I wasted 6 weeks manually sending 600+ LinkedIn connection requests. Here's what actually converted.
Three months ago, I was spending 2-3 hours every morning doing LinkedIn outreach for my SaaS.
Copy profile URL, paste into spreadsheet, craft personalized message, send request. Repeat 30-40 times daily.
The results? Out of 600+ connection requests sent manually over 6 weeks, I got 203 accepts (24% acceptance rate) and exactly 11 meaningful conversations. That's a 1.3% conversation rate.
Here's what I learned the hard way:
The problem wasn't my volume. It was that I was treating LinkedIn like a numbers game instead of understanding what actually drives responses from founders and decision-makers.
What changed everything:
I started tracking which messages got responses. Turned out, requests that mentioned a specific post they wrote or a problem their company was solving had a 61% acceptance rate vs. my generic "I'd love to connect" messages at 18%.
The second shift: I stopped sending connection requests to everyone in my "ideal customer" search. Instead, I focused on people who were actively posting about problems my product solved.
Their recent activity told me they were thinking about this pain point right now.
My current approach (that actually works):
- Spend 20 minutes finding 10-15 prospects who recently posted about lead generation, sales automation, or bootstrapping challenges
- Leave a genuine comment on their post (not promotional)
- Send a connection request referencing their post specifically
- If they accept, wait 2-3 days before sending a value-first message
This brings my acceptance rate to 58% and conversation rate to 12% - that's 10x better than my spray-and-pray approach.
The automation part:
I built https://bearconnect.io/ specifically to solve this workflow problem for myself. It doesn't blast 100 requests daily (that's how you get restricted).
Instead, it helps me identify active prospects, schedule natural-paced outreach, and personalize messages at scale without losing the human touch.
But here's the real lesson: Automation without strategy is just faster failure.
The founders getting meetings from LinkedIn aren't using tools to spam more people. They are using them to do high-quality outreach more consistently.
If you are doing LinkedIn outreach for your product, what is your current acceptance rate?
It's wild how fast things move — shipping Draflit in 24 hrs.
Solid breakdown. Your absolutely right that strategy beats volume.
It's the same logic for cold email. Instead of targeting people based on LI posts you can use buying-intent signals like new hires in specific roles or recently funded announcements. It lets you get into an inbox they actually own with a message that's super relevant to them right now.
Happy to share some of the signals we've seen work best :)
Absolutely, that makes total sense! Targeting based on real intent signals is way more effective than blasting messages blindly. I’d love to hear which signals you have found work best always keen to learn new approaches.
Let’s connect, shoot me an email [email protected]