Ninja Outreach

Dave Schneider didn't set out to build a SaaS company. In 2012, while working as a business analyst at Capital One, he and his girlfriend decided to leave their corporate jobs and backpack around Europe and Asia. To fund the trip and stay connected with friends and family, they started a travel blog in February 2012, approaching it like a business from day one. Reading articles from Neil Patel and other growth experts, they applied blogging best practices including guest posting and content strategy. By the time they launched their actual trip in September, the blog was already gaining traction.

The blog eventually generated over six figures annually—more than enough to fund their travels and change Dave's perspective on digital business. But the real insight came from the manual effort required to promote their content: finding relevant bloggers, identifying contact information, personalizing pitches, and building relationships. This process was painfully unscalable.

After the travel blog proved the power of influencer marketing, Dave recognized an opportunity. There was no good software tool to help businesses find influencers at scale. Existing solutions like Google searches, BuzzSumo, and Follower Wonk could surface potential partners, but none aggregated the key metrics—Domain Authority, traffic, engagement, social shares, and contact information—in one place.

Dave built Ninja Outreach to solve this. The product pulls over 20 different metrics from APIs including SEO data (PageRank, Domain Authority), engagement metrics (Alexa, social shares, comments), and contact information. It integrates with email to allow one-by-one custom outreach rather than bulk sends. The emphasis was on scaling the grunt work while preserving the relationship-building aspect that actually drives results.

Dave practiced what he preached: he used influencer marketing to grow Ninja Outreach itself. Starting in January 2013, he launched a concerted influencer outreach campaign. Rather than cold emailing a massive list, he followed the methodology he teaches: finding relevant influencers, ranking them by engagement and relevance, engaging with their content first, then pitching partnerships.

He wrote guest posts on influential marketing blogs, coordinated product reviews, negotiated affiliate partnerships, and secured resource page mentions. The strategy worked immediately. Within the first month or two of the influencer campaign, traffic roughly doubled. By June 2013, just five months after launching the outreach push, Ninja Outreach was receiving approximately 9,000 sessions per month—all without paid advertising.

The influencer marketing playbook proved remarkably effective for Ninja Outreach. Dave emphasizes several tactics that moved the needle:

**Guest posting** worked because it positioned the founder as a contributor in the industry. He completed over 30 guest posts on relevant blogs, each sending qualified traffic.

**Product reviews** were particularly effective because they put the product front and center, unlike guest posts that just mention it in an author bio. Influencers were incentivized through free accounts and affiliate commissions (50% on some partnerships).

**Affiliate programs** created long-term partnerships rather than one-off mentions. Once an influencer signed up as an affiliate, they were motivated to mention the product in future posts, newsletter mentions, and resource pages.

**Relationship-building before the ask** consistently outperformed cold pitches. Dave engaged with influencers' content, commented thoughtfully, shared their work, and signed up for their newsletters before requesting anything. This primed them to say yes when the actual pitch arrived.

What didn't work: generic bulk emails with poor personalization. Dave contrasts his approach with rejected pitches that had typos, missing names, and no clear value proposition.

By mid-2013, Ninja Outreach had reached 9,000 monthly sessions almost entirely through organic influence marketing. The company continued to scale by staying deeply embedded in the influencer marketing world—using its own product to fuel growth while gathering insights that improved the product for customers.

Dave emphasizes that the product is a scaling tool, not a done-for-you service. Success still requires judgment, relationship-building skills, and strategic thinking. But for bootstrapped founders, the core strategy requires no paid budget—just thoughtful outreach, real value creation, and patience.