Konstantinos P.

Saransh Garg seems like everyone here’s positive about LinkedIn ads so I thought I’d represent the other side bc my experience has been very different. Whenever I used LinkedIn ads personally, I’ve gotten leads but they never engaged after submitting their info (very strange). Also, in 2023 I interviewed 200 b2b founders and nobody said LinkedIn ads was a viable channel. Sorry I can’t suggest how to make them work. I’d just strongly recommend looking at a different channel. But obviously there are certain niches where they work. Maybe see if you fall into these categories….

Harsha V.

I’m sure you can come up with lots and better ideas. Just wanted to share some thoughts that may take you in a different direction.

Siddanth S. I haven’t done it for others but I’m doing it for a few companies I’m involved in. For us, it often boils down to how can we design the easiest and fastest experiments to validate an ICP <> value prop thesis. You can vibe-code a landing page and send DMs to your network to get a first-layer validation before going out cold. Happy to chat and give you input from the startup side, and share the challenges we see.

My experience with teams working in AI automation stuff is that these systems are way too brittle so they require much longer to develop and much more labor to maintain. At the end, I often wonder if it's cheaper to take a mechanical turk approach (the anti-AI;) and do things manually with cheap labor. Because AI can only automate what cheap labor could do. So if you develop the SOPs, there are certain benefits to employing humans: you lose speed but you gain in flexibility and adaptability. Or, my favorite approach is 80% AI with 20% human in the loop for the last-mile that's tricky for AI to automate. Automate as much as you can but don't overdo it. Would love to hear others' experiences in the field too!

Fingers crossed, will definitely share results (whether they're good or bad!)

Fair point... Just to be fair to them, they didn't say specifically about pricing but the contract said that anything inside the contract should be treated as confidential, and I didn't want to run afoul of any terms. Maybe I'm reading into it too much or maybe they used a template. So far I've had a good-enough experience with them but we'll see. It's an investment in the thousands but not the tens of thousands so I thought it's worth the test b/c I've been hearing a lot about these types of AI SDR agencies and wanted to see how much value they really deliver, and if the results justify the investment.

I actually just hired an agency to build me an AI SDR. Happy to share my process, lessons and results... (DM me for actual costs b/c they said I can't share publicly)

Slack is a good example. I don’t think they had a super strong villain. The tagline was literally “be less busy” at some point. They’re attacking busywork / laziness (you don’t want to call your user lazy, though I wouldn’t mind;) Zapier is another one, making things effortless and removing manual steps. Calendly, get rid of the back and forth Expensify was saying “expense reports that don’t suck” All these are effectively attacking our laziness instead of a big corporate pain point. No strong villains in the typical sense.

I’d say there’s A LOT of great companies built on the back of our laziness so don’t dismiss that for a bit. It’s a most visceral pain point ;)