Most early-stage founders build pipeline backwards. They start with cold email and LinkedIn messaging because both are cheap and easy to scale, then wonder why nobody responds.
The tactics that work best are actually the ones that borrow trust or create awareness first. I work with seed and Series A founders every week, and the pattern is consistent: the closer your outreach is to a real relationship, the better it performs.
In this post I rank nine early-stage outreach tactics from worst to best, explain why each lands where it does, and show how to make even the weak ones work harder for you.
#9 Cold email
While email is the de-facto medium for B2B communication, its also saturated af. Email response rates have been on a downward trend for 20 years, thanks to vendors deploying automation after automation — AI SDR being the latest one — to send more emails to more people at higher frequencies.
A better approach for email is to treat it as an awareness channel:
Cold call the people who open your emails. If you get a connect, there’s a slightly higher chance that they’ll have heard of you and not hang up on you. Admittedly you need to send a lot of emails to get any kind of signal.
Start a newsletter. If you actually have valuable insights to share on a regular basis, a newsletter is an excellent way to stay top of mind without the cringe of pretending you noticed something about your prospect and that you have some valuable content that they can only get if they respond to your email.
Skip sending emails altogether and use the same list to run a custom audience campaign on Meta. This will at least get people from your ICP coming to your website, which gives you a shot at connecting with them (as covered later in this list).
#8 LinkedIn messaging
While LinkedIn is less saturated than email because of rate limits on connection requests and inMails, its still a lot of paraphrased LinkedIn bio slop and pitch slapping.
A better approach for LinkedIn is to also treat it as an awareness channel:
Post quality content to build an audience, attract your ICP and stay top of mind with them.
Use a tool like PhantomBuster to download profiles who regularly like and comment on your posts to build a more targeted list.
Boost your top performing posts to increase reach.
#7 Cold call to cold prospect
Cold calling is surprisingly good in certain categories but is very time consuming and needs at minimum dedicated time blocks if you’re a founder doing GTM on your own and at ideally a dedicate resource like a BDR or founders associate. I currently have several seed stage and Series A clients booking 20 meetings a month cold calling cold prospects.