PipeBagger

Before building an audience, everyone has someone on their mind.

An inspiration. A competitor. Someone you came across and thought: "I want to get there."

Sometimes it's one person. Sometimes it's a whole invisible crowd you carry around.

And that voice in your head doesn't stop. It keeps comparing, measuring, tracking.

That comparison is somehow one of the biggest reasons people lose before they've really started.

Because when you sit down to write, you're thinking more about the person your audience might compare you with, than the actual person you're writing for.

So you end up becoming a very dedicated stalker. Just not of the right people.

The ones you should be studying are your audience's world, the voices they already trust, the conversations they're already having, the language they think in.

When your subconscious is fed that, it shows up in your writing. Your content starts speaking to them, not past them. And that connection, that's what builds something real over time.

Those competitors you've been mentally following? Remove them from that space for the next six months. Not forever. Just long enough to redirect that attention toward the people who actually matter... your audience.

The irony is, when you stop watching those people, and start genuinely understanding yours, you'll reach a point where those same people start paying attention to you.

And by then, it won't matter.

It shouldn't have mattered this much from the beginning. But you're human. We all do this.

Now you know. That's the part that counts.

Think about the mental space this frees up. Think about what you'll create when that noise is gone.

Your founder branding has a long way to go. Start it looking in the right direction.

Nobody tells you that the most dangerous moment in your business is when things are almost working.

Pipeline is inconsistent… but not dead.
Referrals come in… but not on schedule.
Revenue grows… but not predictably.

So you keep doing what got you here.

Another hire.
Another outbound sequence.
Another event.

A few more blog posts. A few more SEO hacks.
Another ad campaign or two.

Because stopping feels like losing momentum.

But, somewhere the reality on the other side is overlooked:

Every month you delay building buyer certainty is a month your competitor's name compounds in your buyer's feed.

While you're closing the deals in front of you, which is exactly what you should be doing, someone else is being built into the answer to a question your next buyer hasn't asked out loud yet.

By the time that buyer surfaces, they already have a preference.

It wasn't formed by a pitch.
It was formed by 90 days of low-attention, high-frequency exposure to a founder who showed up consistently with thinking they respected.

You didn't lose that buyer in the sales process.
You lost them in the quarter before the sales process started.

The founders who break through $3M don't find better leads.

They build the system that makes every lead arrive pre-sold.

That system takes 90 days to build.

And it starts before you feel ready.

DM me if you're tired of pipeline that resets every quarter.

Your product probably has product-market fit.

But, that's probably not your problem.

Superhuman had 22% PMF score, below the 40% threshold, and didn't rebuild the product. They resegmented. Found the buyers who were already closest to certainty. Built everything around them.

PMF score went from 22% to 58% in three quarters.

The lesson everyone takes from Superhuman is that changing your market is faster than changing your product.

While, the hidden lesson nobody talks about is the reason that segment had higher PMF wasn't the product.

It was certainty.

Those users had seen enough evidence, heard enough from credible voices, and felt enough alignment with the brand's narrative that choosing Superhuman felt obvious, even inevitable.

You don't scale revenue by improving your product alone, right?

You scale it by identifying the buyers who are closest to certainty about you, and then systematically building that certainty in every channel they trust, before they start a buying process.

And, that's not a product problem.
I call it 'The signal architecture problem'.

B2B buyers aren't afraid of spending money.

They're afraid of being wrong.

Wrong about the problem.
Wrong about the solution.
Wrong about the partner.
Wrong about the timing.

Every stage of their buying decision carries a specific risk,

and sellers keep responding to that risk with the wrong move.

They drop the price.
The buyer was never negotiating on price.

They were signalling uncertainty.
And a discount doesn't remove uncertainty.
It deepens it.
"Why are they dropping so fast? What does that tell me about the value?"

Think about this...

A buyer who won't book a call isn't protecting 30 minutes.

They're protecting themselves from feeling obligated,
from being pulled into a motion they didn't choose to start.

Throwing a Calendly link at someone who didn't ask for it doesn't move the needle because,
it creates a different kind of risk of losing control of their own buying process.

Make the buyer ask for the meeting instead.

That shift alone changes everything, because now they're moving on their terms.

This is what certainty-building actually means in B2B.

Not persuasion. Not pressure. Not a better pitch.

Removing the specific risk a buyer feels at each stage:

1️⃣ . Problem certainty -> do I actually have this problem?

2️⃣ . Solution certainty -> is this the right approach?

3️⃣ . Partner certainty -> is this the right team?

4️⃣ . Decision certainty -> is now the right time?

Each stage stalls for a different reason.

Each reason is a risk, not a price objection.

Sellers who figure this out stop discounting and start building conviction.

That's when pipeline stops being a pseudo numbers game.

A founder said something to me last quarter that I haven't stopped thinking about.

"Every time I try to write something, I read it back and it sounds like everyone else."

He runs a DevOps infrastructure company. $2.3M revenue. A product that genuinely does something his competitors don't.

In a room, he's exactly who you'd want across the table.

Direct. Specific. No patience for noise.

On LinkedIn, he sounded like a press release.

And, I've been asked about this gap many times now.

Between who a founder is in a room,

and who they become on a feed.

Everyone has a solution for it.
👉 Post more consistently.
👉 Write better hooks.
👉 Study the algorithm.
👉 Batch your content.

These are answers to a question that serves less purpose for a founder.

It is like offer a 'creator' medicine to a 'founder' problem.

The actual question that the one almost nobody thinks to ask is this:
"What do you actually believe about the thing you've built?"

Not the features.
Not the roadmap.
Not the problem it solves.

The belief underneath all of it.
The reason it exists.
The reason it has to exist this way, and not some other way.

When a founder can answer that question, really answer it, not recite a positioning statement, then, the clarity boundaries start cracking.

Content stops being a performance.
It becomes a position.

A position doesn't chase attention.
It attracts the specific kind of attention that compounds.

The buyer who reads three posts over four months and thinks: this person sees what I see. And feels it.

The peer who mentions your name in a conversation you weren't part of.

The investor who reaches out and says: "I've been following your thinking."

None of that happens because of frequency.

None of it happens because of hooks.

It happens because someone finally asked the right question, and the founder had a real answer.

The biggest magic metric worth tracking in founder branding isn't likes.

It isn't impressions.

It's whether your name travels without you.

6 months from now.

In a room you weren't invited to.

In a conversation you'll never see.

Does someone say your name?

That's it.
That's the whole thing.
That's what I call Founder Branding.

The (real) founder led growth demystified. Follow PipeBagger

Your buyer shortlisted your competitor before your SDR sent the first email.

Not after a demo.
Not after a proposal.
Before any of that.

Lets look at the timeline nobody in sales looks at:

Day 1: Buyer realizes they have a problem worth solving.
Day 3: They open LinkedIn. Start searching.
Day 12: They're following 3 founders in your space.
Day 28: One of them posts something that describes the problem exactly.

Day 31: They visit that founder's profile. Stay for 4 minutes.
Day 44: They forward one of his posts to their VP.
Day 67: Budget gets approved.
Day 68: They reach out to that founder first.

Where were you on day 3, when they opened their LinkedIn to search?

You weren't missing. You were just invisible.

Your product was probably better.

Your pricing was probably sharper.

Your team was probably stronger.

But honestly, none of it mattered.

Because the shortlist was built in the 67 days before you knew there was a shortlist.

B2B buying doesn't start with a demo request.

It starts with a Tuesday afternoon scroll by someone who hasn't told anyone they're evaluating yet.

And the founder who was in that feed… consistently,
with thinking that confirmed
what the buyer was privately suspecting…
became the default choice
before a single sales conversation happened.

This is not a marketing problem.

Is it?

It is an absolute timing problem.

And in 2026 the timing is fixed only by the presence, not by the outreach or ads.

Want to demystify B2B buying?

Follow PipeBagger

“4-Pillars of Your Cold Email Pipeline”

Let me start with why we prioritized building Cold Pipeline.

Firstly, Cold LinkedIn outreach comes with a limitation of 100 invites a week per profile,

Which means 5000 invites per profile per year,

With 20% acceptance rate, that is 1000 prospects.

On average, we manage 3 profiles per client and that gives us 250 prospects a month

And to deliver more leads to our clients we wanted to crack cold emailing

With a lot of buzz around, we tried various email automation tools.

And it took some time of failures and struggles to identify the right tools,

But when this was happening, we pushed our limits and gained better grip with crafting the right messages.

And gradually the results started showing up.

Then we solved a big gap of Email Deliverability (check yesterday’s post for details about how we fought this monster),

And finally after weeks of grinding and failure and learning we realised that cold emailing is a game of -
📌 Solving Email Deliverability Issue
📌 Cracking the right Craft
📌 Getting the Best tool
📌 Quality Data (procurement + verification)

There should be no compromise on any of these.

We also connected with a lot of cold email folks (freelancers and small agencies),

But we still found some gaps in terms of what we expected,

And that is why we took all the 4 pillars of cold emailing seriously,

So when you plan a cold emailing campaign, get the right data and tool and set it up,

And verify emails without fail (preferably from two different tools),

Then ensure the right deliverability process,

And then keep working on your craft,

Be clear about your KPI (for us they are ‘open’ and ‘reply’ rates),

And until and unless you reach consistency levels,

Do not stop working on your 'craft' and 'deliverability'.

A timeline of 5-8 weeks is what it takes to succeed in cold emailing,

And remember, there is no ‘getting rich quick’ thing with cold emailing,

Because this could be your other gold mine (just like it is for PipeBagger and our SaaS partners)

So make sure there is a qualitative approach to everything, especially these 4 pillars,

Because a strong pillar system is what your cold emailing success needs.

Cold emailing did not only give us some high-ticket clients,

Cracking this also helped us build high-quality pipeline for our B2B tech partners,

So, take it on priority to make cold emailing your success.

DM me if you need any quick help.

Is this useful?

Follow Gaurav Patel for 28 more such posts about what helped us grow 3X in 2022,

And 2.5X in 2023.

Secret no. 2 of 'How we grew 7.5x': Email Deliverability

'Email Deliverability' came out as a highly underrated

and much overlooked (most of our clients weren't aware either),

part of cold emailing.

This is one of the crucial challenges where Shiva Dudigama really brought in some of his hustle to assure us of 90% deliverability.

Within 2 months, we started seeing serious leads coming in.

💥 More email open rates.

💥 More replies.

💥 More meetings booked.

I always measured cold emailing with 'email replies' as the ONLY KPI.

And now deliverability has become the biggest reason why the open rate for me is a serious KPI.

We tried various tools and Instantly.ai was our early winner,

followed by Reply.io becoming our recent favorite.

However, choosing an email tool is not more important than warming your emails for high deliverability,

which is why this is a huge shout-out to those who spend a lot of time in the automation part of cold emailing.

Chose the simplest to use cold emailing tool (eg: instantly),

and focus more on deliverability.

Because it is more important that your emails get delivered.

And also ensure you get quality source for list building + quality email verification tool.

If you ensure all three, you are only right craft away.

Are you liking this idea of sharing every bit that helped us scale 7.5X in less than 2 years?

B2B Sales Lesson (hard-way): '01 / 31'

"Fear the ones who practice one thing 10,000 times"

In early 2022, we got this serious idea - to master ONE thing at a time.

And with the flood of Linkedin and Social media marketers (our competition),

we decided to stand out with 'Outbound DMs',

10,000 Meetings seemed like a distant dream.

But, we said - let's write 10,000 Outbound Messages (without copy-paste),

and the journey was very hard-hitting,

with less than 200 prospects accepting invites per profile, you can send only 2000 DMs a year, per profile.

This is how more team members at PipeBagger jumped in,

to build their personal brands and practice Cold Outreach on Linkedin.

With an average of 2-3 meetings a week per profile, we scored 400+ quality meetings FOR FREE,

WITHOUT hiring a sales rep.

👉 Outcome-1: A super-validated funnel to scale our B2B business.

👉 Outcome-2: On-boarded our first TWO High-ticket Clients, through this.

👉 Outcome-3: Closed our first client with 100% DM-only communication.

👉 Outcome-4: HUGE differentiation, compared to every other agency.

👉 Outcome-5: Set a strong culture of 'Social Selling', which changed us gradually.

Guess what? Our first strategy was to write 10,000 LinkedIn posts, and just before executing it,

we shifted to OUTBOUND DMs, because if we nail it, we will have a HUGE differentiation,

and a bigger problem solved for our customers.

💣 Super Fact: This success became a reason for us to create our Growth Benchmark - 💥 'Total Meetings Booked' 💥

Since 2022, we measure our Agency Growth by tracking 'Total Meetings Booked'.

In 2022, we booked 1400 meetings.

In 2023, we are already close to 5000 B2B meetings.

What are you deciding to practice 10,000 times in 2024?

--------------Watch-out-----------------

In December 2023, I'm sharing all the secrets that helped us grow 3X in 2022, and about 2.5X in 2023.

30 more super transforming lessons, coming later this month.

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Hit that ' 🔔 ' to get notified.

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