Why we built Funkel
Outbound is broken because the prevailing tools force a tradeoff between volume and price. We thought there was a third path, signal-based outreach you run yourself, so we built it.
Most B2B teams running outbound today are stuck choosing between two bad deals.
Option one is hiring a lead-gen agency. They build a list, send from accounts you do not own, give you a Monday report, and charge you between two and three thousand euros a month for the privilege. The work is opaque. When the contract ends you have nothing to show for it except a spreadsheet of names that, at best, your CRM will recognize.
Option two is buying automation software. Pick your poison: Lemlist, Apollo, Expandi, the rest. They all sell the same promise, which is volume. Connect every account, send hundreds of messages a day, run multi-channel sequences. The trade-off shows up six months in: reply rates trending toward zero, accounts getting flagged, and a brand reputation that takes a year to repair.
We thought there was a third option. Outreach that is yours, not an agency’s. Quiet enough to keep your accounts safe. Smart enough that every message has a reason. Cheap enough that a solo founder can afford it.
The thesis
The reason cold outbound is broken is not that nobody is doing enough of it. The reason it is broken is that nearly all of it is sent at the wrong moment, to people who are not paying attention, with no information beyond a job title and a company name.
A buyer who just changed jobs is in a different mental state than the same buyer six months earlier. A buyer who posted about replacing a competitor is more available than a buyer who posted about their weekend. A buyer who visited your pricing page three times in 48 hours is, somewhere in their head, already weighing build versus buy.
These moments are not invisible. LinkedIn surfaces most of them, every day, in public. The problem is that no human can watch thirty thousand profiles in parallel and notice the four of them that just gleamed.
What Funkel is
Funkel is the watcher. Paste the URL of what you are taking to market. Funkel reads the page, drafts an ICP, and starts looking. When a person matches the ICP and trips a signal, the agent flags them, scores them against your buyer profile, and drafts a message that cites the actual signal that fired. You approve, edit, or skip. Funkel sends.
Every part of that loop is built around one rule: send fewer messages, but send them when they have a reason to exist.
What it is not
It is not a sequence builder that lets you blast a thousand identical templates. It is not a black-box agency that spends two thousand euros of your money before you find out the results were mediocre. It is not multi-channel: we do LinkedIn, because that is where the buyers signal, and we do it well.
It is also not infinitely customizable. We chose a small set of defaults that work for most B2B founders, SDRs, and solo operators, and we hold them tightly. The point is to set up in ten minutes and run forever, not to fiddle with knobs.
The price
Funkel costs roughly five percent of what a lead-gen agency costs and is comparable to volume automation tools. We deliberately did not stack feature flags or tier the product into a six-rung pricing ladder. There is one plan, two senders, two agents per app, unlimited campaigns. If you need more, you add senders one at a time, at a small predictable cost.
The seven-day free trial is the actual product, not a feature gate. Set up your workspace, find your first warm leads, decide whether the radar earns its keep, then pay or do not.
What we are not promising
We are not promising you a 40% reply rate. The reply rate depends on your ICP, your offer, your tone, and the specific signals you tune the agent against. What we will give you is tighter timing, fewer irrelevant messages, and clearer control over who gets contacted and why. The rest is the craft of outbound, which is still, even with an AI in the loop, your craft.
That is what Funkel is. Quiet outbound, paced for the moment, priced for the operator. Built by a small team because nobody was building it, and the founders we kept talking to were burning out trying to do it by hand.
Read next
- A field guide to LinkedIn intent signalsThe 13 signal strategies Funkel watches for, what each one actually predicts, and which combinations produce the highest reply rates.
- Connection notes that get acceptedA short, opinionated guide to writing the 280-character note that gets a "yes" instead of a "your account is restricted."
- When to write the message yourself, and when to let the AI draft itA practical decision framework for when AI-personalized outreach beats a hand-written template, and the times it absolutely does not.