AI & Brute Forcing Your Go-To-Market

I don't know about you, but RIP my inbox. We've always received a decent amount of cold inbounds over the years. I've even made two investments purely based on blog posts. These were posts about a specific opportunity, which prompted founders to reach out saying they had been working on exactly this. 

But what we are seeing lately is a different order of magnitude. It is no longer just founders, it is also just tons of service providers brute forcing their go-to-market for VC-adjacent services.

Sales automation has been a key driver for these increased volumes over the last decade. But that felt gradual and pretty easy to filter (Priority Inbox has done a good job, at the cost of missing a few important emails). 

But the combination of GPTs with the wide and cheap availability of tools, and the increased sophistication of lead funnels and targeting has changed the game. I would estimate volume is at 10x of what it was even 2-3 years ago. 

I have fully given up on Linkedin, and am closer to email bankruptcy every day. 

For what it’s worth, we are seeing these channels decrease in conversion across verticals for all companies selling B2B software and services. That's probably well-deserved, but it is a pity for those businesses solving real problems. 

My advice to founders is to go back to basics: warm intros from qualified fellow founders or angels. They'll always get attention. 

My advice to businesses is to iterate your channels now, because this is a problem that won't go away anytime soon. Not unlikely in consumer, you need to put a good 20% of marketing into experimental. As you can imagine, I have _thoughts_ on where to deploy this. 

The other answer, however, must be technological. The arc of innovation in spam filters, which I thought was over, seems to be just beginning. The right response to this level of spam needs to be a level of not just filtering but response automation. I know Google and Superhuman and others have begun to experiment with this. 

If it is something you are working on, Heartcore would love a look.