I cold messaged 100 people on LinkedIn. Here are the results...

I've heard that a good strategy isn't to pitch your product at first intro. You first find things in common, strike up a small convo, and then after there's a bit of warmth, you introduce the product.

I think I automatically switch off if there's a link in the message. You're trying to sell me something. It might be worth my time, it might not.

Instead, how about asking for help? Say you're trying to validate a startup idea and would want to have a 10 minute chat with them this week? No links, no smell of selling, a simple ask for help via a short chat (because people love to help)

Thanks for sharing your experience, I've had some with Linkedin recently as well. Was targeting community managers and devrels.

Here's what I had:

0. I optimized my LinkedIn profile: mentioned in my bio that I'm also running a community and also had some LinkedIn posts and articles published.
1. I requested to connect with ~500 people. Linkedin has a limit of ~200 per week which I was reaching all the time
2. About 200 people actually accepted my request.
3. I texted about 50 of them (not immediately, I waited for 1-2 weeks)
4. 8 of them responded and agreed to help

Here's the copy I used:

Hi <name>, stumbled upon one of your posts and decided to reach out.
I'm also DevRel and I'm working on a product to help DevRels analyze and engage with their communities. I have some ideas, but I really want to ensure it’s genuinely useful.
As you're active in that industry, your ideas could really help me cut through the fog. Would you be open to a quick 15-minute Zoom chat so I can learn from your experiences and perspective?

Thoughts:

1. People are more willing to connect with you if you have common connections. Once you have the first 10 people, you can easily find 100 more relevant profiles who will be more likely to connect with you.
2. Personalized messages might work really well. Check this out: https://twitter.com/sveta_bay/status/1678672346327158785

Hope it helps!

The issue with your approach is no connection or reputation is built. Imagine how many cold dm a person get on linkedin. My linkedin alone have hundreds of them asking for job interview, and selling some products.

DMing only work if the person already know you, so in order for people to know you, engage with their post. Chat with them on comment section. Built reputation . Write blogs or posts on linkedin just to built your profile, so when you comment something people and people find your comment interesting they will go to your profile and understand what you doing.

Of course the engagement you are doing should be related to whatever you are doing. Overtime when they start replying back to your comment, you can try bring it to dms and discuss about something. At that moment, you need to keep it normal and after few conversation now you can ask them a favor.

It take sometimes but that is better approach.

Meanwhile you can write blogs and try optimize your website for SEO . I built a tool to assist you with ranking high on search by providing you the best keywords and topic for your niche. Checkout creativeblogtopic.com

From the blog you can posts on linkedin and built more authority for the subject.

You cold message doesn’t provide any value, you are just telling people to visit your website. What makes you different and why is your product an absolute must?

wow, thanks for sharing! LinkedIn messages are easy to ignore, especially as most of the messages I get are from recruiters or people trying to sell me something.

Cold messaging -- whether you use Linkedin or email --ensure it is seen
[Linkedin, Google are pretty smart ; they take $s on ads and put your posts in "promotional" tab ; Cool business for them

1. Start writing on Linkedin -- on your topic and get noticed [there is no short cut here ]
2. Reach out very targeted audience who are active on Linkedin [wish Linkedin gives me who are active [not necessarily posts]
3. First probe their interest and then ask your call-to-action

Cheers

Hope the moderators are watching me ('need to post some useful comments before I can post my own)

Thank you for your sharing.
It's very helpful to me.

I would like to offer a constructive suggestion for TypeChinese: consider adding a ranking feature that would highlight users with the best performance in the Chinese language.

I believe this could foster healthy competition among users and, as a result, increase engagement on the platform.

I wish the project great success!

Thanks for sharing your experience to the readers.
As per our experience, follow ups are a great way to get leads to revert as they might be busy when you messaged the first time.

The initial messages are highly likely to get ignored as the leads are not warmed up and they do not know you. So the best way is to follow up and get the conversation going.

Though you need paying customers, but even more than that you would need first hand feedbacks from the actual users of the product. Hence getting them for a conversation is one of your priority KPI at this stage.

Wish you all the very best for your journey!

If you wanna check out a lead tracking tool for your startup, we have built @toolsoncloud CRM. Do check out and let me know your feedback.

Appreciate you sharing your story here Alexander. A lot of what has already been said in the comments resonates with my experience.

I've found better success using LinkedIn for a smaller group of folks we want to speak with. Once identified, I'll have myself and 2 other members of the leadership team send a connection message. That way this person feels personally selected and is more open to understanding why we want to chat!

Thanks for sharing the experiment in such detail. I found it useful, as much as anything, because it prompted a lot of responses that have great advice I want to try out.

I thought there is a bug on your project. I have typed the right word but the word shows red.

Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sharing! I've been having doubts myself about cold messaging like that on LinkedIn. My experience is that personalized messages do very well on the platform, but so far, trying to cold "pitch" has been extremely unsuccessful.

One thing i learnt about finding your first users is that you have to go to talk to people, recruit them as your users, targeting a large market or anonymous people on linkedin won't do any good, go to schools and talk to teachers and students, make them use your product there and then, any product which is new in the market always needs an organic community that you have to build yourself. hope that helps

I think you can be warmer than contacting with people to introduce them to your product.

try going on university websites and cold emailing the professors

Hey thats great! I think your post hit the spot for me because I tried something similar. Here is what I found after I ran 150 user interviews in 2 weeks, could be helpful for some people here:

1. Ask "do you see yourself using the product"
   Useless question. Easiest way to get yourself confused with real vs fake user intent because the answer will probably be "yes" every time.

2. Not ask for LOI
   Always try ask for LOI or some sort of action that has friction. Number one there is nothing to lose; number two you want to try to distinguish the users that are actually willing to pay vs the ones that just say they will.

3. Ask how much are they willing to pay without giving enough context
   Asking how much they are willing to pay is good, but not without context. Put this question at the end of the chat when you've asked everything else and they're in the zone, and always preface it with something like "given the amount of pain X problem is causing and how much you are already spending on Y other tools..."

4. Chatting for too long
   Most of the interviews don't need to be that long to get all the info you need. Especially if it was a cold call. If cold call, keep it at max 9 min. If proper meeting (e.g. set up through Calendly), try keep it at 15 min. Obviously when the user gets super excited you'd want to chat longer but in general keeping it short worked for me.

5. Sticking to the script
   Don't worry about getting answers to all your questions and keep an open mind. Often the user will surprise you with something you didn't even know existed in their workflow, in which case you should probe more to fully understand what's going on, instead of rushing to the next question.

thanks for sharing!

thanks for sharing!

If you have money to spend and want to continue trying LinkedIn outreach, consider using dripify.io to automate the messaging sequence.

You went too cold... Instead if you have send connection request, engage with them a bit on posts and comments and then message them will give you a lot more conversions...

I am also looking for a way to reach my target audience.

I'm not sure if that's the only issue, but I wouldn't use such a direct ad message. You start with 'How do you teach typing in Chinese?' It's quite straightforward for me

Connected with people on LinkedIn because of how they introduced themselves. This could bring dividends.

Almost all Chinese people from China are on WeChat. It might be easier to connect with Chinese teachers there. Also Chinese parents who want their children to learn Chinese might be a good target market, because many are willing to pay to improve their children's education.

hey this is a great idea! I'm a Chinese speaker and I tried it a couple of times. I liked it and here's some picky feedbacks:

1. I had trouble with the Punctuation marks. When I didn't type them, it throught there's a mistake. When I did type them, then it thought I was typing the following charactors.
2. The typed chinese won't show in the text box.
3. It would be great if the GREEN can skip the wrong charactors and keep going so that I won't need to restart the entire sentence and it makes the learning process feel better.

Good job man! Good luck! :)

I think its good, keep doing it.

I use LinkedIn for connecting to decision makers for jobs I apply to. I saw higher response maybe 10 out of every 100 people, but that wasn't enough to consider the strategy viable. I use email outreach now using Hunter.io.

I am assuming that you have sent this message in English. I think the result will be different if you send this in Chinese only.

As someone who regularly receives unsolicited messages on LinkedIn, I can say that I ignore 99% of all of them. The most annoying thing is when I get a connection request and accept, and then immediately get an automated message selling me something. I agree with much of what has been said above. Work on the connection and relationship first before selling. I have another idea for you though. There is a site called teacherspayteachers.com where teachers can buy really basic things for their classes like PPT games, activity sheets, etc. If you go and search Chinese Language, you will see various products for sale and will be able to see who created the product (often the teacher) and then work to build the contact with that person. Second, you could create a small downloadable product and sell it on the site. With your product download you can include information on typechinese.io. I am not sure if you can offer free products on teacherspayteachers but if so, that would get you the most interest. If not, I would make it very inexpensive. Good Luck!

From my experience, 3% acceptance rate is very low, aim for 25% to 30%.

To better the 1st step, your intro message needs to provide some tangible value. Tell them what they gain if they start interaction with you.

Do shy way from pitching the product as long as your target audience will actually gain from your product!

Try it :)

Hey Alexander, love this insight as I've just launched my own first product as was looking to leverage my existing network on LinkedIn!

I think a few people have already pointed this out, but perhaps holding back on the pitch until an initial connection has been forger might perform better?

OR

between your first line and the pitch, lead with the problem you are solving (that should in theory resonate with your target audience).

IF your assumptions are correct and this is a problem being felt by Chinese teachers, you might see a larger response.

Hope this helps!

Wow, this is amazing strategy.

I'll definitely try this.

Thanks for sharing

I would suggest reaching out to IT people at the schools. They are the most tech savvy and most likely to appreciate what you’re doing. They also generally deal will all staff at schools and are the people that teachers trust with their technology based decisions.

Maybe you can try giving a free mandarin class and try promote it to get people who is interested in learning mandarin. And from that you can have direct customer.

I am not sure about your region but at my place the mandarin teachers probably on facebook rather than linkedin. The easiest way to know is see where most mandarin class ads are frequently displayed. For my place it absolutely facebook.

Have you tried direct approach ? Because I am quite certain teachers work like some kind of gang. Meaning you need to just get one people try it and feel good and she will let other know, or you can offer her something to promote your things. Usually teachers will have circle of their own and you need to find a way to penetrate the circle and promote you product.

Maybe you can also try parents who send their children to learn mandarin. And there is very good chance the parents will know the teachers and other parents that sending their children to learn mandarin.

These are some ways that I manage to think, anyway if you want to write a blog targeting mandarin learner, I would suggest you to try out my product creativeblogtopic.com . The tool will analyze google trend and give the best blog topic and keyword to rank high on search.

https://tenor.com/view/rookie-numbers-gif-26135237

Thanks, I am trying something similar on Twitter with better results. I am promoting my web analytics tool Overtracking. I do raffles and then to those who follow the account I send them the private one. It works better this way.

this is really interesting, i get your point that linkedin message got ignored most of the time.

i love your analysis though! and it’s super creative haha i’ve never heard of cold message about product on linkedin before 😂

im at around 7.9%, its important to find the right people first I guess. reddit didn't work for me and PH

"I may try to target Chinese students or send messages through InMail."

Would be very interested to see results!
You mention automation further down, which I'm a bit against for early products (user feedback > getting pageviews imho)

1 Project a month is pretty sweet! Excited to hear how it all goes :)

Reddit is king for first few users for consumer products. There must be some subreddits about people learning chinese. Just post something there, it is free and you only need to do it once, as opposed to cold reach.

Just don't sound like you are selling something. Try to ask for help for your product instead.

Try Linkdin Groups and instead of directly sending messages , try to engage with their content /posts .... You will be in notice and then send casual message and if possible create content around your product and share them in related groups in LinkedIn ! I am doing it for my project WebIkh currently and results are good but I had done previously too , results were good !

"sending 10,000 messages to get 100-300 page views"

IMHO, this should either change for better or other channels need to be explored.

Niche community based engagement/outreaches should work better for your use case.

ATB!

I find this method intriguing. I am considering trying it during my next launch.

I definitely would try PPC in your case. Good job, keep up

I think it's better to try on Chinese local sites or Twitter..

Similar story from my experience on response rates to InMail. I ran a test on about 200 messages and got around 8 responses. I did get a lot of connections so I see that as something I can leverage over time.

Probably better sending a connection request, then following up with a message once connected. I say this as someone who tends to ignore initial connection notes but I usually respond when I've connected and they message me. I always ignore InMail too. Maybe using one of the many LinkedIn automation tools for a simple connection flow would be better and LinkedIn premium too.

Most people aren't active on LinkedIn, also the conversion rate should be for the sale yes? So the 3% would be response rate. Unless the goal was to get 3 connections

Seems like a cold B2B DM connection request on LinkedIn is somewhat problematic. What about DMing people you are already connected to on LInkedIn (and know in the real world) on LinkedIn ?

So moral of the story is that linkedin marketing is total waist of time right ?

I don't have direct experience in the category, but doesn't it makes sense to use chinese alternative to linkedin, like Maimai (especially in the case of China)

Nice, it's cool to see this kind of transparency!

Good on you for taking the first step! A/B testing channels are the way to go - and thanks for sharing!

I had the same experience with LinkedIn.

I tried using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to reach connections. The subscription is not cheap, but I did get an acceptance rate of about 30%. However, trying to follow up on the people in that 30% group mostly resulted in being ghosted.

I’ve had no actual interest in my product from LinkedIn. I won’t be trying LinkedIn as a marketing channel in any significant way for anything else.

I joined LinkedIn many years ago, not long after it launched. It set itself apart as a professional business network, but in the past couple of years, the content has largely become an endless stream of borrowed, unoriginal business motivational quotes and self-improvement diagrams…plus cat, sports or holiday photos, which would never have been seen on LinkedIn a few years ago.

This may be a more focused alternative for you to explore:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/

• but remember there’s a strict “no promotion “rule on Reddit. Just try to answer some questions and make some connections.

It's great to see your proactive approach to product promotion and experimentation. LinkedIn can be a valuable platform for connecting with potential users or partners, but as you've noted, its effectiveness can vary depending on your target audience and your outreach strategy.

Here are a few observations and suggestions based on your experience:

Target Audience Selection: You initially chose to target Chinese teachers, hoping to leverage their influence over a large number of students. However, you discovered that Chinese teachers might not be active on LinkedIn or may not respond well to connection requests. It's worth considering other segments within your target audience, such as Chinese students or language enthusiasts, who might be more interested in improving their Chinese typing skills.

LinkedIn Premium: If you have access to LinkedIn Premium, using InMail can be more effective for reaching out to people who are not in your network. This method can increase your message volume and potentially generate more page views. However, be cautious not to overuse it, as LinkedIn has restrictions on the number of InMail messages you can send.

Message Content: Your initial outreach message is concise and to the point, which is good. However, you might consider making it even more personalized. Mention something specific about the teacher's profile or work that caught your attention, and explain why your product could be particularly beneficial to them or their students.

Follow-Up Strategy: If someone accepts your connection request or expresses interest in your product, be sure to have a well-thought-out follow-up strategy. Engage in a conversation, offer to answer any questions, and provide additional information about your product's benefits.

Content Marketing: In addition to direct outreach, consider sharing valuable content related to learning Chinese or improving typing skills on your LinkedIn profile. This can help you establish yourself as an expert in the field and attract more organic interest in your product.

A/B Testing: As part of your experimentation, try different variations of your outreach message, connection request, and targeting criteria. A/B testing can help you identify what works best for your specific product and audience.

Feedback Loop: Collect and analyze feedback from those who visit your website and use your product. Understanding user needs and pain points can help you refine your offering and improve conversion rates.

Overall, launching on LinkedIn can be effective, but it requires a combination of persistence, adaptation, and understanding your target audience's preferences and behavior on the platform. As you continue your journey of building a project a month, consider these suggestions and keep iterating on your approach to find what works best for your products. Good luck with your endeavors!

I think LinkedIn has low presence in China where its main service is blocked.

Thanks for sharing your experience on Linkedin outbound strategy. I quick tip I have for all the entrepreneurs and that is before sending connection requests, we should learn more about the person and approaching them with a super personalized message. That will grab their attention and will increase the conversion rate drastically.

Keep on experiment and sharing <3