Syngal

I run a financial services product for early-stage founders. Good product. Real results for the people using it. No customers I didn't find manually.

For months, my outreach process was: find businesses that look like they need what I offer, dig up an email, send something honest and specific. Not a blast. Not a template. One person at a time.

The emails got opens. Decent ones. But almost no replies.

I kept refining the copy. Tightened the subject lines. Tested different angles. The opens didn't move much. The replies didn't come.

I thought it was a message problem. It wasn't.

About three months in, I started monitoring forums and job boards for people actively describing the problem my product solves. Not finding companies that fit a profile but finding people in the middle of the pain, describing it in public, right now.

One day I found what looked like a perfect signal. Someone had posted exactly their problem, named the pain, asked for solutions but I was only seeing it after a week. I reached out the day I found it.

Reply came back: "Thanks, we've actually just sorted this. Not looking for now."

I went back and looked at when the original post was made.

Eight days ago.

That was the moment I understood what was broken. Not the copy. Not the targeting. The timing. By the time I found the post, they'd already moved on. The signal was real. My arrival wasn't.

I ran this analysis on every cold outreach attempt I could track. The average time between when a potential buyer publicly expressed their pain and when I found it: 5–7 days. The window to reach someone still inside the problem? About 48 hours.

I wasn't running outreach. I was cleaning up after opportunities.

So I started building Sygnal. Not to scrape more contacts. Not to send more sequences. Just to solve one problem: close the gap between when someone publicly expresses pain and when a founder finds out about it. From days to minutes.

I'm building it for myself first. If it works for my own product, measured in real customer conversations, not signal volume then it's worth selling to other founders doing the same thing.

Here to document what works and what doesn't. Happy to swap notes with anyone else doing founder-led outreach without a sales team.