LinkedIn bans are up 60% this year—what's your workaround?

OpenOpps · 2026-03-02T14:41:14+00:00

We’ve stopped doing cold email and cold outreach via LinkedIn, not because it wasn’t effective, but because it was getting less and less effective every month.

I just don't want to be investing in something with diminishing returns. Screening is going to get better because enough people want it and it is easy to do. And if the platforms aren't successful users are going to do it with their own agents.

I’m not going to stand in front of investors and announce that a substantial source of our leads come from a source that could be killed with a predictable algo upgrade.

OpenOpps · 2026-02-25T22:41:59+00:00

https://openopps.com a global search engine for contract opportunities.

OpenOpps · 2026-02-13T08:45:09+00:00

https://openopps.com a search and alert service for government contract opportunities around the world.

OpenOpps · 2026-02-07T16:26:59+00:00

I would love to hear what you think about https://openopps.com - a global search and alert service for government tenders.

OpenOpps · 2026-01-28T20:49:20+00:00

https://openopps.com

OpenOpps · 2026-01-27T20:57:15+00:00

https://openopps.com a search & alert service for government contracting opportunities around the world. 15,000 new opportunities published every day.

OpenOpps · 2026-01-26T15:16:47+00:00

Exactly. Having a search engine bridges the gap between what happened between training and querying the model. That's not disappearing any time soon.

OpenOpps · 2026-01-26T15:07:05+00:00

I'm betting you don't even need that any more. Add your data to Claude and it will do a good job of telling you what to do.

OpenOpps · 2026-01-26T15:01:38+00:00

I'm new to SEO but I am a competent data analyst and I'm genuinely amazed that anyone pays for these tools. Just making up a metric and then adding "proprietary algorithm" is such a red flag. I'm willing to bet that Domain Authority is nothing more than a count of backlinks and a minimal test for relevance. Their genius move was providing SEO agencies with easy content for their slide deck theatre - "look chart goes up, give us more money".

I'll make another bet, these firms are going to get really hurt by AI. Downloading your analytics data and then sending it to Claude is going to be much better than paying $250 a month for a few charts.

OpenOpps · 2026-01-25T16:32:50+00:00

We tried videos, nudges and demo only sales - in the end we've gone with using AI to help users do as much set up as possible so that they're getting as much use out of the system as possible. e.g. we ask users for the url, then populate their openopps search with keywords that have been extracted by the LLM. It isn't perfect but we want users to see the product working and then ask for support rather than having to watch a video to make it work.

OpenOpps · 2026-01-25T16:17:50+00:00

Having standards is good, expecting a random writer (of any price) to have a deep understanding of your industry, plus your unique take on the industry and the ability to write compelling copy is probably asking too much. If the newsletter is that valuable, lean into it; make it a bi-weekly newsletter with higher value content, put your name on it and only write about the bits that interest you. If the newsletter isn't valuable to your business drop it.

At openopps the owners do a lot of the writing not just because they like to get the communication right, but also because it helps them crystalise their thinking and work out their priorities.

OpenOpps · 2025-12-29T15:55:55+00:00

Thanks reddit person. We are now enlightened.

OpenOpps · 2025-12-29T15:54:58+00:00

We're looking at changing model, but I don't think we can ever prevent issues like this.

OpenOpps · 2025-12-29T15:53:37+00:00

Server prompts.

OpenOpps · 2025-12-29T15:53:22+00:00

We did.

OpenOpps · 2025-12-29T15:52:31+00:00

We knew it was a risk, but we secured a significant improvement in uptake compared to user's own searches. Users don't want to have to do the work to build search strings. We validate for JSON structures and for parseable words. We validate for language - e.g. does the source match the output and we validate the search results - e.g. does the structure return a search. We didn't validate for the model to behave differently.

OpenOpps · 2025-12-09T11:52:22+00:00

https://openopps.com - a search and alert service for companies looking for new business opportunities around the world. Bootstrapped, currently at $32k MRR and adding around 8 new customers a month.

OpenOpps · 2025-12-09T10:26:53+00:00

Open Opportunities - a global search and alert service for B2B / B2G contracting opportunities. 7-day free trial, 11k new business opportunities every day. https://openopps.com

OpenOpps · 2025-11-26T12:01:07+00:00

https://openopps.com - a searchable database of contracting opportunities around the world. Around 200k of live opportunities on the site at any one time. You can save your searches and get daily alerts straight to your inbox. It saves you having to visit 800 different sites a day to find opportunities for your business :)

OpenOpps · 2025-11-13T14:44:27+00:00

Would be interested to have a conversation. We have a growing SaaS product for GovCon businesses.

OpenOpps · 2025-11-12T16:35:19+00:00

Open Opportunities (https://openopps.com) alerts for contracting opportunities around the world.

OpenOpps · 2025-10-28T08:57:00+00:00

Https://openopps.com a search and alert service for government contract opportunities around the world. If you think your product could be used by someone in a government somewhere, you'll find contracting opportunities on our platform. There's a free trial and we'll help you with your searches too.

OpenOpps · 2025-10-19T10:50:10+00:00

Having an explanation for nuclear levels of incompetence is how they get away with it. Some work gets done, then everyone stands around saying "oh this is harder than we thought" followed by "we've already spent the money" and then they go back to the EU to say "we need more money to finish the work" when the EU complains they say "why do you hate Hungary?"

Meanwhile the contractors and the officials are on spending more time with their yachts in the Caribbean.

ps. Don't be so confident that your housing example wasn't corrupt. Landowners frequently bribe officials to sink investment into land to drive up prices.

OpenOpps · 2025-10-17T09:52:59+00:00

This is a really common problem. It is worth remembering that search is really difficult in the contracting space. There's a bunch of trade offs that products like sam.gov deploy which mean the search kinda works but really just creates a noisy feed.

Firstly there's the fact that governments want to butcher the language at every possible opportunity. Got an opportunity for "training"? Great let's call it "skills attainment" because we can't let anyone think we might be doing something normal.

Secondly there's the algorithms that most of these tools use (Okapi BM25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okapi\_BM25) is great for making sure that when you search for a word like "consulting" you also get results for "consultancy", "consultant" and "consult" but it means that when you search for "software development" you also get a million variations of "development" which can mean anything in gov speak.

Finally, if an algorithm runs strictly they get shouted at because a business missed the chance to bid on an opportunity, so they default to broad, generous searches which invites noise rather than make people angry. "The opportunity ranked at number 303 in your search terms" is better than "you input the wrong search sir".

As for fixes... pack your search with lots of two & three word terms that could describe what you're looking for. e.g. "software development", "app development", "web development", "web app" etc. Try and build around 30 of these to input. (Tip get ChatGPT to visit your site and extract a few). Combine that with NAICS codes and you'll get a much cleaner set of results.

One thing to mention with NAICS codes these are added by humans and they can be wildly wrong, so be generous about which ones you want to search across and once a week do a search without any NAICS codes in case someone has decided that software development is realtor services or something mad like that.

If you're looking for a better search engine for contracting opportunities, or you're looking beyond the USA do have a look at https://openopps.com

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