How we replaced Apollo, Waalaxy and Expandi with our own outreach tool

Our sales team ran LinkedIn outreach through the usual subscriptions. Apollo for the lists. Waalaxy for the sequences. Expandi on trial because the first two disagreed about who we had already contacted.

Each wanted a seat for every person who looked at it. Each put a wall of counters in front of a team that needed four numbers. None would say what it was doing with our one LinkedIn account between those counters. So we built our own, and took the three subscriptions off the bill.

The screens were the problem before the price was

Open any of the three and you get a dashboard built for a sales floor sending thousands of requests: tabs inside tabs, a sidebar of modules the team never opened, settings explained in a help centre rather than on the page. A founder or a team lead who gives a screen three seconds leaves with nothing.

We wrote ours the other way round. Every page answers one question. Every term explains itself when you hover over it. Every campaign opens into the same one-screen summary.

Who built it

The engineers who built Outreach have shipped systems for blue-chip companies, where a screen is read by people with no patience and no time for a manual. That discipline is what you see in it: the first screen shows what changed this week, and nothing else until you ask.

What it has that the subscriptions did not

• A summary of every campaign on one screen: when it runs, where the leads are, the sequence step by step, how far the leads have got, and what it is using of the weekly budget.
• Sending in the lead's own morning, Monday to Thursday, worked out from where they are. The subscriptions send in your working hours, wherever the lead is.
• One weekly budget across every tool on the account, with the other tool's requests counted against the same line.
• A kill switch that pauses the account when acceptance drops or too many requests sit unanswered.
• Every lead, message and reply in our own database, with a search across everyone and a column per timezone.
• No seats. The whole team can watch, and adding a colleague adds nothing to the bill.

Supervising the team's campaigns

This is the part a team lead feels first. Each campaign is a row with a green dot while it runs and an amber one when it is paused. Open it and the summary reads top to bottom in a glance: schedule, timezones, sequence, progress, budget. A dropdown starts or pauses it. Six campaigns take a minute to check, and nobody has to ask the person running them.

What the research changed

We did not copy the vendors. We read the research first: the academic work on familiarity and reciprocity, the large datasets the vendors publish, and LinkedIn's own rules. Three findings changed the design.

• Timing beats wording. A request that lands in the lead's own morning, Monday to Thursday, is accepted far more often than one sent in the evening.
• A note does not win acceptance. It wins the reply afterwards. So the request carries a short, honest line or nothing, and the pitch waits until they have said yes.
• Three messages beat five. After the third, replies fall and complaints rise. The sequence stops there.

The tool did not make the team better at outreach. The reading did. The tool makes sure they do what we read.

The line nobody shows you

Every tool on one LinkedIn account counts against the same weekly line. Cross it and the account is paused for a week. Outreach shows that line on the first screen, counts the other tool's requests against it, and refuses to pass it. Before every request it reads the profile and skips anyone already connected or already invited.

What it cost

A small monthly fee for the service that holds the LinkedIn session, and nothing per seat. Against three subscriptions priced per person, the bill fell to a fraction of what it was.

Could you have one?

That is the kind of thing we build for operating partners and the companies they run: the small, specific tool that replaces a stack of subscriptions nobody fully uses, with screens their team can read. Tell us which tools you are paying for and we will show you ours.