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
Hey! I'm Florian — a software engineer for 5+ years, creator and CTO of Velto. When I started out as a tech entrepreneur, I quickly ran into the hard parts of building software and the trap of endlessly adding features, watching YouTube videos like "I'm a tech with $50k MRR, this is how I did it…" — THAT'S NOT THE FULL PICTURE. The truth most of us face is even harsher.
Want to build your idea? Bad news: you need to know your future customers and prospects first — it's vital. That's why the development phase matters but isn't enough; it has to go hand in hand with the step that actually makes the difference. The step that turns a product — SaaS or whatever you're building — into a real opportunity. Case in point: Viagra was created for headaches; look what it became. Without user feedback, you'll never know what truly matters in your users' and prospects' minds. Face reality with one word: PROSPECTING. Find your first prospects and customers; manage your outreach with icebreakers that actually work, book meetings, and GET real feedback from those people. In the age of AI in 2026, that's gold.
Why does almost nobody prospect in that case? Good news or bad news: it sucks. I ended up doing another job — sales instead of dev — and I quickly quit everything. I stepped back for a few days, a few weeks; my SaaS was live, 0 users, 0 visitors. I asked myself: "So this is entrepreneurship? Seriously… F*CK." Scrolling Reddit, LinkedIn, niche sites, digging through HubSpot and other CRM tools, I came to one conclusion: NOBODY has the guts to build a tool that uses the gray zone of Instagram or LinkedIn to scrape data easily, anonymously, and plug it into an app with real on-the-ground value; I added hundreds of profiles in 1 CLICK — result: colossal hours saved & near-perfect stick-with-it, where you easily and quickly enjoy really focusing on my prospects' profiles themselves, not on information and copy-pasting 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.
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