How do you do cold outreach?

Hello everyone,

I'm the founder of Makkuro.app, a project management software, and I'm at the stage where I've finished building my product and I'm trying to grow its userbase.

Due to a lack of funds, I'm ruling out ads for now and I'm just doing some social media posts on my own (which don't bring any traffic and are probably just proof of life to my network for now :D ).

The thing I know I need to do, though, and I'm having a hard time is sending cold messages or emails to my target audience.

Here's my current workflow:

• Find a target company (from IndieHackers, reddit, linkedin)
• See if they're using a competitor
• Look them up on LinkedIn
• Send a connection request
• Send a message

This is, obviously, a very long and manual process so I'm wondering if you have any tips on improving this? Or any alternatives?

How did you tackle that phase in your company?

Thank you all so much for the help.