Ask HN: What are your biggest frustrations with cold outreach tools?

Me and my team are currently looking at developing a tool for personalized cold outreach using LLMs. We're trying to understand the pain points with current tools and workflows. What specific frustrations do you encounter with the current tools you use for sending cold emails?

We’re very keen to hear from anyone who frequently engages in cold emailing and feels there might be a better way. Thanks in advance for your insights!

As a recipient of garbage cold outreach emails, there is a lot that can be improved. I get tons of silly founder-spam, most of which tries to appeal to me based on one or two facts about me/my company. This leads to off-base pitches (I used to be a lawyer and am now an entrepreneur; some emails assume I work in legal tech, which I don't). Other emails appear to have harvested my email from HN, and make references to YC.

Because I hate emails like this so much, I send very few cold emails, even though I work in the B2B licensing space. I find relevant people on LinkedIn and can typically find a warm introduction. I'd prefer to miss out on some opportunities rather than contribute to the spam avalanche that's overloading people's inboxes.

I guess my hope is that tools like yours would do a better job identifying truly relevant prospects instead of taking a spray-and-pray approach. I would consider using a tool that searched for prospects, showed me a personalized email, and then showed me why each part of the email is relevant. I would want to manually review every single email that gets sent out in my name.

My keyboard and fingers