I’ve Been Doing Cold Outreach on Twitter for the Past Few Days. Here’s What I’ve Got So Far

Indie hackers like data, here's what I've got:

• Accounts scanned: 710
• DMs sent: 126 (17.7%)
• Can’t DM: 584 (82.3%)

From those DMs:

• Positive replies: 4 (3.2%)
• Rejected: 1 (0.8%)
• No response: 121 (96%)

Here’s the process:

𝟭. 𝗗𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗺𝘆 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗞𝗢𝗟𝘀
I started by figuring out who my product(which is Snapdemo) is for. Then I found some KOLs in that niche and used an API to grab all their followers. That gave me hundreds of thousands of potential leads.

𝟮. 𝗨𝘀𝗲 𝗔𝗜 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗹𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗜𝗖𝗣𝘀
Next, I used AI to scan bios and guess whether someone might be my Ideal Customer. For each account, I asked AI to tell me:

• Are they ICP? (Yes, No, Not sure)
• Why?
• What’s their label? (e.g. AI builder, SaaS exec)

𝟯. 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲
I ran all this through OpenAI’s batch API to save on cost and dev time.
Once I had a few thousand ICPs, I skipped the “Not sure” ones since the confirmed ones were enough.

𝟰. 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗠𝘀
I made a simple dashboard to track everything, and used a few templates to auto-generate DMs. I also logged which template went to which user, so I could measure performance later.

𝗦𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘆
Without a solid automation tool, and with most users not open to DMs, the whole process took a lot of time.If you’ve done something similar, I’d love to hear your suggestions.
And if you’re also a founder, feel free to DM me to exchange ideas.