Why I built MyPip

The first time I built an outreach system that actually worked, it nearly broke me.

This was at Plastic Bank, and later for a handful of private clients I'm not allowed to name. LinkedIn, mostly. Automated engagement, the kind that looks clever in a demo. I pointed it at a few thousand people and waited for the usual two or three percent to trickle back.

Nearly half of them replied.

It worked. That was the problem.

I should have been thrilled. For about a week I was.

Then the replies kept coming, and I understood I'd built myself a problem I had no way to handle. Hundreds of interested people and a day that still only had so many hours in it. I couldn't read them all properly. I couldn't research them. I couldn't tell who actually mattered from who was just being polite. So I did what anyone does. I worked the ones near the top of the pile and let the rest go cold. The meetings I did take, I walked into blind, because I'd never had time to learn a thing about the person across from me. Forty replies became four real conversations became a quiet feeling that I was wasting something valuable.

The trap nobody admits to

Nobody admits why mass outreach feels manageable. It only feels that way because you assume it won't work. Two percent reply, you can handle two percent. The whole model is secretly built around its own failure. The day it succeeds, you drown.

Then the AI SDRs showed up and made it worse. I understand the appeal. You can automate the first message, fine. Nobody reads the first message that closely anyway. But you can't automate the relationship. When you finally get on the call, no machine can hand you the context. You don't know this person. You haven't built anything with them. You're starting from nothing in the exact moment that was meant to be the payoff. I watched good people quietly wreck their reputations this way, one "Hi {first_name}" at a time.

What the good ones actually did

Around then I was running a lot of interviews. Sales teams, customers, anyone who'd talk to me about how they actually found people worth knowing. The good ones all told me a version of the same thing. They didn't do volume. They did five, maybe six a day, properly researched. They read the person first. They found the real reason to reach out. And they converted at rates the spray-and-pray crowd would kill for.

Quality wasn't the soft option. It was the only one that worked.

The five who are actually ready

I kept turning that over until it settled into something I now believe more than almost anything else about selling. At any given moment, most of the people who could ever buy from you are not ready to. Wrong time, wrong budget, wrong week. Call it ninety-five in a hundred. The other five are ready right now. They have the problem, they feel it, they're already looking. Spend your time on the ninety-five and you burn your hours and your good name on people who were never going to move. Find the five and talk to them like a human, and your numbers hold or climb while you waste nothing.

Find the five. Ignore the ninety-five. That's the whole game.

Almost everything in this industry is built to make you do the opposite. The expensive platforms, the credit systems, the agencies selling you eighty names a month. They all push volume, because volume is the thing they're selling. The whole machine points you at the ninety-five, and it points you there on purpose.

The edge I already had

I built MyPip because I already knew how to win the other way, and I was tired of that being something only people like me could do. I had the systems. I had the years of working out who's worth a message and what to say to them. A founder who shipped something last month has none of that. They have a product, a nagging sense they should be "doing outreach," and a Google Doc full of names they'll never open again.

So MyPip does the part I'm good at, quietly, in the background. It finds your five. It works out why they matter and what you should say to them. Every morning it hands you a short list and then gets out of your way. You send the messages yourself, because that part was always meant to be yours. You do the reps. It does the rest.

It's for the founder who built the thing and then hit the wall nobody warned them about. The one who can code or design or teach but locks up at the word selling. The one with five minutes between meetings and no idea where to spend them. If that's you, you don't need another tool to learn. You need someone to tell you who to talk to today.

I'm still building it. It's better than it was last month and worse than it'll be next month. I don't know yet how far the five-minute version of this goes, or the point where it stops being enough. But I know exactly who it's for, because for years I was solving their problem for everyone except them.

Now I'm not.

More soon.

Toby


By Toby Stapleton, founder of MyPip.

Toby builds MyPip from Vancouver and writes about going zero to one in public.