The LinkedIn Playbook That's Replacing Cold Email | Zayd Ali, Valley (EP 17)

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Welcome to the GTM Vault Podcast where top founders and operators reveal the playbooks behind today's fastest growing companies. I'm your host, I'm Rick Coletta, and in this episode, we're exposing how one founder is about to turn the LinkedIn sales tools industry on its head. Our guest is Zayd Ali, founder and CEO of Valy, an AI-powered outbound engine that's flipping the script on LinkedIn automation and sales engagement. With two prior exits, scaling teams across the globe, and now building Valy with backing from General Catalyst, Jason Calacanis, and top sales leader, Zayd is on a mission to redefine outbound sales. Valy has already generated $128 million in pipeline for companies like Front, Cardlytics, and 70+ startups backed by Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and more. But there, but here's what's crazy. Zayd is considering giving Valy's core features away for free. To undercut the entire LinkedIn tool space. Is this a bold growth play or a death sentence for competitors? Today we'll unpack why this is the perfect moment to disrupt LinkedIn sales tools, how Valy monetizes what others can't replicate, whether this forces competitors to innovate or just fade out, the future of AI-powered outbound, and why 60% reply rates are just the start. If you're in sales growth or just love a good disruption story, you don't want to miss this one. Let's dive in. Why is now the perfect time to disrupt the LinkedIn tool space? And how does Valley's approach differ from existing solutions?

Yeah, 100%. First off, man, stoked to be here. So a couple of things. So my, my background is in LinkedIn automation. Prior to founding Valley, built, exited two LinkedIn appointment setting agencies. Now, With those companies, we use tools like Zopto, Dripify, Waalaxy, Duxoup, HeyReach, you name it, all of them. We use all of them under the sun. They all worked somewhat well, but really they all did the same thing, right? There was pretty much 99% feature overlap with them. It allowed you to send templated messaging. Hi, first name. I saw you work at company name. It allowed you to manage multiple accounts. It allowed you to sort of see a unit inbox. They all really have the same features. So when I think about this next wave of go-to-market tooling, you're moving from these templated messages. Everybody paid for those things, right? That provided a lot of value to people, but now you're moving to personalization. You're moving to research. You're moving to agentic messaging. You're moving to signal-based messaging. And so this initial commodity that people loved, people are still paying for. You now have people on the bleeding edge who are purchasing tools like Valy who want to improve their LinkedIn outreach. But the mass of the market is still sitting here and sort of your, in terms of the bell curve of the adopter curve, they're still sitting with your old tooling. So the idea here was, why don't we just give that away for free? We can do all of that, right? There's a couple core reasons here. One, we have the ability to power these features. Two, people are still paying boatloads of money to get access to them. And three, if we can get them into our ecosystem and have the ability to upsell them or cross-sell them. Or even give them a free trial of what Valyant can do when it comes to the research personalization and the increase in acceptance rates, response rates, and pipeline generated as a function of that, it could be a fantastic lead generator for us. So all of these different sort of headwinds are combining to say, look, this actually could be a really interesting growth avenue for us. The core value that we offer is here. Most people are still using templated messaging, but seeing atrophying results. What if we could just offer that for free and then upsell them to the good stuff? So yeah, that's why I think the timing makes a lot of sense. No one's really doing it. Uh, and I think somebody will.

You mentioned flipping the space on its head. What's fundamentally broken about how LinkedIn automation tools operate today?

Yeah. So if you look at the vast majority of tools, I'd say again, 90% of them, they've been around for nearly a decade, right? Look at Zapto, Expandi, Duck Soup, Waalaxy, even Lemlist, right? These guys have been around for a really long time. Now, kudos to that. They've got longevity. They've got amazing tools that people love. The issue is that the innovation has really lacked. The core of what they brought to the space, they brought 8, 9 years ago. And they may have innovated on the margins, but what are we really doing here with LinkedIn automation tooling? We're generating a template. We're sending that out at scale and we're trying not to get your account restricted, right? Those 3 things haven't changed for those companies. And so when I think about Bali, I can go and do what you're doing for free and use that as a mechanism to get people into what really matters, right? Which is this next generation of technology that is signal-based. It's about sending fewer messages. It's how do we improve conversions? Which all these other tools have really spent any time focusing on.

That makes a lot of sense. I want to dive a little deeper on the monetization strategy that you're suggesting by giving away core LinkedIn automation features for free. How do you monetize when others can't replicate your model?

Yeah, 100%. So, um, when I think about this, right, you can even think of like, I don't know, two circles. You've got your old guard of linked automation tools. Their core features are what we were just talking about, right? Templated messaging, sending that at scale, keeping your account safe, uh, and then maybe some administrative and sort of agency features to do multiple account management. That's their core. For Valley, that's an ancillary piece of what we do, right? It sits right over here. There's like this overlapping sliver between us and the old guard linked automation tools. Again, the core here, let's give that away for free. Everybody who's spending between $500 and $50,000 a month on tools like HeyReach and Zapto could do the exact same thing with us for free. Now, when it comes to monetizing, it's what does Valy offer on top of what a HeyReach, a Zapto, or Expandly does today, right? And that's really what, where we spent all of our investor money. That's where we spent all our energy. That's where I spent all my time in terms of the product side. Um, and number one is going to be intent. So Valy, unlike these other tools, is able to identify your highest intent leads. We can identify prospects on your website. We can score them. We're about to launch the social signal suite as well. Number 2 is going to be prospecting, right? A lot of these tools don't have the ability to help you prospect, help you build your lists, and help you find the right leads. Bali has the ability to do that, both in terms of helping you leverage, say, Sales Navigator in the most effective way possible, but also in terms of building signal-based lists. And we spent a lot of time there. 3 is going to be research, right? And all these prospects that people bring into Bali or Bali finds, finds itself. Valley's performing research across 50 different data points to understand who is the prospect, what's going on with their company, and what's going on with their industry to ultimately craft a hyper-personal and hyper-relevant sales message that can be sent out on autopilot. So those are the core 3 pieces that we offer that these other tools don't. And that's ultimately where all the value accrues, right? If you wanna think about what's leading to Valley generating a 60% acceptance rate and a 60% response rate on connection requests or a 20% reply rate on inMails. It's those 3 things. It's the right prospects, it's the right research, and it's the right message that comes out in your voice. That's what people should be paying for. They shouldn't be paying for the tooling to just blast out template, blast out template messages. So yeah, that's where we're monetizing. That's where we think it makes a lot of sense. That's where the value is.

Do you see that evolving into a long-term moat?

So I think that there are a couple of moats that exist today, far fewer than ever existed in the past. Number 1 is network effects. Um, I think you build network effects into your product. Uh, it's. It's a long-term durable moat. You think Uber, Airbnb, Instagram. There's a reason why you haven't seen a new social network pop up in like a decade. Number 2 is, is gonna be brand. I think brand has become much more important. And when I say brand, it's really an umbrella term for community. It's an umbrella term for obviously the, the emotions that the brand makes, uh, so it sort of evokes in you, but also mindshare, right? And so what I think that this does for Valley is it absolutely cements us in terms of mindshare and brand. When it comes to being a premium LinkedIn option, um, right? Or being really the LinkedIn automation company. We started out going and building an AI SDR. We realized what we're fantastic at is LinkedIn when it comes to LinkedIn messaging, when it comes to how to operate within LinkedIn's, uh, rules, regulations, and make sure that accounts are safe. Nobody could really play with us on that field. So now we want to go really deep there and we want to become the de facto LinkedIn automation tool for people across the gamut. Who want to do things like very basic, uh, let's call it level 1 LinkedIn messaging, which is just setting up connection requests, but also people who want really complex workflows when it comes to identifying signal-based prospects, scoring them, routing them based on campaign, creating multiple different research agents, X, Y, and Z, managing 20 different accounts. We want to be known as the LinkedIn de facto tool, and this free distribution strategy is a way that we think we can really cement that.

I think that makes a lot of sense. In this past, I want to say 12 months, I've noticed LinkedIn becoming increasingly the number one founder-led outbound channel, especially with email open rates declining. Talk to me a little bit about how your approach differs from traditional automation and why do you think prospects think it's more human?

So a couple of pieces there. So number one, why does our approach differ from traditional automation? Every message is unique, right? When it comes to outbound messaging, there are a couple things that need to be true. One, I think of relevance, right? There are AI-personalized tools out there that'll say, uh, hey Rick, I saw your face in New York. Have you ever been to Blue Bottle Coffee? By the way, come join my CISO webinar where we're talking to security and chief security information officers. It's like, cool, it's personal, but it's highly irrelevant. So when I think about relevance, you need to be able to tie the narrative together of why you're reaching out to this specific person, why you versus the person next door. And a good litmus test here is if your message is relevant, to the person that you're sending it to, the fact of it should be irrelevant to the other 8.5 billion people on the planet. And I can show you some examples of valid messaging. We do this incredibly well. And number 2 is going to be the fact that, uh, it's hyper-personal. So personalization in the sense of how can we make Rick feel like this message could only have been drafted for him? He's the only possible recipient. There were no tokenized variables. Hi, first name. I saw you with your company name. Has to feel very one-to-one. And our messaging makes it very clear that we invested time into you. And when a prospect feels like you've invested time into them, they'll return the favor and invest time back into you. So all of those things are sort of core tenets about how Valley has gone about message generation. It's a very expensive process for us. Um, but we do have the best AI messaging in the game. So the last piece I'll mention is that we've spent a lot of time thinking about how can we make an AI output sound like the human it's designed to represent, right? And so if you think about the way that I'm speaking right now, just the way that you're speaking versus the way that Matt, my engineer in the other room, speaks, everybody has a unique fingerprint around the colloquialisms they use, the words, phrases, slang, punctuation preferences, stylistic differences. And what I found that a lot of AI-based solutions have done is they've tried to box those into casual, formal, correct, funny, um, in how you want your output to sound. We said that doesn't make any sense, right? This thing needs to be hyper valuable and hyper customizable. And so when you onboard to Bali, one of the first things that you do is you give Bali your writing style, upload examples of things that you've written in the past, give Bali specific dos and don'ts. Imagine taking a sticky note out and jotting down notes on how you write and handing that to your newly hired BDR. That's what you're doing with Bali in our writing style section. So all of those key nuances. Valley is able to understand, internalize, and then deploy when it comes to crafting messaging, which ultimately leads to messaging that is indistinguishable from what the human themselves would write. I haven't seen anybody else in the AI space really focus on this piece of the output engine. I think it's something that we do uniquely well.

I really like that. And talk to me about the intent signals. How do you prioritize which signals matter most for conversion?

So right now what we have is website visitor intent. So what we're doing is we're tracking who's going to the site, obviously on the person level, where are they going on the site? And then we have an automatic event, which will basically go and discover as much information as we can about the prospect. And then based on the ICP that I've defined inside of Valy, Valy will score those people, right? So I have something set up where anybody scored above a 70 who views my pricing page is immediately getting a personalized message from me. I don't need to think twice about it. Conversions there are fantastic. The second piece that we're launching quite soon and we're running right now internally is scraping competitor, people who've engaged with competitors' posts. So people who've engaged with HeyReach or Expandi. Right now I'm running a 55% reply rate on that campaign. And that signal has performed very well. Basically, take the list of people who engage with the post, bring them into Valet. Valet is then going to score them. And then it's going to route, let's say people who are above a 70 to a campaign and start to message them. And that score is predicated on your ICP. So people who are in this location at these size companies with this job title, X, Y, or Z. So those, those are the two signals that we've deployed internally. Uh, there are going to be a couple others that we're shipping. So prospecting for people who are currently hiring for certain roles. Champion tracking is also coming very soon. Uh, that's been useful for, for larger scale companies, people who who've used your product in a prior role. Obviously, if they liked it, they're going to be a great prospect for you. Companies who have recently hired for sort of their first role in a department, right? So you can look at people, companies who have hired their first marketer, their first PM, their first sales hire, right? That's obviously a great signal that they're looking to extend the tech stack. So those are just a couple that have been really useful for us in terms of internal testing that we're going to be rolling out to our customers soon. And then also any social signals, right? If you think about Trickify, You're going to be seeing a lot of those inside of Bali as well. So for example, following certain people. So let's say that you have influencers, B2B influencers in your space who talk about the topic, let's say marketing, product, or sales. What Bali can do is follow those people, take the people who are engaging with their posts, and again, score them and then route them to a campaign based on that prospect score and what, how you want to message them. So, uh, yeah, a mouthful, but a lot coming.

I love that the Valy engine could be working while, um, you know, asleep. I want to talk a little bit about, you know, we first, uh, connected, I want to say, 2 years ago when you were just getting Valy started, getting some momentum, had raised some money from top investors. I'd like to get a better understanding of how do your investors feel about the pivot that you guys have made over the course of this venture?

Yeah, I wouldn't even say that it was, uh, I wouldn't say that we pivoted. All we've done is really take the aperture of where we want it to go, and instead of having it go from here, it's now down here, right? We're really focused on where we can dial in our energy. It's like, uh, yeah, the, the sun could beat down on the earth and, and it will never boil a pot of water. You put a magnifying glass on it and suddenly it's a very focused energy. I think that's what we've done over the course of, of our gestation of the past 2 years. Uh, started off as a very broad base, how do we go and book appointments in Autopilot? Uh, very quickly realizing that that is a trying challenge. AI wasn't quite there with GPT-3.5, um, figuring out how you can chain these prompts together. It was just very, very, uh, early days. Uh, what we realized again is sort of key insights. Why are people buying Valy? Why are people staying with Valy? Why is our retention sort of top decile in the AI SDR space? Well, it's because we do one thing really, really well, which is LinkedIn, right? Now, obviously under that umbrella term of LinkedIn, it means you need to do research really well. You need to have incredible messaging. You need to understand how to structure those messages in under 300 characters for connection requests and then follow-ups and, uh, all sorts of nuances there. But we do that uniquely well. So yeah, investors have taken, have taken well to that, uh, to that focus, the precision. And obviously once you sort of conquer this first space, you could obviously start to replicate that success and start to expand your roadmap from there. Um, but so your first couple million in ARR, it's really gonna be about focus. Who's the right customer? What's the right first product. There's really no such thing as a product that is too narrow to get to a million, 2 million, 3 million ARR. Uh, it's a big world out there, a lot of customers, and you can build something very specific for 1, 2, 3 people, find 100 more people like them, and then start to expand from there.

It sounds like you're making the job of the BDR or even founder-led growth a lot more efficient, a lot more effective. How do you balance scaling a free product while ensuring sustainable revenue from premium features?

Like, I think what we're doing is very similar to what HubSpot did. Uh, it's funny, like I just put this post out yesterday of like, hey LinkedIn, I'm thinking about doing this thing. And then people were, were, got very, very divisive in the comments. Uh, take HubSpot, right? HubSpot, when HubSpot started, there were a lot of CRMs out there, right? There were paid products, uh, that allowed you to sort of understand where your, where your prospects were in the funnel and, and, and help them follow up and manage the sales cycle better. What HubSpot said was, I'm just gonna give that away for free, right? Let's just do that for free. And what we can do is then layer on additional tooling very quickly, right? In terms of, um, this could be nurturing sequences, marketing sequences, and really HubSpot's whole suite of tools. So what they could say is, look, we have this incredible retention. We've got an incredible NRR story. We're able to cross-sell and upsell with ease because we've built this suite of products around this core value. Essentially did was give away a free tool, just like people use these lead magnet free tools, but they're very lightweight tools. They treat them like toys. Why not build a free tool that in the market today is accruing tens of millions of dollars in revenue? So, you know, it's a pain point that people will pay for, you know, that there's something valuable there and you're saying, hey, I'm going to give it away for free. It's the same thing as the whole concept that Gong pioneered, which was create content that people would pay for. And then give it away for free, right? The next gestation of that, or the next evolution of that, is build a product people would pay for and give it away for free. Use that to build your foundation. Use that to build your brand, your mindshare, which again, these are defensible things. And then go and build an NRR story through cross-sells, upsells with premium. So anyways, that's the monetization path. It's not something novel. I just think people are— it's, uh, haven't been thinking about the HubSpot story in the way that we are. I don't think people are thinking about this idea of what distribution looks like in 2025 in the way that we are.

Do you see LinkedIn cracking down on automation tools and how does Valy mitigate those risks?

So it's an interesting question. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome, right? I think LinkedIn is quite incentivized to, to keep automation tools alive and well. They've had 10 years, 12 years to go and figure out how to get rid of them and they haven't. Uh, my idea is that if they haven't already, why not? And think about the amount of Sales Navigator revenue that, uh, that automation tools bring them, people who use automation tools. And then second, if they were going to crack down on, on sort of, uh, automated messaging, where are they going to start? I think they're going to start with your Zapdos, Expandies, your Walaxies, your DuckSoups, right? Uh, they're not going to start with a, with a tool that is able to send incredibly personal messages that people love receiving. LinkedIn knows that the ground truth that we're coming from today is not everybody sending handwritten letters to one another. The grunge that we're coming from today is people sending really crap messages with spammy bogus offers. And Valy is the antithesis to that, right? Valy is the company that is trying to figure out how can we build an outbound tool to send less outbound, not more, right? All the sales tools that have come before us have been built for the seller. How can we build for the buyer experience? How can we build for a world where we could send 20 messages and book 2 meetings or book 10 meetings? It's a sales tool that is built for the member experience. That's a sales tool that's built for members first, which is LinkedIn's ethos. So anyways, I would look at it two vectors, right? If they have it already, why not? And what incentives do they have to, to keep the automated messaging game alive? And I think that there, uh, anybody can run down that rabbit hole and pull out some answers.

What's the biggest misconception about AI and outbound sales today?

That the loudest people get to define what the future looks like for AI and outbound sales. I think that's a, that's a broad misconception. I think there are a lot of very loud tools out there, um, specifically in the AI SDR space that people have heard of. Uh, again, they're divisive, they bring sort of opinionated actors to the conversation, but they don't get to define— they're not the arbiters of what AI and outbound should be or can be or will be. I think that ultimately everybody is chasing towards this ultimate goal of how do you get the right message to the right person at the right time. And a lot of your loudest actors are not building in a way that is, um, accrédit to that future, accrédit to that vision. And so I think that is a large misconception that AI-STR is going to be defined by the loudest, AI outbound gets to be defined by the loudest. We should really be focusing on, on, on who's being thoughtful about how to build for a future where the right message is the right person at the right time. And you can create this symbiotic relationship between buyers and sellers. You can create harmony between these two people. And ultimately, once and for all, end the whole sales spam bullshit that we've been seeing for, uh, yeah, 15, 20 years.

Where, where do you see the future of outbound in 3 to 5 years?

Absolutely signal-based. We're putting all of our chips on signals. It's never been easier to scrape data. It's never been easier to watch for a, a signal or even to find a signal, right? I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day and he was saying, dude, I wish that there was a tool that could look at my close one customers for the past year and go look at what those people were doing. 3 to 6 months prior to purchasing my product and go find like the random niche signal where there may be some statistical significance between, uh, this customer, this customer, this customer, but what precipitated prior to them purchasing, uh, purchasing, uh, my software. And so, and that's fully doable, right? The next 3 to 5 years, you can absolutely do that. Signals won't be static like they are today. Like, hey, scrape this post or who visited my website. It's going to be hyper malleable. Based on each individual company. Each company will have their own signals that tell you that somebody's ready to buy, and companies like Bali will be able to identify what those signals are, identify the patterns between their close one customers, and go hunt for those moving forward. Um, so that's number one. It's absolutely going to be a signal-based, uh, sort of future. It's similar to how AI went through its V1 in, I don't know, like 2012, and then went through like a real sort of revolution in 2021, 2022, 2023. I think signal and intent-based selling did the same thing. You first saw like the emergence of signal and intent-based selling in 2016 to 2018 with Sixth Sense. I think now it's really gonna take its full form, similar to like what ChatGPT did for AI. I think that's gonna happen with signals as well. So anyways, that's what I think the next 3 to 5 years looks like. It's hyper-customized signals based on each company's sort of unique fingerprint and unique customer base, and companies like Valy will find them and be able to get messages out to them at the perfect time.

You built and scaled teams before. What's the biggest operational challenge in outbound that most founders underestimate?

Managing the lead flow is very, very difficult as you start to scale. Knowing when to follow up with people, once you send a calendar link, do they actually book? If you quote times, like you gotta set a reminder to make sure that you're following up, or you do that inside of Valy, but I would say managing sort of the conversation after you get the reply. A lot of people are focused on getting the replies, but once you actually get that dialed in, there is a whole other world of headaches that you need to figure out. And there's just generally in company building, getting everybody rowing in the same direction. It's obviously the, it's very difficult at 5 people. It's, I'm expecting it will be very difficult at 500, but it's definitely difficult right now where we are at like 15, 20. Context is everything. It's very difficult to. To get everybody operating with the same context and ultimately sort of understanding the, uh, the, uh, to self-prioritize and, and again, grow in the same direction. Yeah.

If you could go back and change one decision in your entrepreneurial journey, what would it be?

Well, that's a good question. I would not have transitioned systems. With Valyant, we've gone through 3 versions, a V1, a V2, and a V3. All of those have represented sort of these clean slates, right? Uh, and it's become sort of known to me now as something called the second system problem. So we built a V1, right? This was our MVP, bootstrap duct tape. By no means something that's scalable. What we then did was transition to a V2, which was clean codebase, brand new, trying to rebuild everything we did in V1, but using best practices, using better technologies, etc. Um, it was a complete shitshow. Absolutely the wrong, took the wrong course. It caused an unbelievable amount of bugs, an unbelievable amount of churn. People couldn't use the product. It was just, it was horrific. And then funny enough, I made the same mistake when we went from V2 to V3. Yeah, those are just, that's going to be the biggest decision I would never make again is like, once you, once you started with the V1, just keep building on it. Um, it will always, even if it seems like it may be buggy, it's always going to be better than trying to build a second system. Um, and scaling from there.

Any, any insights you can share about raising $3.2 million from top investors? To aspiring entrepreneurs looking to make their way?

Yeah, for sure. Two things. First thing is just like, stop spending so much time like focusing on the fundraising strategy and creating a pretty deck and doing this and this and building FOMO. Just like build a fucking good company. That's it. Like just build a good company. The money follows. Um, go find a way to get some early revenue. Go find a way to talk to customers. Go find a way to sign some LOIs. That's all. It's like, I, if I look back at our fund, our fundraising journey, like I tried all these different strategies. Fucking Loom videos and this cold email template and, uh, banging it, like going and visiting VCs in person without a meeting and like all this other stuff. And I'm sure some of it helped in the margins, right? I got more confident as I went through all these exercises. Um, but ultimately, like, all of our money came from like meeting 131, 136. And obviously that coalesced really well when revenue was highest, right? Because we had this much more time to build. Um, and I could say in my deck, right, it's a very basic deck. I didn't spend much time on it. They could just see April 2023 revenue was X, and then by July it was Y. And like, that's ultimately when we closed our funding rounds. Like, number one is just build a good company. Number two is investors obviously want to have a very clear narrative around how you're gonna win today, but also how you're gonna be a $100 billion company. You need to figure out how to straddle that line very well. Focus on the $100 billion, people will think that you're pie in the sky. You don't understand how to operationalize your vision today. You focus on what can be today and sort of that first lily pad that you want to win. And people will say, ah, it doesn't think big enough, vision's too small, market's too small. I'm not convinced. You need to bounce and straddle the line between what is and what can be, what is and what can be, what is and what can be. And then always remember, people make, uh, emotional decisions and like to think that they're logical. So as you're weaving your story together, focus on evoking these massive, these large emotions of how this is going to be a billion-dollar company in your investor's mind. Then tie it back to some kernel of truth that can be an early proof point about how that vision can be a reality. Focus on whatever proof points you have today, trying to tie them to some larger data point in the future. Hey, Valery has sent these, um, 50 messages so far for this customer. We've already figured out that these words and phrases work really well. Imagine compounding that across a billion messages, across hundreds of thousands of customers to really dial in what works for each individual fingerprint of company. What I just did there was took the fact that Valy sent 50 messages out to our customer, which was nothing, which is a story that I use. So imagine extrapolating this across a billion, right? Valy went from a 10% acceptance rate to a 20% acceptance rate. Imagine what this looks like compounded over time. What does that flywheel mean for the future of sales if we can do this correctly? And then final piece of advice is a lot of times you need to answer questions that really don't matter, answer them how like the investor wants you to answer them. A lot of them were like, Yes, they kind of matter, but there are a lot that just don't. Um, and there was a really good, uh, I can't remember this company name now. Um, it wasn't Replit. It was, I'll find the name. It was some in-app analytics tool that went through YC. It was Mixpanel and Amplitude. I think Mixpanel was the, was the big one at the time. And then Amplitude came out and like investors just wanted to know how they were different. And really all Amplitude did, they were just cheaper. That was it. But you can't go tell an investor like our distribution strategy and our differentiators that we're cheaper, you're going to get steamrolled. So they like made up a bunch of bullshit about how they had this cooler database architecture and whatever, whatever, whatever. They had conviction in the fact that being cheaper was actually a really unique insight because they could do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. They could give away a bunch of the tool for free and then they could grab, uh, they could get defensibility and stickiness and as those companies grew, they would compound revenue over time, whatever. They knew that that was great. Investors wouldn't believe it because investors are surface level. They don't have the context. They're often just trying to figure out how does this fit this very structured business model that I have in my mind about what makes a sound investment. And so the founders of Amplitude, like, gave some bullshit rigmarole reason about how their tech was, like, their database architecture was 99% more effective and X, Y, and Z. Ultimately, they got the funding and, like, their first initial thesis proved to be right, which is that being cheaper was actually a massive advantage. Um, so sometimes you just got to play the game. and it doesn't need to always pan out, but be a sound bet, right? Make it seem like you're a sound bet and say things that logically could be true. But obviously when it comes to the business, the facts, the fundamentals about what you've done so far, be 100% truthful.

That's a wrap on an insane conversation with Zayd Ali. If you took one thing away from this episode, it should be this: outbound sales is being reinvented and Valley is leading the charge with AI. Signals, and a freemium model that could reshape the entire space. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who's tired of spammy LinkedIn automation. For more insights on GTM strategies, follow us on YouTube at GTM Vault and check out our GTM Vault newsletter on Substack. If you're ready to supercharge your outbound, go check out Valley at joinvalley. Until next time, keep selling, keep scaling, and remember, the best GTM strategies don't just follow the rules, they rewrite them. See you in the next episode. Zayd, thanks so much for coming.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Tech Founders and VCs: Careers, Lessons, GTM.