I've been talking to founders across different stages and ICPs, and here's what's surprising: there's no consensus anymore.
1. Cold email is crushing it for some teams and completely dead for others.
2. LinkedIn DMs are either goldmines or ghost towns.
3. And somehow, cold calls are quietly working for a subset of B2B companies.

It feels like the best practice playbooks don't account for how much this varies by your specific ICP, deal size, and market maturity.

So I'm curious about your experience, not what you think should work, but what's actually generating pipeline for you right now. Is it cold emails? Calls? LinkedIn outreach? Or have you found success with a completely different motion?

Would love to hear what's working in your world. What outbound channel is moving the needle for you?

It did for us.
3 customers came to @Flexprice last week. No ads, no cold DMs. Just conversations.

Most people treat Product Hunt as a one-day spike.
I treat it like a community of builders.

We launched Flexprice last year and learned (the hard way) what works here and what doesn t.
So now I keep it simple:

I support makers launching on Product Hunt for free
I give honest product feedback as a real user
I help with launch strategy when useful

We kept hearing get your ICP right.
But what we learned is that who you reach out to first matters just as much as who eventually decides.

In most companies, there isn t one ICP. There s a sequence.

• Someone experiences the problem daily.

• Someone else prioritizes it.

• Another person signs off on it.

If you jump straight to the top, you often lack context.
If you stay too low, momentum dies.

I looked into a few of their launches and what stood out wasn t a secret hack.
It was how little they tried to launch.

Their tagline isn t hype.
It s literal. Write, edit, and chat about your code with AI.

No buzzwords. No promises. Just what it does.

The pattern is simple:

This debate often gets framed as Should researchers use AI for literature reviews?

I think the real question is different.

Is it ethical to spend hundreds of researcher hours on mechanical work when that time could be spent advancing actual knowledge?

Think about a researcher spending an entire weekend searching papers, skimming irrelevant abstracts, copying citations, and fixing references. That s not insight or discovery. That s overhead.

What s worked for us looks very different from spray-and-pray.

We ve learned that outbound works when it s intentional at every step.

A few things that made the biggest difference for us:

Getting the ICP really right. Sometimes the first outreach isn t to the buyer, but to someone who can open the door.
Personalization isn t optional. Company context, role, recent updates. Generic gets ignored fast.
Channels are chosen by output, not comfort. We double down on what actually converts.
The first message rarely works. Conversations usually start around the third or fourth touch, if there s value each time.
Timing matters more than volume. Funding news, hiring, social posts. Showing up when the problem is top of mind changes everything.
We focus on relationships, not just pipeline. Some buy later. Some refer. All conversations compound.
Context before calls helps. If someone engages multiple times, the conversation feels very different.
Signals matter. Engagement often tells you when to reach out, not just who.

AI is moving fast. Every day there s a new tool promising leverage. Most don t stick.

In 2025, the tools that mattered weren t the flashiest.
They were the ones that quietly saved time on work I already did every day.

Some are now non-negotiable.
Others are on my watchlist because they could replace entire steps, not just speed them up.

What AI tools actually earned a permanent spot in your workflow in 2025?
And which ones do you think will matter in 2026?

Over time, I ve realized how much effort we put into our websites on landing pages, pricing, testimonials, product tours and yet, most visitors only ever deeply interact with one or two sections depending on your ICP.

• For developer-first products, that s usually docs.

• For consumer apps, maybe it s onboarding or pricing.

• For enterprise tools, perhaps case studies or ROI calculators.

The rest is mostly noise or at least secondary.

It made me wonder:

Almost every team building usage-based or credit-based pricing I ve talked to says something like:

We just have to aggregate events, multiply with a price, and send it to Stripe.

Shouldn t take more than a week.