Struggling to track my own outreach while trying to find my first users. How do you do it?

For first users, I’d split Tamable into 2 acquisition pages: one for creators losing sponsorship threads and one for freelancers/journalists losing client follow-ups.
Qualified traffic usually converts when the page mirrors their exact inbox mess and shows the “next follow-up” view immediately.
That gives you a cleaner way to convert visitors than a broad “deal tracker” pitch.
I built Clustra for this — personalized acquisition page clusters for 39€: https://clustra.nanocorp.app

One thing I’d track separately from the CRM is the “reason to follow up.” If the next touch is just “checking in,” it dies fast; if it’s tied to a creator’s latest sponsor, a journalist’s beat, or a concrete workflow pain, the tracker becomes a reminder of context instead of a guilt list. That also tells you which niche is painful enough to pay for Tamable.

Simple spreadsheet with columns: name, channel, date contacted, response (yes/no/ignored), next action. The key insight is "next action" — without it, outreach becomes a one-shot thing instead of a conversation. I also tag each person with why I think they'd care, so follow-ups feel personal rather than copy-paste.

The thing that unstuck this for me at the same stage was splitting "who I contacted" from "who reacted" — most Notion outreach trackers die because people cram both into one table with twenty properties and it becomes a chore nobody updates.

What actually held up: contacts stay dead simple (name, channel, last-touch date, next-touch date), and a single Kanban view (To reach / Waiting / Replied / Dead) carries the state. Then a date-sorted view does the follow-up nagging for you, so "who needs a nudge" is a glance, not a memory test. For sub-50 threads a spreadsheet + one calendar reminder genuinely beats a CRM — the tooling only earns its place once you're dropping threads because there are too many to hold in your head.

Given you're building Tamable around inbox parsing, I'd almost dogfood a stripped version on your own outreach and let that pain pick your next feature. What's your reply rate looking like so far — is the problem volume, or that replies scatter across channels?

The irony you're describing hit close to home. I've been on the other side of it.
My last thing was a modular app. We built it flexible on purpose, several modules, and honestly the spread itself became the problem, we were a little bit of everything and not clearly one thing. So we narrowed down to a single module, the one we thought was strongest.
People used it, but it turned out to be a nice-to-have, not a need so they'd use it and never convert to paid.
The reason your post stuck with me: the thing you're reaching out about (tracking outreach) is something people currently solve with a messy Notion that kind of works and it's free. That's the exact zone where I got burned. "Good enough already exists for free" is a hard place to charge from.
Curious whether the people 'ignoring' your outreach are doing it because the Notion-pain isn't bad enough yet?

The irony of building a deal tracker while struggling to track your own outreach is not lost on me.

You mentioned pivoting from content creators to freelance writers to journalists. Each has a different "deal" shape. sponsor deal vs. writing assignment vs. press inquiry. Same product, different cadence and urgency.

Does Tamable handle all these patterns equally, or does the generic approach make each use case feel slightly off? I have seen flexible tools require so much setup that you end up back in Notion anyway.

Reading this, I found myself wondering whether the outreach problem is actually evidence for the current direction or evidence that you're still searching for one.

Not because the problem isn't real.

Because the list of people you've built this for seems to keep growing, and those two situations can look surprisingly similar from the founder's seat.