on a journey to PMF: just keep swimming, just keep swimming
Learning how to be patient...
Hey everyone,
Last week I wrote about pivoting from CRE to manufacturing, breaking the ICP into three Pain-Qualified Segments, and building the Clay pipeline that runs enrichment automatically on 90+ contacts.
If you missed it, the short version is: CRE signals were slow, the TAM was narrow, and the outreach required too much manual research per prospect. Manufacturing is a better fit: physical products that can’t demo on Zoom, long email-heavy sales cycles, and a clear gap between having HubSpot and not having anything to actually deliver sales content through.
That post went out March 5.
I had met up with Steve the next day, and it surfaced some things I want to document.
fun stuff (before we get into things…)
my eldest had a birthday party last week, so it was super fun to see friends and family get together to celebrate that.
also, getting my 2.5 year old into baseball, so we’ve been going outside to get some swings in every other day.
fun times.
the honest pulse check on linkedin
Steve opened the call with a question I didn’t have a clean answer to: how do I feel about LinkedIn as a channel so far?
And honestly, I can’t tell.
Connection rates are normal. In-mail reply rates are better than email typically performs. So there’s nothing that says the channel is broken. But we’re doing something with a finite group of people over a finite window of time, and those experiments always feel inconclusive early. I’ve learned this from running outbound… you almost always have to wait longer than feels comfortable before you know anything.
What I’ve been sitting with is a different fear: that it’s not the channel, not the targeting, not the copy, but something about the offer itself.
the gamma question i keep avoiding
When Steve and I first connected, he sent me a Gamma, my first reaction was to immediately compare it to Journey. And I had a hard time.
Gamma is free. You can embed videos in it now. You can add calendar links. You can build something that looks well-designed from a prompt in about two minutes.
So what does Journey actually do that Gamma doesn’t?
It was hard for me to put together a good, valid answer.
What I came back to was something that came up in a separate conversation I had with another founder (shout-out Ken and meetsona.ai) who had described his ICP in a way I’d never heard before:
“I’m not targeting the person who needs to post more. I’m targeting the person who’s scared to post.”
His platform is built around authenticity, not virality. He’s not competing with the volume tools. He’s serving a completely different emotional state.
It was helpful because the thing I’ve been telling myself about Journey — that I’ll never compete with AI tools that create content at scale — is actually the right instinct. Gamma has that. Claude has that. Canva has that. Journey isn’t about generating the content.
Journey is about prescribing the order in which your content gets consumed.
I actually ran into this recently when I recorded a Loom explaining five or six things and then I also needed to send the recipient the actual things I was showing.
Two links, two PDFs. So I sent the Loom with four attachments in an email.
And then I sat there thinking: he’s going to watch that Loom right before a meeting, close out of email, and never open those attachments. And if he goes looking for the Loom later, he’ll have to find the email, re-open it, and hope the attachments are still there.
So I put everything into a Journey. One link. Video at the top. Supporting docs in order. Now if he goes back looking for that video, everything’s right there with it.
Steve put a name on it at the end of the call: it’s a packaging problem. Not a content creation problem. Not a design problem.
A packaging problem.
We’re not building a deck builder. We’re building…. something else haha (and I don’t know what that punchline is yet)
what changed about the offer
The last newsletter described the outreach close as: “I built a sample of what your product line would look like as a Journey using your public content. Want me to send it?”
That framing came from before the call. After the call, it’s shifted.
The version Steve pushed toward is: don’t ask if they want to see it. Build it for them specifically, from their actual assets, and send it. Include it in DM1. Include it again in DM2. Put it in every message. Don’t gate it behind a question.
The whole point of the permissionless value prop is that they already have it before they agree to anything. The ask isn’t “would you like to see what this could look like.” It’s “I already did it — here’s the link.”
There’s a practical constraint worth naming: Journey doesn’t currently make it easy to automatically ingest assets. Text is simple. But pulling in actual PDFs and spec sheets programmatically — that’s harder with the way we track assets on a page. So for now, this is semi-manual. I go to the prospect’s website, pull their product pages, find what’s there, and build it.
sprint 3: founder-led b2b services
We also planned out the third outbound sprint on the call: founder-led B2B services.
The people I have in mind are solo operators and small teams running video production companies, creative agencies, design studios — people who sell visual work, and share that work via Google Drive links with file names like “ClientX_Final_v3.mp4.”
The pain is that the delivery undermines the work. If you’re a video production company charging $10k a project, sending a Google Drive folder is a bad first impression. Your work is only as strong as the frame you put it in.
We have existing customers that fit this. And one that’s quite interesting is a Hollywood game show producer who pitches major networks. Before Journey, he was sharing scripts, mockups, and sizzle reels in a folder. Execs would click around randomly. With Journey, he controls the narrative arc. He can see that NBC watched his video. He can see that Paramount spent time on the storyboards. That’s not a Gamma feature. That’s a different problem entirely.
The challenge with this segment is unit economics. ACV is $39–50/month, which doesn’t support the same level of outbound we’re running for manufacturing. So the channel strategy is different:
Content-led inbound — post about the packaging problem, attract founders who recognize it
Lightweight LinkedIn engagement — show up consistently, DM softly
Lookalike lists from existing customers
Native LinkedIn video — Steve’s suggestion, and I think it’s right. Record yourself walking through a Journey you built for a lookalike company. Send it as a DM. For someone who cares about visual quality, a scroll-stopping thumbnail is a more compelling cold touch than any text message.
This one is next on the list to try.
the intent question
One more thing from the call that’s worth documenting.
Steve made a point about buying intent data that I’ve thought about a lot since: it’s been promised for 10–15 years, and it mostly doesn’t work. The exceptions are when the signal is structurally forced — a government permit, a job posting that mentions specific tooling, something mandated and therefore reliable. But for most B2B SaaS, you can’t get a clean read on who’s “in market” from third-party data.
His framing: stop trying to find intent. Start engineering it.
Cold traffic becomes warm traffic when they click your Journey link. Warm becomes hot when they visit your pricing page, or open the Journey you built for them twice. You can’t know who woke up ready to buy today. But you can message enough of the right people that when they do wake up ready, you’re the first thing that comes to mind.
This is why the Journey link goes in every message. Every click is a signal I generated. If someone opens the thing I built for their company and spends four minutes on it without replying, that’s information. That’s warmer than silence, and I know it from data I own, not from a third-party platform guessing.
so where are we
Manufacturing sprint is live. I’m watching connection rates, click rates on the Journey links, and waiting long enough to actually learn something.
Sprint 3 planning is done. Founder-led B2B services is next.
And I’m sitting with a cleaner answer to the Gamma question than I had a week ago, even if I still have to figure out how to say it in a cold DM.
More soon.
Let’s keep it going.
Cheers, Danny