LinkedIn Is Eating the Cold Email Playbook, and Extrovert Is Betting Everything on It

The Macro: Cold Outreach Is Broken and Everyone Knows It

LinkedIn in 2025 has become, somewhat against its will, the last channel where a salesperson can reach a stranger without getting filtered into oblivion. Email open rates have cratered under a decade of automation abuse. Cold calling is a numbers game that requires numbers most small teams don’t have. LinkedIn, creaky and corporate and deeply weird as a social network, still works, at least for now, because it still feels personal enough that people actually look.

The space around LinkedIn sales tools has gotten crowded accordingly.

Taplio owns the personal brand and content scheduling lane. Trigify positions itself around high-intent lead identification. Opencord AI sits somewhere in the engagement-automation vicinity. The competitive surface is real, which makes sense given the demand signal. If you’re a founder, consultant, or sales rep whose livelihood depends on pipeline, LinkedIn is probably the channel you’re most actively rethinking right now.

The problem most of these tools work around is the same one Extrovert works on directly: building actual familiarity before the pitch. The cold DM that opens with “I noticed you posted about X” is so transparently templated at this point that it reads as hostile. What actually works is commenting thoughtfully on someone’s posts, staying visible in their feed over weeks, existing in their peripheral awareness before you ever ask for anything. That work is incredibly time-intensive to do manually. It also gets triaged out of the day the moment a real fire appears.

That tension is exactly where Extrovert is planting its flag.

The Micro: The Comment Is the Product

Extrovert’s core mechanic is not complicated, which is either a strength or a limitation depending on what you need. You tell it who to track. Prospects, existing customers, relevant topic threads on LinkedIn. It monitors their activity, and when those people post, the AI drafts suggested comments and DMs based on what the company calls your “playbook,” a set of parameters defining your tone, goals, and relationship context. You review the suggestions. You send what you like. The pitch is fifteen minutes a day.

The product website claims over 1,000 users. It got solid traction on launch day on Product Hunt, which suggests real interest beyond just founder-network votes.

What stands out from the competitive research is that Extrovert apparently started as a commenting-only tool and has since expanded into integrated DM outreach. One of the founders described it on LinkedIn as “the biggest leap forward since we launched.” That evolution matters. A tool that only helps you comment on posts is a niche utility. A tool that connects commenting behavior to a broader outreach sequence is trying to be something closer to a lightweight CRM for relationship-based sales.

The AI suggestion layer is the part that’s hardest to evaluate from the outside.

AI-generated LinkedIn comments have a reputation, and it’s not a good one. The entire value proposition collapses if the suggestions read like they were written by someone who has never had a conversation. The “you review and send” framing is doing meaningful work here, positioning the AI as a drafting assistant rather than an autopilot. Whether the drafts are actually good enough to be worth reviewing, rather than just rewriting from scratch, is something you’d only know after using it.

The Verdict

Extrovert is solving a real problem in a way that isn’t embarrassing. In the LinkedIn automation space, that clears a higher bar than it sounds like. The instinct to make relationship-building more systematic without making it robotic is correct. The execution question is whether the AI suggestions are actually useful or whether they become one more thing to edit before deleting and typing something real.

At thirty days, I’d want to know what the comment acceptance rate looks like. What percentage of AI suggestions do users actually send versus abandon? That number tells you almost everything about whether the core product is working. At sixty days, the DM outreach integration needs to prove it’s more than a bolted-on feature. At ninety, retention is the question: does this become a daily habit, or does it get quietly uninstalled the way most LinkedIn productivity tools do?

The 1,000-user claim is encouraging context, not validation.

What Extrovert hasn’t proven yet, and can’t prove on launch day, is that the AI is good enough to make the fifteen-minutes-a-day promise feel honest rather than optimistic. That’s the bet. I think this probably works well for founders and consultants running relationship-heavy pipelines with a manageable list of target accounts. I’m less convinced it holds up for high-volume sales reps who need throughput more than nuance. The core idea is reasonable. I’m just not ready to call the execution a sure thing.