Two years ago, we tried buying a lead list. Three thousand “B2B SaaS founders, Series A, EMEA”. It cost us [€XXX] and three days of cleanup. When we finally started outreach, our reply rate was under 2%.
Most of those companies didn’t need us. They already had agencies. They’d just shipped a brand. They were three weeks into a leadership transition. The list told us who they are but not what’s happening to them right now.
That gap is what kills outbound. And it’s why we built First Insider.
Cold lists go stale the moment they’re sold
A list is a snapshot. The market moves every day. By the time you load 3,000 rows into your sequencer:
- A chunk of them have raised since the list was scraped
- A chunk have already hired the role you’d have suggested
- A chunk have shifted strategy in ways that make them un-target-able for your service
- A chunk are in product transitions where outbound just bounces off
You’re not selling to the company on row 1,452. You’re selling to who they were eight weeks ago. That’s why “personalization at scale” doesn’t fix cold outbound — the target is wrong, not the copy.
Triggers tell you when. The when beats the who.
A trigger is anything that signals a buying window just opened:
- They raised funding
- They started hiring for the function you serve
- They expanded into a new market
- They got acquired or just spun out
- They launched a major product
- An executive just changed
Triggers don’t tell you who to sell to. They tell you when. In B2B that distinction matters more than the copy of your email. A company with the perfect ICP won’t reply if you catch them mid-cycle. A company two notches off ICP will reply if you catch them three days after their seed round closed.
So we built a tool that watches for triggers in real time, matches them against the kind of customer we want to talk to, and surfaces only the ones where both conditions land in the same week.
That tool became First Insider.
How it works — in 3 minutes
The fastest way to understand the core flow is to watch our co-founder Vlad walk through it:
In short: you tell First Insider who you sell to (the ICP wizard takes ~3 minutes — or AI can suggest it from a paragraph about your business), and it builds you a queue of companies where a trigger just landed and the ICP matches. Every morning the queue refreshes. You work the top, contact who’s hot, snooze who isn’t, repeat.
What’s inside
Under the hood it’s three loops running in parallel:
Ingestion. We pull from a broad set of sources — funding databases, startup news, Show HN, Product Hunt, YC announcements, job board feeds, regional press. The raw stream is noisy, so every item runs through an LLM extraction pass that pulls structured data: company name, stage, funding amount, geography, hiring signal, founder profile.
Matching. Each company is scored against your ICP across multiple axes: business model, funding stage and amount range, team size (8 gradations from solo founder to global enterprise), geography (10 regions including DACH, CEE, MENA, APAC, LATAM), vertical, founder background, and 45+ buying-signal triggers grouped into 7 categories (Hiring, Funding events, Lifecycle, Leadership, Product, Digital, Negative).
Surfacing. Each company gets a 0–10 fit score. The Hot tab shows top fits with active triggers. The Watchlist also surfaces “great on paper, no recent trigger” — companies that match your ICP fundamentals so well they’re worth a slow-burn even without a fresh signal. The Database view holds the full archive — filter by industry, size, market or stage, search anything by name.
Who it’s for
First Insider didn’t start as a product. It started as a tool we needed because GRWTHLR’s own outbound was burning hours on the wrong companies. After [X months] of refinement, the difference was sharp: our reply rate went from [under 2%] to [double digits], with the same effort. The leverage came from filtering when, not from better copy.
That same dynamic shows up consistently for the kind of teams we serve:
- Founders running their own outbound between product calls
- Two-person sales teams without the budget for an SDR
- Agencies and consultancies where every outreach needs to feel timely, not blasted
- Indie SaaS founders whose audience is small enough that hitting the right 20 prospects matters more than spraying 2,000
If you’re a 200-person sales org with an SDR team running pure volume, this isn’t for you. If you run outbound where every contact attempt actually costs something — attention, credibility, founder-time — this is exactly what we built it for.
Try it
First Insider is in private beta. The waitlist is open at firstinsider.growthler.io — we onboard new teams in small batches each week to keep the matching quality tight while we tune scoring against real ICPs.
If you’d rather start with the 3-minute intro video above, do that first. The wizard inside the app picks up exactly where Vlad leaves off.