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

I ran almost the same Notion setup for months and kept abandoning it. What finally made it stick was cutting the columns down to four: name, where I found them, last contact date, and next step. I'd been tracking a bunch of other fields I never once looked at.

After that, a simple Airtable board filtered on "next step is empty" did everything I needed, and I actually opened it. If you want a nudge, a weekly Make scenario that emails you everyone with no next step set keeps it honest without you babysitting it.

The tool mattered less than how few fields I could get away with. What in your Notion do you actually check versus what's just sitting there?

The irony is your best asset — you're building the fix for your own current pain, you just haven't pointed Tamable at yourself yet. Dogfood it hard; "I built this because Notion wasn't cutting it for my own outreach" is a great origin story.
On the actual question: resist over-tooling before you have volume. A flat spreadsheet with date / who / channel / next-action / date gets you far. The discipline that matters isn't the tool — it's the "next-action + when" column, which is exactly what manual Notion setups tend to miss.
And a reframe: if losing track hurts enough to post about, that's your sharpest user-interview question. Don't ask "would you use Tamable" — ask "walk me through how you tracked your last 10 outreach conversations." The messy answer is your wedge, and they're pre-sold because they just said the pain out loud.
Which niche replied at the highest rate so far? That's often a better focus signal than which one interests you most.

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.

I would split the tracking into two layers: relationship status and learning status.

Relationship status can stay simple: not contacted, contacted, replied, follow-up due, closed/no fit. That keeps you from losing people.

Learning status is the more useful part early on: what problem did they mention, how painful does it sound, what are they doing now, did they ask to see something, and what would make them try it?

If you only track follow-ups, it becomes a sales pipeline too early. If you also track repeated pain language, you start seeing which niche is actually worth more conversations.

For your case, I’d probably tag each conversation by niche first: creators, freelance writers, journalists, etc. Then after 15-20 conversations, compare which group gave the clearest problem, fastest replies, and most specific current workaround.

I do daily outreach too (comments, not cold DMs, but same tracking problem) and gave up on Notion for the same reason: too manual to keep open every day. What's worked better is keeping it dumb on purpose, a plain log file I append to right after each touch, just date, who, one line of context. No dashboard, no status field to update. The second a tracker needs its own upkeep, it competes with the actual outreach for your time and loses.

The tracking problem is usually a symptom — at zero users the harder question is "am I in the right conversations at all?"

What helped me early: pick one channel where people already post the problem you solve (Reddit, niche forums), reply there first, log only those threads. 10 intentional replies beat 100 cold touches with a spreadsheet.

What are you selling, and where have you tried outreach so far?

yeah, happy to share. I mainly use MailSuite as a way to avoid losing context and follow-ups when I'm having multiple conversations going on.

My workflow is basically: every outreach/conversation has a stage, contacted, replied, follow-up needed, waiting, closed, etc. I use it to keep the communication tied to the actual inbox so I can quickly see who needs attention and what the last interaction was.

The biggest thing I like about it is reducing the mental load of remembering "who did I reply to?" which sounds very similar to the problem you're solving with Tamable.

That said, I think your idea is interesting because email management for creators/freelancers is a slightly different problem than a traditional sales CRM. Curious, are you thinking more about Tamable as a lightweight CRM inside the inbox, or more like an AI assistant that surfaces the important conversations automatically?

You're describing your own product's use case and tracking it in Notion instead. Be your own first user. Run your founder outreach through Tamable. If it can't handle your own inbox, that's the most valuable bug report you'll get this month. If it can, you just found your sharpest demo and your first testimonial in the same move. On the tracking itself, don't over-engineer it while you have 20 conversations. A flat spreadsheet beats a Notion system: name, channel, date contacted, last touch, next follow-up date, status. The tool matters less than the daily 10-minute habit of "who's due for a follow-up today." Most first users come from the second or third touch, not the first, and that's exactly the part a manual setup lets slip.

You’re basically living the exact problem you’re building for.
The setup that has helped me in outreach is not a full CRM. It’s a tiny state system:
not contacted → sent → replied → sample/demo sent → follow-up due → parked
The key field is “next action + date.”
Without that, Notion becomes a place where leads go to disappear.
Since Tamable already touches the inbox, I’d go for one narrow view first:
“who needs my next reply today?”
That feels more valuable than trying to automate the whole workflow too early.

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.

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.

At first-users stage the system is not the bottleneck, the follow-up cadence is. Most founders quit after one message, but the replies almost always land on the third or fourth touch, so the only field that matters early is 'next touch date' plus the discipline to work that list every morning. The real tell in your post is the dogfooding: if Tamable cannot run your own outreach today, that gap is sharper product feedback than anything a user could give you.

At low volume the honest answer is usually just a single spreadsheet — one row per
person, and the only column that does real work is "next action + date." Status and notes
are nice, but that one field is what stops people slipping through. Notion gets painful
here because it tempts you into building a system instead of just logging the next touch.

The trap with automating early is you burn the time you'd have spent actually following
up. I'd get the manual version boringly consistent first — if "next action" is always filled and you work it top-down each day, you rarely lose anyone. Automate only the one step that's genuinely repetitive, once you can see which one it is.

Funny enough, I ran into something similar with Ashive.

I started building it to help founders think through decisions and execution, then realized I was using the same frameworks myself almost every day.

Curious if using Tamable for your own outreach changed your thinking about the product at all?

This resonates. I’m also at the early stage of building an AI SaaS, and I’m realizing that the hardest part is not only building the product, but keeping the user-discovery process simple enough that I actually do it consistently.

For now, I’d probably avoid a full CRM and keep a lightweight tracker: name, channel, date contacted, context, reply status, and next follow-up date. The most useful field for me would be “why this person is a good fit,” because otherwise outreach becomes a numbers game instead of a learning loop.

I also like the point others made here: if your product helps manage inbox conversations, using it for your own outreach could become both your best test case and your clearest demo.

Quick test comment to capture the API endpoint.

Notion doc works well for me at the early stage. One row per prospect: name, where I found them, date contacted, channel used, and a short notes field for what I said or why I targeted them. The key thing I added was a next-action column with a date so it doubles as a follow-up reminder.

The reason I avoided proper CRM tools early on is that maintaining them adds overhead right when you are already stretched thin doing the actual outreach. A doc you will actually update beats a well-designed tool you will not open.

A simple spreadsheet with columns for channel, date, response, and follow-up date got us further than any tool early on — the friction of a “real” CRM wasn’t worth it pre-PMF. The bigger unlock was tracking which channel actually led to a real conversation, not just a reply, since most replies go nowhere.

The irony of an outreach-tracking-tool founder losing track of his own
outreach is almost too perfect 😄 I'm in the same boat right now, building
something else but doing the exact same scrappy outreach.

worvi26's "plain log file, no dashboard" point is the one that clicked for
me — the second tracker competes with the actual outreach for your time,
and loses. I keep a dumb spreadsheet: name, channel, MRR, status, date.
That's it.

But the thing nobody warns you about isn't tracking — it's the silence. I
sent ~7 cold contacts this week and the next-morning silence almost made me
think I'd failed. Then I remembered cold replies come day 2-3, not the next
morning. So now I track "contacts made" (which I control) as the metric,
not "replies" (which I don't). Keeps me sane and shipping.

For your case specifically — since Tamable already lives in the inbox,
could the tracking just BE the product? Like, your first user is you, and
the dogfooding doubles as your outreach CRM?

Genuine question, not a pitch: when you say "track my outreach," do you mean the conversations themselves (what I said, when, to whom) or the status of each deal (waiting on reply, ready to send, closed)?

I ask because I've been digging into this exact problem and I think they're actually three different problems that look like one:

Memory — what did I actually say to this person (the email log)
State — where is this conversation in the pipeline (the CRM)
Next move — what should I do about it today (the part that's hardest)
The irony you mentioned (founder of an outreach tool can't track their own outreach) is the giveaway. The problem isn't "I don't have a tool." It's that even with the tool, the cognitive load of running 30+ conversations at once is the bottleneck. The tool records what happened. It doesn't tell you what to do next.

Curious what your current workaround is — Tamable itself? A spreadsheet? Or just memory?

the irony of losing track of outreach while building an outreach tool is honestly kind of perfect lol, i'd almost put it in the landing copy. i'm doing first-user outreach by hand rn too and my "system" is a spreadsheet i lie to myself about updating.

what moved the needle for me though wasn't better tracking, it was cutting the list way down. like 20 people i genuinely thought would care, followed up properly, beat 200 sprayed and forgotten. for context i'm building groundwork, helping founders land their first users, so the messy early outreach part is basically my daily life. how are you deciding who's even worth reaching out to rn?

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.

If that is the real problem you face yourself why dont you repurpose your tool to solve that exact problem? As about tracking sponsorship deals I might not be the right person to judge but I wish I had a single sponsorship deal, I would have tracked it manually :) Are there enough content creators who get that many deals that they need a tool to track them?

40 days on SEO with zero paying strangers is demoralizing, but SEO usually does not pay out for 4 to 6 months, so that part may be slow rather than broken. The faster signal is direct outreach. Have you tried messaging 20 specific agencies that fit, instead of waiting on inbound? Curious what your outbound looks like so far, since we sell to a similar crowd.

The irony of losing track of outreach while building a tool that solves exactly that is real. Every solo founder goes through some version of this.
Honest answer: I use a simple Notion database with columns for name, status, last action, and next follow-up date. Not glamorous but it works at low volume. The key is logging immediately after every interaction, not at the end of the day when you’ve already forgotten half of it.
At what point does your own tool become usable for this? Feels like you might be your own best first user.

U can try Product Hunt

honestly I think the Notion frustration is hiding two different things and they need different fixes.
the tracking part — state, next action, follow-up dates — @samir_minj and @JohnMadison already covered. spreadsheet with a "next action + date" column genuinely beats a CRM until you're past ~50 people.
but I don't think tracking is actually your problem. tracking feels like a chore because you're treating everyone the same, so a row you haven't touched nags you whether it's a warm lead or someone who was never going to reply. it's not the manual work, it's that half the list doesn't matter and you're still carrying it.
so the real question — are you dropping threads because there's genuinely a lot of them, or because replies land in different places and there's no one spot that says "reply to these today"? those aren't the same problem.
and the dogfooding thing someone raised above is the part I'd actually chase. can Tamable handle your own outbound right now or not? if it can't, that's worth sitting with. is the scanning built only for inbound stuff, or could you just point it at your sent folder?

mailsuite is the tools that help me handle this issue, funny how it's a low cost tools

this is genuinely the best validation moment you could've stumbled into, you're not theorizing about the problem, you're living it in real time while building the solution. the obvious next question: have you actually tried using Tamable on your own outreach yet, or is it specifically built for the inbound side (sponsorship deals, freelance gigs) and awkward to repurpose for outbound cold outreach you're initiating yourself?

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