The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 24 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
VCs cold-messaged $150K checks without meetings after Amigo's first term sheet
“The second we had our first term sheet, everything else fell into place. Like many people came. The craziest thing I'll say is I had people cold, like investors cold DM me on LinkedIn saying, Hey, I heard you got a term sheet. I will also contribute a 150 kids…”
Zima: Omni BDRs got 3% response rates while founder outreach reached 90%
“So like when our BDR team was doing this, they were getting like a three percent response rate. So they'd get three responses out of a hundred LinkedIn connects. I might get a 50% connect rate. And on a message, depending on the group, like to the ex looker gr…”
Greenberg: 700K-view LinkedIn post yielded zero sales calls; 4K-view post drove three
“700,000 people read that post. I didn't drive any business from it. So that post was really good for my ego. It was really good for getting me on this podcast, but I didn't drive a single sales call out of it with 700,000 people reading it. Whereas a week befo…”
Jain: Avoid using friends as early design partners; prioritize cold outreach instead
“I didn't actually go and, like, you know, hit my friends, you know, and say, like, hey, can you actually, you know, take this product and give me feedback? Because I felt like, you know, they'll all be very nice to me. And they will do it like, you know, even …”
Khokhar boosted LinkedIn response rates to 60% with a single tweak
“I DMed 50 people being like, hey, I'm building this AI thing. You can like build an AI coach for yourself, train it, et cetera. Nobody replied to me. Okay. Like one out of 50 replied to me. And then what I did was my next batch of 50, I added a PS. At the end …”
Hughes: Founders should test outbound messaging using manual, personalized LinkedIn outreach first
“I think you have to do the manual stuff at the start to kind of, to tinker the messaging. So, like, what I would be telling founders to do is, like, start with social selling on LinkedIn and, like, be as personalized as you possibly can from, like, voice notes…”
Paffenholz: Profile review consumes roughly half of recruiter time
“Profile search or profile review, basically something where it involves looking at a profile, be that a LinkedIn profile, a resume, or any other type of visual version of a profile is a very substantial percentage of recruiter time. Let's ballpark it at like h…”
Greenberg: Direct LinkedIn Posts Outperform Ephemeral Trade Publication Press
“If you get an article in your dream trade publication, It exists for a week, and then it's kind of ephemeral and dies, but that LinkedIn is- ... LinkedIn is the one publication that every single one of your customers reads pretty much every week, and you can j…”
Greenberg: Content familiarity drives much higher response rates than cold outreach
“Totem pole of likelihood of getting a response. Very bottom is a cold email. On top of that, you have LinkedIn message. You've never heard of me, but like, at least you can see that I'm the CEO of this company. And then on top of that is like, wow, I've been s…”
Noah Greenberg: Delaying outbound LinkedIn DMs after connecting boosts reply rates
“If they accept, you are not immediately DMing them. You are letting them then see your content, AKA your free advertising, so that you have a much more likelihood of them accepting your request when you do DM them.”
Greenberg: Founder titles give outreach an advantage over 90% of SDRs
“When you connect with someone on LinkedIn, They see your name. They see your face. They see that you have CEO in your title or founder in your title or whatever it is. And already you have a leg up on 90% of the other SDRs that are doing outreach on LinkedIn, …”
Greenberg: Disarm cold outreach defensiveness by asking for organizational routing
“A cheat code that I have found recently is I will start my message by saying, apologies for coming straight to you with this, but I was unsure of who the right person to talk to about X might be. You know, no one wants to be pitched. Everyone, when they're goi…”
Greenberg: Tagging target companies in praise posts predictably yields sales calls
“Pretty predictably, if I say here's three companies that are doing awesome work in this space, two of them will comment and be like, thanks for calling us out. And, you know, within a month we're getting on the phone.”
Broad ICP startups need buzz channels while niche ICPs require targeted outreach
“If you have a broad ICP, I would say do things that we did, like post on LinkedIn, post on Reddit, do SEO content, like build up some buzz. But with a niche ICP, I think it's very difficult. It's like, you have to really find where the people that you're targe…”
Zima: messaged roughly 900 of Looker's 1,000 former employees to seed Omni
“We had a thousand employees when we got acquired. I probably sent a LinkedIn message to 900 of them.”
Englander: 90% of Fat Llama's early capital came from secondary intros
“Probably only five, 10% of that came direct from those LinkedIn messages I was sending. The other 90% was indirectly, almost entirely through that, right? Because, you know, at the end of the day, if you're meeting one person, you're not meeting just them. You…”
Juicebox's PeopleGPT demo video hit up to 2 million LinkedIn views
“Yeah, I think like one to two million views on LinkedIn, which was pretty high, like view count for a piece of content there.”
Pylon founders sent 120 personalized LinkedIn messages daily during idea discovery
“Robert Abbott and I, we'd wake up every day, we'd go on LinkedIn we bought sales navigators so you could message, I think at the max it was, like, 40 people per day, so we're messaging 120 personalized messages between the three of us every day, you know, book…”
Kumar: Clumio secured its first five alpha customers from 20 conference meetings
“At Clumio, we went to a big conference and I basically had set up, you know, 15, 20 meetings based on LinkedIn.
And, you know, of course I had my past background also at play.
And then between those 15, 20 meetings over those three, four days over lunches and …”
Vilner: Walnut's low-budget video gained millions of organic LinkedIn views
“And we woke up to seeing like millions and millions of organic views on LinkedIn.”
Zima: Omni started with 6,000 to 8,000 LinkedIn connections from Looker days
“I probably, when I started Omni had, I don't know, seven or 8000 connections on LinkedIn, maybe, maybe 6000 or something like that. And a lot of these were people that had purchased BI from Looker at some point in the past that I talked to in person.”
Aragon made its first revenue selling $40 photo style packs
“We had, like, eight different packs, and yeah, and they all worked, and it was 40 dollars, and you could choose four packs, and we, like, yeah, and I, like, basically launched it on LinkedIn, launched it on Twitter, made, like, a few hundred dollars, but that …”