Half Baked Newsletter August 14th-2.jpg

The Idea

In 2021, Nikola Velkovski was a software engineering student in Skopje, North Macedonia, trying to get anyone at all to download an app he had built. He posted about it in the subreddits where his users lived. Reddit deleted every comment and banned the account under its no self promotion rule.

So he wrote a script instead. It scraped the members of those subreddits, filtered them by keyword, and fired a personalised direct message at each one. The result was more than 2,000 Google Play downloads in under a fortnight.

That script became Howitzer, the world's first Reddit outreach tool. Two years later, Reddit's API crackdown was strangling it, and the team went digging through their own product for anything worth saving. Buried inside was a small LinkedIn outreach feature, built as an afterthought, sitting in a category that already had 160 tools fighting over it. Velkovski hated the idea.

This was the beginning of HeyReach.

The Execution

The lesson?

Velkovski did not find a new problem. He found an old one, in a category with 160 tools already in it, and rebuilt the single function nobody had bothered to do properly: running one outreach sequence across multiple senders. He did not even name it. The team called it multi account outreach and customers renamed it for them. The market he thought was hopelessly crowded turned out to be the market that was already paying. You do not need a category nobody has heard of. You need a job nobody has done properly.