How Chris Mjelde turned LinkedIn puzzle fans into 524 warm leads with a 75% positive reply rate

Chris Mjelde and his co-founder Rory run Dozenal, a daily puzzle game, on the side while already working on their startup Kenobi. As we wall know, a side project usually gets no outbound team, so the outreach had to run itself or it wouldn't happen at all.

Manual outreach didn't scale. Persona targeting didn't fit either, because "math teacher" doesn't tell you who actually loves puzzles.

Chris noticed that LinkedIn already shows you who loves puzzles. Every day, thousands of people comment their scores on LinkedIn's daily games, like Patches, Zip, and Mini Sudoku. Those people are self-selected, active, and visibly obsessed: Dozenal's exact audience.

In just over two months, that one insight produced 524 interested leads.

This is exacetly how he did it, step by step.

How it works

Step 1: Plan the play with Claude

Chris started by describing the insight to Claude and working out a plan before touching any tool. The plan covered the signal to track, the cadence, the deduplication logic, and the campaign structure.

Step 2: Define the ICP by behavior, not job title

There's no role, industry, or company size here. The ICP is:

• Signal: People who comment their scores on LinkedIn's daily puzzle game posts
• Games tracked: Two similar daily games, one of them Patches
• Freshness: New commenters every day, so the lead pool never runs dry
• Priority: Repeat commenters rank higher, since commenting several times shows real habit, not a one-off

Step 3: Build an evergreen lead pipeline

Each evening, a Apify + Claude workflow collects the latest commenters on the daily games posts.

Every lead gets tagged and stored in a local database, which tracks:

• Who keeps commenting
• Which games they play
• Who has already been contacted, so nobody gets messaged twice

A small custom script then picks the top 30 eligible leads per game and pushes them into HeyReach. Claude Code orchestrates the whole thing on a daily cron, so nobody has to build a list by hand.

Step 4: Split the volume across two senders

Chris and Rory each have a LinkedIn account connected to HeyReach. Each of them has their own campaign, one per game.

The sender limits in HeyReach are:

• 30 connection requests per day
• 40 messages per day

⚠️Please note: limits may differ per accounts health

Step 5: Keep the sequence short

The whole campaign is four moves:

1. Send a connection request with no note.
2. Once accepted, send message 1 within 4 hours.
3. If there's no reply, send one follow-up after 3 days.
4. If the request isn't accepted within 8 days, the lead exits the campaign.

The 4-hour window matters. The puzzle is fresh in their head, and the connection still feels new.

Step 6: Write like a fellow puzzler

The opener names the exact game the person comments on and makes a tiny ask: feedback. There's no pitch, no "quick question," and no meeting request.

Patches opener:

Hi {first_name}! Caught your name several times on the Patches daily posts. I'm looking for avid puzzlers to give feedback on my puzzle game, Dozenal. It's a bit harder than Patches, so no worries if it's not your jam, but would love to hear your thoughts! https://dozenal.game

Patches follow-up (3 days later):

Just letting you know that we've created a dedicated tutorial, so that new players can learn the ropes. Really eager to hear if you find the game intuitive or not! Tutorial here: https://dozenal.game/worlds/2

The follow-up gives people a new reason to reply, and the tutorial lowers the barrier for anyone who bounced off the first time.

Step 7: Track replies and let it run

Replies and interest get tracked as they come in. Beyond that, nobody touches the campaign day to day. The pipeline refills itself every evening, and HeyReach handles everything after the push.

Results:

• 1,923 connection requests sent
• 1,220 accepted (63.4%)
• 1,120 messaged
• 699 replies (62.4%)
• 524 interested (75.3% of repliers)

This was Dozenal's first outreach campaign ever. It also beat every campaign the team had run for their SaaS startup, and Chris puts that down to targeting.

Key take aways

• Target behavior, not demographics. A job title tells you who someone is. A daily puzzle score tells you what they love. Find the public action your buyers repeat and build your list around it.
• Make the top of funnel evergreen. Chris's team always struggled to keep outbound alive when it needed a fresh list every two weeks. A daily signal source plus an automated push into HeyReach solved list-building indefinitely.
• Strong targeting lets you write simple messages. When the signal is this precise, the message doesn't need clever personalization. It needs to sound like a human, reference the signal, and ask for something small.
• Shrink the ask. "Would love your feedback" is easier to say yes to than "want to try my product?" A smaller ask got Chris more replies, and more of them positive.