Welcome to Banyan — Why We're Building the LinkedIn Outreach Platform for Indian Founders
Cold outreach is broken. Warm outreach, done at scale, is the future. Here's why we named our company Banyan — and what we're building.
When we started our last company, cold email was our lifeline. We blasted 3,000 emails a week. We hit every “cold outreach playbook” on Twitter. We AB-tested subject lines. We used Lemlist, then Instantly, then Smartlead.
And the reply rate kept dropping. From 8% to 4% to under 2%.
We weren’t doing anything wrong. The whole pattern was broken.
The thing nobody told us
The founders who were actually booking meetings weren’t cold emailing. They were on LinkedIn.
Not posting for “thought leadership.” Not running Sales Navigator like a billboard. Something different — something we started calling warm outreach.
They were reaching out to people who had already shown interest:
- People who commented on their posts
- People who visited their company page
- People who followed their VC
- People who engaged with their competitors
Those messages got replied to. Because they weren’t cold. They were rooted in something real.
The problem: doing warm outreach manually doesn’t scale
If you’ve ever tried to do this yourself, you know the grind:
- Check who engaged with your last post. (LinkedIn shows ~30 people, truncated.)
- Open each profile. Read their bio. Scroll their recent posts.
- Write a personalised connection note in under 300 characters.
- Send. Wait. Follow up 3 days later with something relevant.
- Track which conversations are alive. Don’t let anyone slip.
Doing this well for 50 people a week takes 5-6 hours. Doing it for 500 is impossible.
Every tool we tried automated the wrong part. They automated the spam — sending the same message to thousands — and left the hard, valuable, human work (finding warm leads, writing real messages) to us.
What we’re building
Banyan automates the right part.
It watches LinkedIn for the people already showing intent — post engagers, company page visitors, commenters on your content, followers of specific people in your space. It reads their profile, their recent posts, their role. It writes a message that sounds like you wrote it. Not a template. A conversation.
Then it follows up, in your voice, at the right time. Not a sequence of 5 increasingly desperate nudges — a genuine conversation that waits for the right moment.
Why “Banyan”?
The Great Banyan tree in Kolkata is 250 years old. It covers 5 acres. It has 3,772 aerial roots touching the ground.
And it has no main trunk.
Its original trunk was destroyed by a cyclone a hundred years ago. But the tree didn’t die. Each root became a new pillar. Together they became something that looks less like a tree and more like a forest.
That’s the metaphor we’re building around. Most outreach tools are one loud trunk — one message, blasted out. Banyan is 3,772 small roots. Each one rooted in something real. Each one warm.
Where we are
We’re 500 teams in. 18,000+ meetings booked. Reply rates 3x higher than our users’ previous cold tools.
We’re just getting started. If you run a SaaS company, a sales team, or a GTM agency in India — and you’ve felt the cold-email reply rate falling — we’d love to show you a different way.
Book a demo. Your first 10 warm conversations are on us.
— Ujjwal, Co-founder, Banyan Outreach