Earn the DM.

Max Kolysh, a YC Visiting Partner, says to answer one question before you pick any channel: “Where does your target customer actually spend their time?” ¹ For developers, AI builders, startup founders, investors and creators, the answer is often X: they think out loud in public. Many YC companies that grew partly on X are developer and AI tools. Supabase’s CEO says simply, “we’re on Reddit, we’re on Twitter.” ⁹ Resend’s announcement post passed a million views, by its own count. ¹⁰ Replit’s advice, passed on by YC, was to be everywhere, Twitter included. ¹¹

It isn’t only developer tools. A podcast episode with the CEO of doola (YC S20), which helps people start companies, is billed as the story of how a cold Twitter DM led to its first paying customer. ¹² But think of Kolysh’s examples of buyers who don’t sit at a laptop all day, like property managers and truck dispatchers. ¹ They’re rarely the ones posting about their work, and I wouldn’t look for them on X.

• Your own account, with your face. People reply to people, and an Indie Hackers interview with Dagobert Renouf, who built a large founder following on X, makes the point that people prefer a face to a logo. ¹³ Use a real photo: X bans AI-generated profile photos used to mislead. ⁷
• A plain bio. What you’re building, for whom, and one line of credibility. No slogans, no “DM for a demo.”
• A pinned post that shows the work. Your best short demo, or the story of why you’re building it.
• Recent posts with real numbers. The people you message will scroll before they answer.
• Messages open to everyone. Set your messages to accept requests from anyone, so prospects can reach you. ¹⁴

Two bios for Pennyline, a made-up startup that shows founders which customers drive their AI bill. I’ll use it for every example on this page.

Premium is optional, and it isn’t a cheat code. For $8 a month in the US (as of October 2026), it raises your cold message requests from 7 a day to 35, lets you reply where the author allows only verified (checkmarked) accounts, lets you message people who accept requests only from verified accounts, and gives your replies what X calls “a slight preference.” ^{15 6} Ignore guides that promise double or quadruple reach; X itself says slight. If X is your main channel, I’d pay for the 35 requests alone.

Here’s how it works in plain words. For each post and each person who might see it, X’s model predicts how likely that person is to reply, like, share, follow, mute or report. Each prediction is multiplied by a weight, and the total decides how high the post shows. ¹⁶ Here are some of the weights in the code as of October 2026, including the bonus for replies between mutuals. ^{3 4}

X’s help pages fill in how replies rank. A reply ranks higher when the original author has replied to it and when it comes from someone the reader follows, ² and a little higher when the replier pays for Premium. ¹⁵ In July 2026, X also began showing people more from their mutuals, including in replies. ^{18 19} Nikita Bier announced the change as X’s Head of Product. He has since left X (his time in the job ended in October 2026), so read his posts as dated. ^{20 21} And the For You feed leaves out replies from accounts the reader doesn’t follow, ¹⁶ so a stranger’s reply is seen mostly in the thread and in the author’s notifications. ²

Put together, two moves matter most: get the author to answer you, and become mutuals with the people you want to reach.

Replies are how strangers meet on X. Done well, they helped Dagobert Renouf build a following of more than 70,000: by his Indie Hackers interview’s account, he aimed for 50 or more replies a day on other people’s posts, answered everyone who commented on his, and X became his main source of customers (all self-reported). ¹³ Done badly, replies are noise that X now hides.

1. 1

   Pick your circle.

   List 50 to 100 people who post about the problem you solve: customers, prospects and peers. Favor people who answer their replies over famous accounts that never do, since a reply the author answers ranks higher. ²

2. 2

   Keep them in one place.

   Put them in a private X List and read it every day. Follow your customers too: RevenueCat’s CEO, Jacob Eiting, follows back every customer he spots, and “it just fills my feed with customers.” ²²

3. 3

   Reply only when you add something.

   A fact from your own work, a number, a fix or a sharp question. Stay on the post’s topic: X counts off-topic promotional replies as spam. ⁷

4. 4

   Keep a pace you can hold.

   I’d aim for 15 to 30 good replies a day, for months. Accounts without Premium are capped at 200 a day (as of October 2026), and a burst of thin replies does more harm than good. ²³

5. 5

   Answer everyone who answers you.

   It’s how a stranger becomes a regular, and it was one of Dagobert’s rules. ¹³

6. 6

   Notice who follows back.

   Follow the people who answer you. Once someone has answered you a couple of times or followed you back, move to a DM.

Here’s the difference under one post. A founder writes: “Our AI bill went from $900 to $4,100 this month and I can’t tell which customers did it.” Two replies from Jo, Pennyline’s made-up founder:

The first could sit under any post about AI costs, pitches a stranger and points to a link. The second gives a fact, a fix and an easy question, and never mentions the product. If the author answers it, X ranks it higher, and the author will remember Jo’s name. Three more replies that work:

Only the first names the product, because Ana asked for recommendations. That’s the rule I’d keep: in a reply, mention what you build only when someone asks or when it’s the honest answer. Your profile does the rest.

He said 34 of the 59 replies on one of his posts had been hidden. Nikita Bier, then X’s Head of Product, answered the same day in September 2026: “95% are LLM bots,” meaning bots run on AI language models. ²⁴ X’s help page says it hides replies based on “the author’s previous behavior and the content of the reply,” ² and its rules require X’s written approval before anyone runs an AI reply bot. ²⁵ A tool that writes and posts replies for you puts your name on exactly what X is filtering out.

If a tool drafts for you, treat the draft as notes and rewrite it until it’s what you’d say to the person’s face. Kolysh’s read-it-out-loud test works as well for replies as for email. ¹ It’s YC’s advice for any outreach: do at least your first 100 outreaches by hand, as Christina Gilbert, a YC Visiting Partner, recommends. ²⁶ Or in Aaron Epstein’s words: “If you’re trying to automate right out of the gate, you’re doing it wrong.” ²⁷

• Tell stories, not ads. Dagobert’s posts followed a simple shape: a problem, how it felt and what he learned. Per his interview, he rarely talked about his product. ¹³
• Make each demo a small launch. Farza Majeed’s formula, from a YC talk on launch videos: “This is who I am. This is what’s going on. This is what I’m working on. Let me show you.” ⁸
• Launch more than once. Resend (YC W23) shipped “seven new features in seven days” in March 2023 and has run five more launch weeks since. ¹⁰ YC’s Kat Mañalac tells founders to stop treating a launch as a single moment. ¹¹
• Answer critics in the open. Before launching on Hacker News, PostHog (YC W20) listed the criticisms other launches got and answered them up front. Its CEO, James Hawkins: “the foundation of trust we felt was transparency.” ²⁸
• Show, don’t tell. PostHog’s handbook ranks formats “video > graphics/photos > text only” and asks of every post, “does this look like something another company would put out?” If yes, rewrite it. ²⁹
• Mine your replies. The questions people ask you are your next posts. ¹³
• Post one or two good things a day, every day. A burst of posts lowers the reach of the later ones, and going quiet costs reach too, as Nikita Bier, then X’s Head of Product, explained in April 2026. ³⁰ Links are fine: that same month he said they were never pushed down. ³¹

In the same conversation, Garry Tan, YC’s President and CEO, said earnestness is one of the things YC really loves. ³² Be the earnest one. Snark gets likes; it doesn’t get your DMs answered.

Here’s how X handles messages, as of October 2026. If someone follows you, your DM goes to their main inbox and doesn’t count against any request limit. If they don’t, it becomes a message request, and you can send one only if their settings accept requests from everyone, or from verified accounts and you have Premium. ^{14 6} Requests wait in a separate tab. By default X filters out “lower-quality requests” without a notification, and Grok, X’s AI, sorts the rest into Priority or Hidden. You won’t know yours was seen until they accept. ^{14 6} If their messages are closed, you can’t write at all without their X Number, a private code they choose to share, so reply in public instead. ⁶

My rule: send the DM when one of these is true.

• They’ve answered your replies a couple of times.
• They followed you back.
• You’ve had two or three real exchanges in public.
• They asked for it: “send it over,” “DM me.”
• You asked in the thread, “Mind if I DM you the doc?”, and they said yes.

The evidence points the same way. CrossMind, a company that sells outreach automation, compared cold DMs with replying in public, following and waiting for a follow-back first: about 33% replies against none, and about 60% of the cold recipients blocked them. It’s the vendor’s own test, and it changed its targeting midway, so treat it as a story, not a benchmark. ³³ Arvid Kahl, who built and sold FeedbackPanda, puts it as a rule: give without asking, and ask much later. ³⁴ Max Kolysh recommends the same order on LinkedIn: a connection request with no message, then a short DM once they accept. ¹

• Under 75 words. Kolysh’s rule for first messages: long ones get ignored, and people assume AI wrote them. ¹
• Start with what you share: the reply they answered, the post they wrote, the question they asked.
• Give something first. Mintlify (YC W22) did it by “preemptively creating improved documentation for potential users before engaging them.” ³⁵ Kolysh: “Twenty minutes of work before asking for 30 minutes of someone’s time is actually quite a reasonable trade.” ¹
• Ask one easy question, not for a call. As Arvid Kahl puts it, “Asking for a chat is a big ask.” And don’t ask permission to ask; just ask. ³⁴ Save the 15-minute call for when they’re talking with you.
• Say why you’re writing. If you build something for the problem, say so. Ask for advice only if you want it: if you’re just trying to disguise a sales call, Kolysh says, “don’t do this.” ¹
• No link until they ask for it.
• Never copy and paste. X’s rules list sending identical direct messages as spam. ⁷
• Read it out loud before you send it.

No answer? Follow up once or twice over the next couple of weeks, each time with something new, so two or three DMs in all, as on LinkedIn. Then go back to replying in public, or try email. As Aaron Epstein, a YC General Partner, says of cold email: “Nobody owes you anything here. Just move on.” ²⁷

So yes, DM a lot. Just do it the way X allows: many individually written DMs to people who follow you, plus your daily allowance of cold requests. As of October 2026, that allowance is 7 a day on a free account and 35 on Premium. ^{6 37} On Premium, that’s up to 175 handwritten cold requests in a five-day week, on top of your warm DMs. For a founder, that’s plenty.

Here’s a day I’d repeat:

• Read your List and reply to 15 to 30 posts where you have something to add.
• Answer everyone who replied to you since yesterday.
• Search for this week’s posts about your problem and add the best people to your List.
• DM the people who have answered you or followed you back.
• Send today’s cold requests (your daily allowance above) to people who posted the problem this week, each written for them.
• Log it: who you replied to, who answered, who followed back, who you messaged.

Reach on X can be huge and still not sell. Farza Majeed, founder of Hey Clicky and Buildspace (YC S20), said the original Clicky video got 7,000 downloads on 3 million views, while a YouTube video with 20,000 views converted at about 20% (his own numbers). ⁸ Followers aren’t revenue either: Dagobert Renouf’s 70,000-plus followers didn’t keep Logology alive, and he and his co-founder shut it down. ¹³

Give it a month of daily replies before you judge X; people need to see your name a few times. For how many conversations it takes to find a customer, see the numbers in the cold outreach overview.