Iliya Valchanov

CEO @ Team-GPT | 1,300,000+ AI students on Udemy

Putting AI agents inside marketing agencies.

3x founder, 1.5M AI students on Udemy, ex-math competitor, finance graduate, 3x $0-$1M, boostrapped to $30M revenue.

Creator of content, software, and agents.

Co-founder & CEO

Learn, collaborate, and master ChatGPT in one shared workspace.

Almost 3 years after we started building, we've hit:
- 80K users
- $1M+ ARR
- 20 amazing team members

Most importantly, we've found our focus: Marketing Teams and Agencies.

I'm so, so happy to introduce Juma (ex Team-GPT) to the world.

A product that can:
- Perform any Data Analysis
- Get fresh info from ahrefs to optimize your SEO/GEO
- Help you with anything marketing related: Content, Strategy, Research, Slides, Images

We are massively innovating in the next 2 months.

2 months from now it will be a 10x better product.

But even today, it's quite something.

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Personal website

Juma is a team-first AI workspace for marketing teams. 

We help teams and agencies co-create with AI, stay aligned on every project, and deliver better results together. Because the best ideas don't come from AI alone. They come from teams working together.

Juma is trusted by teams at Costa Coffee, Procore, Maersk, and Salesforce. Backed by True Ventures and Pact.


75K+ users, $1M+ ARR, AI for marketing teams

Co-Founder & CEO

1.5M+ students in the field of statistics, data science, machine learning, and deep learning.

AI Course Creator

3veta is an appointment scheduling platform with 10K+ active users.

Co-Founder

Co-founded and led 365 Data Science to 4M students and $1M ARR.

CEO @ Juma | 1,500,000+ AI students on Udemy

Juma (ex Team-GPT)

Me to my wife: 
'Can you fix my profile photo?'

Wife: 
'Done'

Love is blind.

But also...
LinkedIn algorithm is so horrible these days that it deserves nothing less.

To anyone who writes comments with AI: 
You suck!


A post is like a broadcast- it goes out to all and is hardly personal.
(𝘦.𝘨. 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘨𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘮𝘺 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴, 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴, 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘴, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘓𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘦𝘥𝘐𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺).

A comment is deeply personal. 
It's the communication between 2 human beings. 
You comment to engage the other person. And you expect them to engage back. 

Slopify your posts and you lose your unique voice.
Slopify your comments and you lose all your humanity.

Our organic traffic fell 95% the day we rebranded. 
45 days later it's still quite bad.

On it's last day (20 Nov 2025), Team-GPT got:
- 1,000,000 impressions
- 2,000 clicks 
on Google.

As of 3 Jan 2026, Juma has:
- 100,000 impressions (90% down)
- 336 clicks (83% down)

We are greatly suffering from the rebranding. 

So what are we doing about it?
1. On page technical SEO (we nailed it)
2. Off page SEO -> building links as the old days, adding Juma in directories
3. PR -> mentions, podcasts, guest appearances, taking interviews in media outlets so we can show up as Juma, not Team-GPT


Rebranding is a long-term investment with short term

We finally launched Juma (ex Team-GPT) officially, together with 250+ people from the AI community. 

Thanks for coming and super excited for what's to come!

In March 2026, we will be revealing the Juma Superagent, an AI system, which can do all types of marketing related tasks, completely on its own. 

P.S.
Video is a short snippet from our Launch Party on 15 Jan 26.

През ноември месец сменихме името си от Тийм-ГПТ на Джума.

Направихме събитие в СФ (Сан Франциско).

Сега е време да направим и в Сф (София)!

Очакваме ви на 15.01 в CampusX.

Местата са ограничени и само с предварително записване: 
👉 https://lnkd.in/d3ZH3czZ

Here's what Juma can do today.

It's 10x better than 3 months ago.

It will be 10x better 3 months from now.

Interestingly:
- I no longer use ChatGPT... like at all
- Manus rocks and I use it for some tasks (e.g. wide research, slides)
- Grok never resonated with me
- Gemini is useful sometimes but is not a part of my workflow yet
- Perplexity is also not my cup of tea, although I trust it a lot
- Gamma's slides are just too AI generated (Manus is better and soon Juma)
- We pay for Lovable but I'm not the one using it. But I can imagine myself coming back again and again to it

I'm experimenting with other tools but man is it hard to find something that fits your mental model for what AI should be.

We are trying to do

I've lost trust in LinkedIn's algorithm. 
People who are religiously following me don't see my posts. OUCH!
Lots of my content and following is here but the algorithm is rewarding AI slop and my content has lower visibility. 

(to make sure you see my posts, hit my profile and subscribe for updates via the 🔔 bell).

But nobody will actually hit the 🔔, though.

So what am I supposed to do?

Moving to another social media (e.g. TikTok, BlueSky, etc.) has the same risks- algorithm is not aligned with creators but with the platform overall.

The only place where my content-creation efforts are truly safe forever?
My own website.

It has never been easier to build a website. 

Yet I decided to go for a blog (used Substack).
Website designs come and go. 
Letters are forever.

Created. Crafted. Curated.
👇
iliya (.) ai

Changed my profile photo- I hope you are happy...

Putting the ultra-close-up resulted in 40% increase in views of my profile.

Works.
Wondering if it affected our sales and how.

2 months after rebranding, SEO is improving...
(only) 80% decline in organic traffic!

𝗕𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱:
~1,000-1,500 daily clicks
Average position: 10.3
"team gpt" query: 5,775 clicks
CTR: 0.55%

𝗔𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗿𝗲𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱:
~400-600 daily clicks
Average position: 14.0
"juma" query: 1,040 clicks
CTR: 0.53%


Interestingly, CTR stayed almost identical. The issue isn't engagement. It's visibility.


According to AI, the recovery timeline is:

Months 1-2: Stabilization ✓ (we're here) 
Months 3-4: 20-30% recovery 
Months 5-6: 40-50% recovery 
Months 6-12: Full recovery with active SEO


Was the rebrand worth it? Absolutely.

Team-GPT made sense when we were a ChatGPT wrapper.
Juma reflects what we actually are: AI agents for marketing teams.

The traffic will come back. 
But it really hurts.

No alternative text description for this image

AI sucks at Math. 
Juma doesn't. 

If you are looking to analyze your data- 
whether Excel files, CSVs or others, we run real calculations on your numbers.

You can create graphs, charts, or even Lovable-like websites with the results.

The future is now, old man.

Time for AI to do the Math.

P.S.
Charts are actual Juma data.

I came home for Easter.

I couldn’t do it any longer.

After 2 months abroad, the fundraise was not yet done. This meant the company would seize to exist, I would have let down everybody involved.

Came home to my family to celebrate.

They were hoping for me to talk about the whole experience. However, all they got was an Iliya who was not speaking for days.

I had been pitching for 15 hours a day, every day. For 2 months.

I didn’t know what to say.

I couldn’t look my father in the eye.

I was trying to smile but it was not coming out well.


Read full story here: 
👉 https://lnkd.in/djeWRHPS

graphical user interface, text, application, chat or text message

We like to wait and see what our competitors do.

This helps us solve the problems better than them, hopefully in the BEST way possible.

We know the problems our customers face.

Some call it stealing. 

It's actually called research.

Or more posh: second-mover advantage.

My top course is The Data Science Course: Complete Data Science Bootcamp.
It has 791,462 students and a rating of 4.5 by ~159,382 people.
We've now automated it with an agent.

Everything that was thought in this course (and many others) is now fully automated by the Juma agent. 

Our agent turns complex data into reports, charts, PDFs, and presentations - all in one chat.

In this video, we:
- analyze 90-day GA4 dataset
- create visualizations
- generate a website
- build a PDF
- make a PowerPoint deck. 

The data analysis agent is just one tiny bit of what the Juma superagent will be able to do.

Stay tuned!

We are building the place where 'anyone can market anything'. 
Marketers cringe when they hear it.
Mainly because they think marketing skills are hard.

But what makes a great marketer? Think: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, most recently even Timothee Chalamet..

I think it's: 
- strategic thinking
- 6th sense for what works
- curiosity and willingness to experiment
- understanding of marketing mix and multi-touch interactions (even on a subconcious level is enough)
- taste!!!


What most great marketers can't do:
- Run ads
- Edit videos
- Set-up Google Analytics
- Write SEO-optimized articles
- Know where to find stuff in HubSpot lol

Don't get me wrong- I have deep appreciation for marketing specialists who can do all these.

But keep in mind:

-> The first list will remain human
-> The second list is being automated as we speak

Some professions have it easier, when it comes to AI adoption:

- Developers work in repositories, which they unify through GitHub for instance. So it’s already super organized: you connect the repo and it has all the Context for the project at hand.

- Marketers work on campaigns, which often have a start and end date and must be executed rather fast, context is created at the start and evolves for each campaign

- Agencies collaborate on clients, ideally in the span of years, so they often have this stored somehow

More often than not, context is scattered across tools, drives, archives.

An absolute key step to adopting AI well for your organization is to cherry-pick the right context that the AI will be stepping on.

This is so important, that nowadays we often talk about Context Engineering as opposed to Prompt Engineering.

Context is King.

Full thoughts: https://lnkd.in/dsZvEe6t

How is it possible for a human or AI to create this ridiculous outbound message?

I made a Loom for Team-GPT with ideas on promoting "JUma marketing Super agent".

It's really, really hard to get it this wrong.

graphical user interface, text, application

I think ~200M people total will be needed for most work in 15 years.
After teaching AI to 1.5M people, founding a Silicon Valley-based marketing superagent (Juma), and helping 75K+ users across 500+ companies adopt AI for their work, here’s how I think people, organizations, and corporations should and will adopt AI.

---

I’ve been thinking a lot about the best path to AI adoption.

How do you learn it? How do you teach it? What does it mean to adopt ChatGPT well? What is stopping teams from adopting GPT? Where is the resistance coming from? Why are people achieving such wildly different results? Why does MIT state that 95% of all AI adoption projects fail?

Most humans will be left behind.

Since ChatGPT came out the world really changed. This technological leap is historically unmatched. The world economy is majorly, irreversably, and inevitably changing and technologically advanced nations and individuals will have much better outcomes in life on average.

The problem is that many people who I respect are denying or soft-denying (not using) AI. Maybe 1 in 5 of my friends use it passably well. 

Full article here:
👉 https://lnkd.in/dsZvEe6t

We just codified our values at Juma. 

Not because we like being corporate. But because culture wins in the long run.

Here's what we stand for and what we reward:

1. Default to Open
- Share publicly
- Admit mistakes early
- Challenge ideas, not people

2. Own it End-to-End
- Finish what you start
- Deliver on commitments
- Escalate early with a plan
- Choose company wins over local wins

3. Build Great Stuff
- Start with user problems AND business value
- Measure impact 
- Hold a high bar, but ship anyway
- Sweat the details
- Deliver in short term but build for the long term

4. Learn Fast, Ship Smart
- Prioritize ruthlessly
- Test assumptions early
- Learn from mistakes
- Adapt fast

5. Earn Your Spot
- Results over politics
- Same standards for everyone
- Give honest feedback
- Be coachable

6. Set the Standard
- Represent Juma with pride
- Set the bar for the AI ecosystem
- Show up for each other as people


Note:  
This is not wishful thinking. 
It's literally what our culture is- we just wrote it down.

Same expectations. Same standards. For everyone.

Growing MRR of B2B SaaS companies via affiliate marketing | Growth Manager @ Reditus | T500 | Reforge '24 🤘

Hi there, welcome to my profile!

Currently building Signalbase, a real-time intent data provider helping GTM and RevOps teams be the first to reach out when a signal occurs.

Because let’s face it, creating firmographic-first lists and hoping for intent later simply doesn’t work anymore. Prospecting isn’t a filtering exercise as 95% of your market is not ready to buy, but signals can help you see who is about to be.

We help teams spot real intent signals before anyone else does and plug those signals straight into your existing GTM stack, so your workflows trigger when the market’s ready, not when it’s too late.

You will want to use Signalbase if: 

1. You want a healthy pipeline with active companies
2. You seek verified signals to feed your GTM workflows
3. You don't have time to learn Clay or the money to hire someone to do it for you

Ready to discover some accounts with real-time intent? 

Give Signalbase a try, no card needed!

Talking about signal-first GTM and data which you will use to feed your workflows with

Georgi Furnadzhiev

How to hit €10M ARR in under 30 months without spraying & praying? 

That’s exactly what we unpack in the latest episode of My First Signal with Ilija Stojkovski (HeyReach.io), one of the fastest-growing LinkedIn automation tools in Europe

Be prepared, as this one is dense. And refreshingly honest.

A few takes that really stood out 👇

🟧 Why signal-based outreach is broken when everyone tracks the same signals
🟧 The real difference between a GTM technician and a true GTM engineer
🟧 Why hyper-relevance beats hyper-personalization every single time
🟧 How cross-platform plays (Twitter → LinkedIn) still cut through the noise
🟧 The biggest GTM mistake: generating replies that never turn into revenue

One quote that stuck with me:

Signals are not for personalization. They’re for relevance and timing.

If you’re fixing or building your signal-based GTM engine from scratch, this episode will save you months of trial and error.

30 minutes. No fluff. Very practical.

Let’s get practical 👇

Signal-based prospecting at scale | CEO @Signalbase

Week 12 of building Signalbase in public to $1M MRR

This was by far our best week, as we reached 140 users and crossed 53 approved registrations for the first-ever GTM party happening next week in Amsterdam! 🎉 

A few other things/discoveries from this week :

1️⃣We tested a new pricing structure and it freaking works! 

Simplification of your plans is by far the best thing you can do, while later giving opportunities for customization to match the exact needs

Too many teams are concerned about "credit usage" so what we did instead is run the calculation for them so they don't need to be bothered.

Perhaps the new messaging also helped significantly, as it showcases to the person on the other side what type of signals they get and where, within their workflows, Signalbase works best 

In short...you will use us if you need signal-based prospecting!

2️⃣Inbound is going strong 

Compliments over my recent post, more inbound signups & more demos booked. But most importantly, when I entered the latest Clay meetup in Amsterdam, everyone knew who I was:

"Aren't you the guy from LinkedIn who talks about signals?" "You are the Signalbase guy, no?" "Wait, weren't you hosting a conference a few months ago?"

Yet the biggest win? For the first time ever, Signalbase was also displayed as a potential API signal provider during the meetup.

3️⃣ HubSpot is talking more about the importance of signal-based prospecting!

Honestly, I could not be happier to work with their team as they have been part of our journey since day 1! It's so refreshing to see that there is someone who also tries to educate teams about the danger of using firmographic-first lists

Yamini Rangan please count that as a public invitation to join our show "My First Signal"  😉 

And lastly, we finally killed the old version of the software and migrated the majority of the legacy users to Signalbase 

The new chapter of the company is here, let's put this thing on the moon!

Chat later,
G

If I ever turn a fractional GTM exec again, I’d easily charge $20K to implement this signal-based system.

Just 4 months ago, people laughed when I said signals were the future. “Pure ABM,” they said. Now? Everyone wants them.

As Hugo Pereira said to me before the holidays 👉 “ As a GTM leader, you need to ride the wave now to stand out, or get lost in the noise later.” and that's exactly what I want to help your sales team with! 

So this holiday season, I got so tired of the AI glaze, you know the “agents solve everything” hype... and locked myself to showcase practical examples of workflows and mental models you can actually act on if you are starting to build your signal-based GTM motion from scratch.

Who should read this? CROs, CGOs, CMOs, CCOs, COOs who are trying to move away from using firmographics as a cornerstore of their GTM motion.

Inside, I show:

- How to build your signal-based GTM team (Ilija Stojkovski's input)
- How to write a killer copy (Frank Sondors 🥓's playbook)
- Soft skills needed for you to build your signal-based engine (Ashleigh Early's mental models) 
- The only way for you to leverage evergreen signals like the ones inside Signalbase to improve your bottom line
- My playbook for crushing the vetted conference for 200 GTM leaders (from 30 tickets to a full room in 2 months by engineering signals around the brand)

and so much more, which you normally hear only in private calls with those who got their hands dirty and made the mistakes you are about to make 👀 

Just comment “playbook” and I’ll DM it to you!

Get signal-driven account lists at scale | CEO @Signalbase

Things are getting out of hand here... 🫣 

The fact that soooo many good companies applied for a seat means one thing...

The days of spraying and praying are now long gone, and the results speak for themselves.

🔶 Lower number of deals in the pipe 
🔶 Slower sales cycles 
🔶 Teams fighting for every split second for attention

If you ever been annoyed by spammy messages or ever been called a spammer, then you should look into the signal movement. And the best part? 

You can start designing your signal-based engine together with the 50 other vetted executives coming to the first-ever GTM party in Amsterdam this Jan 30th!

With this one, I will try my best to put an end to the premise of buying "ready to buy leads" from vendors and sourcing firmographic-first lists 💩 

We won't run this concept ever again, so let's put this in the books together 👇 

Secure one of the 5 spots left via the link in the comments!

The future of API-first SaaS living inside bigger ecosystems is already here! 

And the truth is that I saw it coming right after OpenAI introduced their workflows/marketplace👇

Just look at how the market moved over the past few months:

We’ve seen Clay making an MCP integration with OpenAI
We’ve seen teams stop “using all-in-one tools” and start composing systems. etc...

Currently, we are still here:
→ Tool A for data
→ Tool B for enrichment
→ Tool C for validation
→ Tool D for workflows

But give it 2-3 years', and we will see:
→ One giant orchestration LLM layer acting as a monopoly (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity)
→ Plug-and-play APIs underneath
→ Data flowing where it’s needed, when it’s needed, with no dashboards, CSV hell or further manual validation loops.

Recent use case around Signalbase x Clay Bootcamp 🥾 

An extremely seasoned practitioner who can't code, yet somehow built his Claude environment. 

This person plugged our API and suddenly had access to verified investors, job changes at scale, fundraising announcements, M&A activity sourced just a minute ago, which previously took hours (or days) to validate.

No more:
“Where do I even start?”
“Can I trust this source?”
“Is this signal fresh or already stale?”

And the key part most people miss is putting effort into validating your data, but no worries, we got you covered there. Verification isn’t an afterthought, but a fundamental part of the product.

Shoutout to Laurens Nys, who also plugged the API directly into his own n8n workflows 💪 

The future of GTM is here,
G

Month 3 of building Signalbase in public to $1M MRR

December -> A learning month
January -> The "getting shit done" month 

🔶 Stats 

Current MRR - 1k 
Current churn rate - 15% (not so accurate, so stick with me) 
Current userbase - 100 users (I count here the trials too) 🎉 
Core use case -> Feeding freshly verified signal-driven accounts into your list


🔶 Biggest learnings 

1. Saying no to clients is a skill you need to protect your devs and move faster
2. You need to search for the most repeatable use case and hammer on that ICP
3. You will always move slower than you think, but the biggest question is how to make the most out of the current situation.

There are probably way more things, but it's good to be back in Amsterdam.

Huge shoutout to everyone who already came to the pod Sara Storm, Ashleigh Early, Frank Sondors 🥓, Ilija Stojkovski, Everett Berry, Laurens Nys, Festus Seiwoh! 

Are you guys ready? Kevin White, Bill Stathopoulos, André Bressel

P.S Secure a seat for the one and only GTM party happening on the 30th of Jan in Amsterdam via the link in the comments

20 hours dev time. Close to 8k credits and a ton of nerves lost 

But for what? A simple flow searching for recently acquired companies at scale

Let's not even start the conversation around data quality within your workflows/ lists, as sometimes even your Claygent can do you dirty!

So in short, you do need Signalbase! 👀 

Here is how your list-building process should look like 👇 

Create an account -> navigate to the acquisition signal -> use the filters on the side -> Save as CSV or push this list to the rest of your tech stack with a webhook

BOOM in less than 5 minutes, you have your signal-based list and entire workflow mapped out 

That's it! No need to hire anyone or lose your hair over long enrichment chains.

👉 trysignalbase(dot)com

Your LinkedIn feed is FULL of job changes, so hear me out!

Not tracking job changes =  Leaving money on the table 👇

Around this time of the year, LinkedIn is flooded with internal promotions and new hires.

But did you also know that key company players who are quietly exiting create gaps that NOBODY is talking about?

As Bill Stathopoulos from SalesCaptain put it perfectly

“A job change isn’t just a resume update. It’s a decision point. New roles mean new challenges, and new challenges create openness to change.”

If a "low-hanging fruit" had a name - it would be a job change signal

Honestly, this can serve as the golden opportunity for your SDRs to convert the org that they have been chasing in 2025

Reaching out right after a role change lets you engage when intent is naturally high, instead of chasing stale signals weeks or months later.

Need job changes in real-time? Get Signalbase 👀

😬 If your sales team is writing such messages in 2026, you need to fire them ASAP

Here is why this message just made me roll my eyes 👇

🔶 Not using any signals, just firmographics - The fact that I am the CEO is okay, but why are you pitching me a mobile app solution when I never made a signal around it?

🔶 Sounds super AI-heavy - You could have easily checked my last posts to make something up or try to introduce a question for better pattern interruption

🔶 Talking about yourself, not about my problem - It happens when SDRs face a shortage of context around that particular account

Don't get me wrong, I also run evergreen campaigns but at least I try to have a signal-driven account list first, which helps me to write better copy.

Just another proof why sales teams need Signalbase

Enjoy your Friday! 🍻

If your list is dirty, there is no point in optimising your copy! 👇 

A few days ago, I got approached by a Google Ads specialist who wanted to pitch me his services, but I felt like his prospecting could be a bit more signal-driven 😉 

Here is how I would execute on finding B2B SaaS teams if I were selling Google Ads services

1. Grab recently funded companies at scale that fit my ICP from Signalbase
2. Push them to Clay for enrichment 
3. Check if they run LinkedIn ads (so I can educate them about Google Ads)
4. Source the marketing / GTM lead
5. Use the Claygent to create an AI-generated message 
6. Repeat for each market you want to go after

And that's it! No more guessing if the person on the other side has any budget in place

Just give it a spin 👉 trysignabase(dot)com

P.S I am running soon a practical Signals x ABM webinar with Stefan Repin where we will showcase 3 cool use cases. Stay tuned!

Sales teams keep misusing the fundraising signal.

“Raised → outbound → hope for replies.”

That’s not smart selling. That’s lazy targeting.

A funding round isn’t a buying signal.
It’s a change signal.

When a company raises, things start moving fast:
• Hiring plans shift
• Budgets get reshuffled
• Priorities change
• New stakeholders appear
• Investor pressure increases

Most reps stop at “they raised", while the winning reps ask “what’s changing because they raised?”

That question unlocks real sales leverage.

Here’s what you can actually do with ONE fundraising signal:\

🧡 Predict upcoming hires and sell into gaps
🧡 Identify leadership or ownership changes
🧡 Map new investors to urgency and timelines
🧡 Surface tech stack and infra gaps before discovery
🧡 Spot expansion or new markets early
🧡 Track decision-makers joining or leaving
🧡 Qualify intent via content and activity signals
🧡 Pressure-test readiness around API, legal, or compliance
🧡 Identify exit-stage behavior (Series B+)
🧡 Run geo-based or event-driven plays
🧡 Validate why now before you pitch
🧡 Disqualify bad deals faster

Same signal, creating 12 different conversations for discovering better deals to win.

Next in this series 👉 How sales teams can use M&A signals to get ahead of competitors.

Let's crush Q1!

Always fresh signal-driven account lists at scale | CEO @Signalbase

How can a team of 5 SDRs drive 500 demos a month? 🤯 

That’s exactly what we unpack together with Frank Sondors 🥓(Salesforge.ai 🔥), revealing in the second episode of "My First Signal" the secret behind his aggressive signal-based GTM engine.

Trust me, I rarely see such an approach to GTM - there was so much to learn!

A few things you need to keep your eyes open for during this episode:

🟧 How to combine signals and data sets to supercharge sales efficiency
🟧 Why copy and pattern-interrupt messaging are game-changers in outreach
🟧 Frank’s approach to building a high-output GTM team
🟧 Signal-based strategies for inbound and outbound success

And lastly how to make your LinkedIn outreach generate 2–3x reply rates

It's time to boost your GTM engine with signals, systems, and human + agent orchestration in less than 30 minutes

Let's get practical 👇

I learned the real cost of poor data hygiene within my lists the hard way.

3 years ago, I was a growth exec at a SaaS company. We wanted to test LinkedIn Ads against a very specific ICP to competitors who f*cked up with their product launch 

In that moment, we did exactly what most teams still do:
• The head of sales pulled accounts from Sales Navigator / Apollo (first mistake)
• I trusted the list blindly since the guy was an experienced SDR, solid logic (second mistake)
• Uploaded it into LinkedIn Ads

On paper, it was a perfect list. Then reality hit.

👉 First €1,000 of ad spend burned.  Zero to no impressions. No conversions started.

Then this question from the CEO came: "Georgi where are the leads?"

When looking under the hood, I got a sharp and cold feeling

The problem wasn’t the ads.
It wasn’t the messaging.
It wasn’t even the ICP.
It was data hygiene of the list

Because the list was full of irrelevant accounts and stale companies that “looks like ICP” but isn’t ICP.

Since then, I don’t trust static lists anymore. 

Here’s the shift we made with Signalbase 👇

Most tools do this:
➡️ Show you accounts first
➡️ Let you assume intent later

We flipped it by starting with the signal of at least 80% accuracy:
• Funding
• Acquisition
• Job change

No signal = no account in the dashboard

The result? Cleaner lists, fewer “spammy” moments for your team and more conversations started.

Vendors never cared about data hygine until this point as volume previously was the name of the game, but we do care 🫡

Most GTM teams mix up signals and enrichment.
Tho being related, they’re not the same.

Signals = behavior
Something just happened.

Examples:
A company raised a round
A company made an acquisition
A key hire or job change

Signals answer one question:
 👉 “Is this account worth looking at right now?”

Enrichment = facts

Context that helps you qualify the account.

Examples:
Multiple office locations
Industry
Tech stack
Key roles

Enrichment answers:
 👉 “Is this a good fit for us?” 

Important rule:
Both signals and enrichment are internal context.

They should influence:
when you reach out
how you position relevance
They should not be quoted directly in outreach.

If you lead with “I saw you raised a round”, truth is that you’ve already lost leverage.

At Signalbase we help GTM teams:
 → get accounts immediately after key moments like
 fundraising, acquisitions, or job changes
 → so timing is right before the market catches up

Signals first.
Context second.
Outreach last.

🧨 Hot take: Everyone claims that they have signals, but almost nobody uses them accordingly

Hear me out on this one 👇 

Everyone says they have signals and yet…sales teams still reach out by saying "congrats on your new role." 

That’s the real problem, as signals aren’t a checkbox. And you should not treat them as all equal.

Most people lump everything under “intent” and call it a day. In reality, signals look a lot more like a sales funnel:

🔶 Top of funnel - Evergreen signals

These tell you where money and movement exist.
Hiring. Funding. Acquisitions. Job changes.

They don’t mean “buy now” — they mean “pay attention.”
This is where you allocate focus and prioritize accounts.

🔶 Mid-funnel — Momentum signals

This is where it gets interesting, since you look for people engaging with competitors, your posts, or relevant conversations.

You need to look for every piece of context that will help you move closer to relevance.

🔶 Bottom-funnel — Product & CRM signals
 
Now your product, customer support and CRM take over

If nothing progresses from layer 1 → 2 → 3, the issue usually isn’t your product - It’s your targeting yet again

Lastly, signals are internal context since your buyer doesn’t care about the signal.

They care about their problem.
That’s the difference.

Be different, use signal-based prospecting with Signalbase

How often do you jump on calls just to discover there’s no budget?

If your answer is A LOT, I might have a solution for you👇

It’s called signal-based prospecting and as you can see bigger teams are starting to adopt it further (HubSpot)

But why? 

🔶 Buyers today are more educated than ever.
🔶 They’re overstimulated and only care about what’s relevant to them.
🔶 If your outreach isn’t aligned with their needs right now, it's considered spam.

Signal-based prospecting flips the old model on its head by start with evergreen signals at scale which helps reps to already get 80% of their foundation 

Example: If a company raises then they will likely hire more people, expand to new locations, get more tools, or at least reconsider their current systems

As next steps, teams should layer in firmographics to narrow their list and only then add custom signals to identify who’s truly in-market (and yes this solves the common objection of "everyone has the same signals"

The result? 

Less wasted effort & headcount, faster sales cycles, and outreach that actually lands. (check the screenshot with my message)

The future of GTM is here Signalbase

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Iliya Valchanov

Georgi Furnadzhiev

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The Battle

Iliya Valchanov

Georgi Furnadzhiev

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Posts

Engagements

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Iliya Valchanov's LinkedIn Performance

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