The problem was never finding people to message. LinkedIn search works fine. Sales Navigator exists. Referrals happen.
The problem was opening their profile and... staring.
"Okay, they're a VP of Engineering at a Series B company. They posted about technical debt last week. How do I not sound like every other person in their inbox?"
Delete. Rewrite. Check if it's too long. Too short. Too salesy. Not specific enough.
Forty-seven minutes later, I'd written four messages.
The real issue
Most outreach tools solve the wrong problem. They give you:
Templates with merge tags ({{firstName}} works at {{company}}) Auto-send features that violate LinkedIn's ToS Bulk sequence automation
But that's not where I was stuck. I knew WHO to message. I just couldn't figure out WHAT to say without it taking forever.
ChatGPT didn't help much either. It would give me generic garbage unless I spent 10 minutes crafting the perfect prompt with their bio, my product details, and tone guidelines. At that point, I might as well write it myself.
What I built I made a Chrome extension that:
1. You set up once — add your product description and create "personas" for different voices (technical, consultative, casual, whatever) 2. When you open a LinkedIn profile, click the extension 3. It reads their profile, matches signals to your product, applies your persona, and generates a message in ~5 seconds 4. You review it, edit if needed, copy and paste it into LinkedIn manually
No automation. No auto-send. No LinkedIn violations. Just faster message writing.
Technical approach The extension scrapes visible profile data (no API, since LinkedIn shut that down years ago). Sends it to a backend that:
Extracts key signals (role, company stage, recent activity) Matches those against your product context Applies persona-specific prompt engineering Returns a message with strict rules (no buzzwords, no "I hope this finds you well", keep it under 150 words)
The persona system was the interesting part. Instead of one generic prompt, you can switch between voices. A "former consultant" persona sounds different than a "technical cofounder" persona — different sentence structure, different reference points.
What I learned
The biggest surprise: people don't want more automation. They want to stay in control but eliminate the blank-page problem.
Every time I mentioned "auto-send" in early user interviews, people got nervous. But "write it for me, I'll review and send" got immediate interest.
Second surprise: the quality bar is higher than I expected. A message that's 80% good but has one weird line? People rewrite the whole thing. It needs to be 95% good or it's useless.
Current state
In private beta now. About 40 people using it. Average message generation time is 6 seconds. Most people edit about 20% of messages before sending.
Not sure if this is a real business yet, but it solved my problem. Maybe it'll solve yours too.
Happy to answer questions about the technical implementation or user behavior patterns I've seen.
It's called Prospectee. You can check it out at prospectee.io if you're curious.