In 2024 we were trying to validate a payments idea by emailing founders. We spent $340/month on cold-email tools and got a 1.8% reply rate. The replies we did get were usually angry. Something was very, very wrong with the channel.
We tried the obvious workaround: DM people on Reddit and X instead. Reply rates jumped to 12%. The replies were warm. People sent screenshots of their problems unprompted. The catch: doing it by hand took four hours a day, and we had a product to build.
So we built a Chrome extension to handle the boring parts — picking the next lead, expanding the template, sending the DM, logging the reply — while keeping the human parts (what to say, who to target, when to follow up) ours.
After three months of using it on our own outreach, friends started asking for the install link. After six months, we'd shipped 47 versions and the daily active count was bigger than the side-project we'd been building it for. So we made PingFinger the main thing.
We're still tiny. The whole team eats lunch at the same table.
