Is outbound going to die?

Thanks, I looked it up and all the results were for Google Tag Manager. That's just close enough to make me shrug and accept it but also be very confused.

I'd seperate PMF hunting and go to market just in case that's not what you're doing. I've done tons of small/startup GTM projects, most notabily I was on the deviantart zero to 1 and the digitalocean zero to 1. I wasn't clear enough. I'm not advocating that you should skip validation or assume a PMF, rather, you shouldn't even be thinking about a full, formal GTM until you've proven repeatable product market fit.

You're right that active, direct customer outreach in early stages, talking to real people at events, user interviews, forcing them to talk to you etc is the only way to validate and refine PMF. But to me, this isn't really "outbound" in the spammy, growth hacky sense that I critiqued above. It's thoughtful customer development: qualitative, deliberate, personal, strategic, and hopefully founder lead.

The real outbound I'm against is that lazy "spray-and-pray" approach, or the obsession with hyper personalized yet fundamentally shallow cold outreach that's mistaken for scalable growth. Real GTM, once you truly have PMF, is actually pretty mechanical and clinical. That said, personally, I've always treated early GTM as inseparable from product refinement. Every interaction early on is about learning and adjusting, (sorry Arch, you just had to go!) not aggressively scaling. "Rapid growth" is alluring, sure, but if it isn't anchored in real market validation, as you're pointing to: it ends up as expensive noise.

Don't build until you have received payment from customers. Otherwise you absolutely won't know what to build.

For those rare companies that are trying to create a market out of nothing for a truly innovative product where there are no competitors or self identified customers, I can sympathize with the hollow allure of firehose marketing - but not only is this kind of startup vanishingly rare (and extremely risky), it’s also the wrong approach even for them.

If you are trying to build stairs into thin air, you need to have a constantly evolving “customer hypothesis” until you can nail down who your customer is. The only way to do that is with founder-led personal marketing, preferably F2F and on-premises. You must meet your customers at the place and time of need. If you are truly solving an unsolved problem, literally no one will know how to solve that problem with your product except you, or maybe even why the problem needs to be solved.

This is more market research than business development.

Depending on your market, moat, and vertical alignment with your customers, it -may- also be important to build brand awareness or “buzz” aside from customer contact, and this often will be non-personalized. For this, as well, firehose approaches like email are ineffective or even counterproductive. Keep in mind, this is marketing adjacent PR, not marketing. Don’t get carried away.

If you just need validation to feel “real”, stick to cheap office swag. It makes great memorabilia for the inevitable swag graveyard that successful founders usually create on their way to becoming successful founders. It also helps to combat hubris if you keep the graveyard on subtle display in your office.

Sure I am! A great read: https://hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia

Marketing was always a grift when it was done to get rich quick, yesterday or today. Products, brands, businesses... take a long time to bake!

I’m so irritated by the constant emails I get as part of automated drip marketing campaigns. Many of them start with outright falsehoods (“I tried calling you”, “I spoke to one of your colleagues”, etc.) and they almost all pretend like they have not added me to a drip marketing campaign, ie they act like it’s a fully personalized email. Newer ones include clearly AI-generated summaries pulled from my online presence (“I see that you graduated from X college”, etc.) It’s so fundamentally dishonest. Why would I enter into a commercial relationship with you if our first interaction is you misrepresenting yourself or worse, outright lying to me?

>Amen. Extra special are the ones that when you complain about outbound, you get "well how else are we supposed to sell things!".

These people live in a different reality than the rest of us, one they've likely taken steps to convince themselves is true so they don't have to feel bad about their actions. I met someone years ago that was basically a professional email spammer that described his job as marketing and sending newsletters and was convinced that people were OK receiving spam and that he was providing a service by spamming garbage to people who didn't sign up for it.

It's not crazy at all, it's basic human psychological self defense. There are much better defense mechanisms that can be learned, but shit talking the opposition is basically the standard fall back psychological defense mechanism for human beings who have failed at something.

I genuinely loathe the over-familiar vibe you get from targeted ads in such a way where no matter how relevant to me the given product is, if you advertise it like that, I'm immediately suspicious of your intentions. If I'm talking about longboards a lot around my house and get ads for longboards, I would go so far as to say I would go out of my way to not buy any of the brands shown to me.

I think this is an underrated metric in terms of how advertisers are organizing their spend; the creep factor. If your first impression with a potential customer is creeping them out, how are the odds of them giving you a sale?

Just my 0.02.

Doesn't make it any less spammy/scammy

So you agree then?

Quod erat demonstrandum?

I'm less hesitant to be rude to telemarketers anymore. Yes, they have a shitty job, yes, it's not their fault that your number is on their list. But it's a job they are choosing to do, knowing they are an integral part of the problem. Kind of like the "Contractors on the death star" ethical example.

If someone was paid to kick my puppy, I'm not going to just be OK with it because, "hey it's their job, and we're all struggling."

>I hate to be rude to real people

Just reminded yourself that they've chosen to remove themselves from the pool of 'real people' by participating scammy activities. They're the ones that have broken the social contract and treating them with respect just lets them continue to believe they aren't doing anything wrong.

Same thing happened to me. I probably get ten calls per day. I just don’t answer the phone any more unless I recognize the number. It’s very annoying. If I accidentally answer a spam call, most of the time I’ll just hang up. But I’m also very annoyed with telephone companies. Why isn’t there a “report spam” button for phone calls?

To me, spam is unsolicited email or phone calls. People or organizations contacting me when I haven't requested they do so.

Attractive person walks up to you and asks you for your number - not spam.

Unattractive person walks up to you and asks you for your number - spam.

Company has a thing I need and calls me at the right time - not spam.

Company calls me up when I'm not looking to buy something - spam.

>How do you define "spam"?

You know the answer. Only assholes need clarification that unsolicited contact is spam.

Any communication that I did not opt-in for.

Thank you for narrowing your claims, you might want to update your post at the top of the thread to call out your ADV/ACV assumption.

I appreciate all the experience and advice you’re offering on this thread! Take my feedback as a nitpick: as I was reading through your top post, my initial thought was “this isn’t true all the time” because I spent 6 years in 2 separate startups with significant and successful outbound sales where our ADV > $100k.

One company stayed private and profitable while driving revenue north of $80M/yr; and the other company sold enough long-term enterprise contracts to be acquired by a bigger $B company.

Context is king.

Thanks! I sent an invite to the email on your profile.

Thanks! HumanCRM is similar to Monica in its people focus (I also add my friends into HumanCRM), but is definitely more oriented towards professional networks. I'm also starting out with more focused feature set: emphasizes connecting with people rather than recording information.

So there is only a handful of primary entities: Humans, Leads, Deals, Communities (thus no Pets, Contacts, Tasks, Photos, Documents, etc).

I might expand it to capture more data in the future, but waiting to see what users make use of.

Thanks, I hope so too! I think by the end of the year sales AI disillusionment will really start set in and I'll have polished HumanCRM enough by then. All of the existing CRM players are going heavy into automation so this might stand out.

> You had a meeting just yesterday about how it'll take 9 months to staff up a team that can foobar your widgets

Who leaves that meeting and starts searching for a solution in their spam email?

why