As the title says I want to follow the advice of talking to potential customers to see if there's a market and to better understand their needs.

I would like to know which specific steps should one take in the actual sending of a linkedin message.

1) Do you advice just searching in linkedin sales navigator for the persona? Or would you advice using a specific tool for the prospecting? (please don't sell me snake oil, I just want to start and get at least 10 conversations)

2) Do you connect first? Send a "special message"? Or just a regular message (I have literally no idea of how the dynamics of linkedin work and what are the best practices)

So there's that, I've read founding sales, but I believe email outreach is very hard and reply rates are abysmal, so maybe linkedin outreach is better. But the book doesn't go into detail on how to do that.