Inbound is the new outbound
AI turned outbound into a robot battleground. Companies are spamming more every day. I barely read my own email anymore -- Claude reads it for me. It unsubscribes me from the junk, summarizes updates and replies to anything important on my behalf. Still: five new cold emails land every day, and within a week anything that matters is buried in junk.
If I'm doing this, so is your prospect. Sales.co, a cold email agency, publishes its numbers every month: 1.89% of contacts replied in May 2025, 0.56% in August 2026.
Inbound used to take faith
When someone asked me what it takes to build a successful inbound, my answer used to be: faith. At YouTeam (YC W18) -- my previous company, acquired by Toptal -- we were in a cutthroat industry where everyone was spamming everyone even before AI, so we bet on inbound from the very beginning. We had a whole team doing nothing but content and link building, and it still took years before we saw meaningful traffic.
Most startups put inbound off until after product-market fit (a fancy word for retention), because it takes a team, and before PMF you can't spare one. So the old playbook was: network, then outbound, and inbound last.
Now you can run it yourself
Now you can automate the whole play: link building, directory listings, content. In every previous company I had to hire a team for it; now you can run it yourself with Claude. Here's how we did the directory part: software directories.
Your industry is probably less crowded than ours was, but traffic still takes time to build up -- so why not start on day one?
The new playbook
Inbound in parallel with your network sales. Your first customers come from your network. While you close them and look for product-market fit, inbound compounds, and by the time you've exhausted your network, it's already working.
That's what we do at Alphie. Email me at yura@meetalphie.com and I'll send you the inbound playbook file we use ourselves.
Sources
- Sales.co, cold email reply rates by month: https://sales.co/research/cold-email-reply-rates-by-year
Yura Riphyak
Yura is building the future of intelligent GTM at Alphie. Previously, he co-founded YouTeam (YC W18, acquired by Toptal) and Hubbub.fm.
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