Velto guide
Lire en françaisHow to prospect on LinkedIn (without burning your account)
No magic sequence — a realistic solo-founder method with sourced benchmarks and a ~35-minute daily routine.
Most LinkedIn prospecting guides push volume: 100 DMs a day, Sales Navigator or bust. If you're a solo founder, your actual problem looks different: you spot six interesting profiles in a week, message two, forget to follow up on four — and three weeks later you can't remember why you saved that CTO.
LinkedIn is still the default B2B social channel. Marketing syntheses consistently put it at roughly 80% of B2B social leads (Martal, 2026, citing HubSpot / Power Digital ). That doesn't mean easy wins — it means your buyers are already there talking shop.
What I lived founding Velto
When I started out in SaaS founding, I quickly understood that the development phase was only the beginning; the most critical phase for a SaaS to survive is prospecting — first to find your early users, then only afterwards, partners and affiliates.
Prospecting isn't a fun phase but a very thankless one, starting with the biggest friction: copy-pasting information across hundreds of profiles; most entrepreneurs and agencies get discouraged during this phase, and even when they persevere, they end up disgusted with their work.
I don't think that's the GOAL. With a bit of a pirate spirit, I decided to hack the system and build the ultimate tool to destroy friction once and for all; I added hundreds of profiles in 1 click — result: a colossal saving of hours & near-perfect stick-with-it, where you easily and quickly enjoy really focusing on my prospects' profiles themselves, not on information and copy-pasting it into a spreadsheet or other archaic note-taking tools.
Concentrate what matters in one place, quickly, efficiently and in 1 click; add notes, tags, statuses, intuitively customize your whole prospecting to fit your needs.
The frequent mistake: many people add profiles in bulk, but let them go cold once they've been contacted. Velto steps in to solve this vital problem.
Cherry on top: I turned prospecting into a Daily Session — each session is built to boost productivity, one profile shown => one outreach action, even more time saved easily, a major focus boost. Useful, mature, intuitive gamification.
Quick tip: In the extension, select full analysis to get an overall verdict on how relevant a profile is: comments/likes/followers and other metrics are analyzed and processed.
Start narrow: one ICP, not a whole market
Before writing anything, shrink the target. Not "startups" — try "B2B SaaS founders, 2–15 people, pre-PMF, posting about outbound or churn." Highly targeted 1:1 outreach often lands 8–15% reply rates in SaaS benchmarks vs 2–5% for generic templates (GrowthSpree, 2026).
First message: short, no pitch deck
"Read your post on forgotten follow-ups — how do you handle that today, Notion, spreadsheet, something else? Testing an approach for solo founders, would value your take."
Follow-ups: where deals actually happen
The classic "80% of sales need five follow-ups" stat is often untraceable (OutSales debunks it, 2026). Verified data still points the same direction: Backlinko's 12M-email analysis found a single follow-up can lift reply rates by ~66%; Woodpecker suggests 55–65% of replies come after the first touch (InboxKit summary).
A day-3 or day-5 bump — one line — beats a heavy CRM you never open. See our guide on a lightweight tracking system.
A routine that sticks: ~35 minutes
- 10 min — feed + save 3–5 profiles with context
- 15 min — 5–8 messages or follow-ups max
- 10 min — log replies, schedule next step
B2B cycles are long: Dreamdata's 2026 report puts the average journey at ~272 days from first marketing touch to closed revenue (Dreamdata). Consistency beats quarterly blitzes.
Take action today
Velto gives you a clear list of people to reach on LinkedIn and Instagram — without setting up a CRM.
Try Velto for free