HeyEcho now has all the features I scoped as part of the beta! 🥳 

It’s time to think about reaching out to customers.

Table of Contents

• Blog posts library and sources highlights

• GTM plan

  • Inbound

    • Content type

    • Channels and tooling

    • Collaboration with an SEO agency

  • Outbound

    • Lead generation

      • LinkedIn

      • Emails

    • Cold Email Outreach

    • My Current Plan

    • Outreach tracking

• Conclusion

Blog posts library and sources highlights

In addition to generating blog posts, I wanted to tackle two key challenges:

1. Managing a collection of blog posts effectively.

2. Highlighting the sources used during the writing process.

To address the first challenge, HeyEcho includes a blog post library organized by workspaces. This feature not only keeps your content neatly organized but also lays the foundation for HeyEcho to function as a lightweight CMS.

For the second challenge, I’ve put significant emphasis on sources during blog generation. Why? Because while LLMs are powerful, they’re notorious for sometimes producing inaccurate information. Publishing non-factual content can severely damage a business’s credibility.

To mitigate this, HeyEcho now allows you to review summaries of the sources used for each post and access the original links directly. This transparency ensures that your content is both accurate and trustworthy. While I plan to expand and refine these features, they’re already a solid step in the right direction.

GTM plan

I think that one of the reasons why I haven’t been able to attract customers for my previous products is that I failed to be consistent when it comes to promotion both inbound and outbound.

This is not the only reason as I explained in this retrospective, but probably I would have been able to get to something if executed better.

This time I’m explicitly planning not to mess this up. 🤣 

Inbound

It’s a common mistake for inexperienced founders to assume that a single post about their product will inform the entire world. This mindset often leads to underpromotion, resulting in missed opportunities.

In reality, every time you write or post about your product, chances are someone new will discover it for the first time. This time, I’m adopting a more systematic approach to content strategy, focusing on two key dimensions:

1. Content type,

2. Channel

Content type

So far, I’ve primarily focused on product updates. Building in public has been great for this—it not only creates transparency but has also led to an exciting opportunity (more on this later). I’m also trying to always have a video as a companion when I’m posting about a product update.

Now that the beta is ready, I can expand beyond product updates to include blog posts. This feels natural since I can easily dogfood HeyEcho to create these posts. 🚀

Dogfooding also gives me the advantage of continuously evaluating both myself and the quality of HeyEcho.

In about a month, with beta customers onboard and continued dogfooding—not just for HeyEcho but also for HaveYouHeard—I’ll likely have enough data and results to produce some case studies. These will demonstrate the real-world impact of the product, further building credibility.

Before case studies, I should be able to also ask some early users to provide some testimonials that I could use as social proof on the landing page.

To recap:

1. Product updates — already started,

2. Blog posts — about to start,

3. Social proof — as soon as beta users start seeing value,

4. Case studies — in a month or so.

And ofc I’d need a well-made landing page.

Channels and tooling

I already set up different channels to distribute the different content types. Depending on the channel, it might need specific repurposing.

These are the channels that I currently have set:

• HeyEcho’s Newsletter — HeyEcho has its own newsletter, and I’m currently using Mailerlite for sending the emails. A user that signs up to HeyEcho is automatically added, right now only the persons who subscribed to the wait list are being added manually.

• Bluesky, X, LinkedIn — I really like companies doing founder-led content marketing, Beehiiv is one of those companies that I think is doing it really well. In my case is quite easy as I’m solo 😂 , but yeah I’m going to post on these 3 using my personal accounts through Typefully. I’ve been using them for posting product updates, but I failed to be consistent. Sometimes I posted only on Bluesky, only on LinkedIn, etc. I also prepared the company version on each of them so that I can repost what I post from my personal account. I don’t have yet a clear plan on whether I should post different things on the two, but at this stage, I think posting from my personal one and reposting using the company one is more than fine.

• Reddit’s r/HeyEcho — Posting on subreddit works, but I’m also trying to consistently post on an owned subreddit. I never mod a subreddit so who knows what will happen. 😅 I think this is going to be tricky, but if it goes well, I would be able to also rely on user-generated content. My current plan is to post product updates and cross-post them on promotion-friendly subreddits. I’m not strictly banning self-promotion so that might also help the community grow here.

• Reddit — I will also set up HaveYouHeard for HeyEcho to catch potentially interesting conversations and also track competitors.

• Slack Groups — I’m part of two groups in Slack related to marketing and sales. I never really leveraged them yet, and promotion is also badly seen unless posted on a specific channel. I’d need to experiment on this one.

• Blog — Ofc I will also set up a blog at HeyEcho.xyz/blog

Collaboration with an SEO agency

As I just mentioned, building in public has its own advantages. In this case, the founder of an SEO agency reached out because he was very interested in the focus that HeyEcho was putting on researching sources and statistics for drafting the blog posts. ✨ 

I don’t know yet whether this will work out or not, but I see nothing to lose. We agreed to catch back in early January. 🤞 

Outbound

The good thing about Inbound is that it’s pretty much free. Among all the things that I mentioned above Typefully is the only thing that I paid.

When it comes to outbound, it’s easy to start investing money. 😄 

I’d group the tools into 3 different categories:

1. Lead generation,

2. Cold email outreach,

3. Outreach tracking.

I don’t want to spend much money for two reasons:

• there are free options that are good enough to start with,

• I still need to experiment with what works best in terms of messaging,

• it makes sense to spend money for automation to replicate what works at scale.

Lead generation

LinkedIn

LinkedIn should be more than enough to start with. Using the basic search to look for specific roles could be a great start.

In my case, I already bought a Sales Navigator subscription. This is the plan:

• filter by roles (Content Marketer, Growth Marketer) and companies (B2B SaaS)

• warm up by engaging by commenting on posts if available,

• build connection,

• send custom DM.

I discovered a few tools that help add some automation on top of LinkedIn like Expandi and Waalaxy, but I never tried them. But this would be an extra step once I’d need to scale LinkedIn outreach.

Emails

I haven’t explored cold email outreach yet, even in past projects, but it’s clear that tools like Apollo (a popular leads database) and Clay (which enriches lead data) are becoming essential for outbound efforts. These platforms are fantastic for scaling and building a robust outbound machine, but I’m holding off for now. My priority is to refine the value proposition and messaging with early customers first. That said, it’s good to keep these tools in mind as the next steps when scaling becomes the focus.

Cold Email Outreach

Cold email outreach can get a little tricky. 😂

If you’re new to it, you might think you can send emails to prospects using your Google Workspace account tied to your custom domain. Technically, you can—but it’s likely to land in the SPAM folder. 😅

Here’s why: New domains and mailboxes are flagged as suspicious if they send too many emails right away. There are guidelines around the number of emails to send per day, the age of the mailbox, and the number of mailboxes per domain. Thankfully, tools like Instantly can help you manage this process, but I’d need to dig into these options more.

For small-scale efforts, you can send a limited number of emails without needing specialized tools. However, once you’re ready to scale, these tools are essential to ensure good deliverability and avoid issues like bans that could affect transactional emails.

My Current Plan

1. Start with LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Begin next week to identify and reach out to early leads.

2. Automate LinkedIn DM sequences: Once manual LinkedIn outreach becomes tedious, use tools like Expandi or Waalaxy.

3. Incorporate cold emailing: When I’m ready to scale, integrate tools like Clay or Apollo for lead data and Instantly for email deliverability.

I’m intentionally keeping cold emailing as the final step because it requires a significant upfront investment. For effective scaling, you’ll typically need up to 2 mailboxes per domain, and it’s a good idea to avoid using your main domain to protect transactional email deliverability.

This means buying N domains, each with a Google Workspace account, and the subscriptions for both the cold email outreach SaaS and the lead gen and data enrichment provider.

Outreach tracking

All these would be a mess without a way to track everything. A few months ago I experimented using Attio as a CRM. TBH it felt “too much” and I was missing using a simple Google Spreadsheet. 😅 

But I’ll give it another try and the great thing is that it’s free

Conclusion

Managing everything solo can be a lot, but I need to stick to a clear and actionable plan—something like “Warm up 20 leads a day” or “Send 10 emails a day.”

Setting small, consistent goals is key to making progress. 📈 

I hope you enjoyed this update!

If you’re interested in following my journey, make sure to subscribe or follow me on Bluesky and LinkedIn!