2 ways you can get high-intent leads for your product
Stop trying to send cold emails to random people who you think might fit your ICP. You can do these instead:
See who’s interacting with your competitor on LinkedIn.
Scrape who likes, comments, or shares your competitor’s posts (you can also use a tool for this). These people are already interested in the problem your product solves, making them much warmer prospects than a cold list. You can then send your outreach to these people and offer them something real, or jump into the conversation to steal the spotlight.
Check out reviews on Capterra or G2
Your priority is to look for negative reviews, from 3 stars to 0 stars. The people leaving these reviews are actively looking for a better solution and may be open to switching. Try to find their LinkedIn and shoot them a personalized message talking about their pain point and highlighting how your product solves it.
I do these myself and get a 5x higher reply rate than with my normal cold outreach. It’s definitely worth trying!
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PS: Follow me on X along my building in public journey.
High-intent leads are much more valuable than building a large list of people who may never need the product. The interesting part is how you distinguish between someone casually discussing a problem and someone who is actively searching for a solution. Are you using recent community posts, company activity, hiring signals, keywords, or another type of behavior? It would also be useful to know how you avoid contacting people whose intent has already expired.
Quality over quantity wins every time. Targeting people who are actively frustrated with a competitor is a goldmine. The hurdle is usually finding the real names behind those anonymous G2 reviews, but when the data lines up, the conversion rate speaks for itself.
Really interesting perspective. As someone who's just starting to learn from founders, I'm curious if you were starting from scratch today with no audience and no network, what would be the very first thing you'd build or focus on?
Good breakdown. Curious how you handle it when G2 only shows a first name and vague title - do you skip those or dig anyway? That's usually where I get stuck trying to match a reviewer to a real LinkedIn profile.
Nice post
the 3-star band is where the gold is. pulling competitor complaints in bunzee, 1-stars are mostly billing rage 3-stars are real gaps. how often can you actually find their linkedin?
"Stealing competitor traffic from negative G2/Capterra reviews is an absolute goldmine. Those users are literally shouting about their pain points. Have you found a way to automate finding their contact info once you spot them on those platforms, or do you do manual LinkedIn sourcing after?"
This is a solid reminder that context beats volume.
The best prospects are often the ones already showing intent—whether they're engaging with a competitor's content or openly sharing frustrations in reviews. Those conversations make it much easier to lead with value instead of sounding like another cold pitch.
I've found that personalized outreach based on real pain points consistently outperforms generic cold emails. Quality signals almost always beat bigger lists.
This is really good advice, thank you!
I find LinkedIn’s natural structure ( a professional identity platform to be somehow working against founders like me or other tech founders!
Because the crowd there is more guarded. I use it still because of job seekers and people who need help with CVs because that’s what my SaaS is about.
For me it’s more a credibility channel than a conversion channel. Dont know if that will change let’s see.
One caution on tactic 1: never open the message with "saw you liked my competitor's post," it reads as surveillance and burns the lead. Use the signal for timing and targeting, then lead with the pain point the way you describe in tactic 2. The G2 negative-review play is the highest-converting outbound source I've seen across my portfolio companies, and three-star reviewers are the sweet spot because they cared enough to write and still want a fix.