Improved Response Rates With Warm Outreach - Lilly Chen, Founder & CEO at Brainstory

The Challenge

Lilly Chen is a former software engineer at Facebook Reality Labs who became a venture-backed founder when one of her side projects went viral. Her company, Brainstory, is an AI brainstorming tool with a product-led growth motion targeting developers, product managers, and designers at tech companies.

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As an eight-person startup with a PLG model, Lilly’s go-to-market was bottoms-up: individuals discover the tool, love it, and eventually their company wants an enterprise contract. The problem? She had no idea which companies her users actually worked for. Most signed up with personal emails.

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Cold outreach was a dead end. The response rate was so low it was demoralizing—and as a deeply technical, introverted founder, Lilly found the whole process painful.

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“It was so demoralizing sending cold emails that we actually had to stop doing it. That’s how low the response rate was. How many cold emails do you respond to? I don’t respond to any.”
— Lilly Chen, Founder, Brainstory

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She tried Segment, Google Analytics, Pendo, and HubSpot. Nothing gave her what she actually needed: knowing which companies were visiting her landing page.

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Enter Warmly

Lilly didn’t even know visitor identification was possible until a trusted friend—Warmly co-founder Max—told her to try it. She’d actually known about Warmly for years but never signed up because the landing page “felt too salesy” for her engineering sensibility.

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When she finally installed it, the first thing she saw was her own LinkedIn profile appear in the dashboard after visiting her own site.

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“I saw my own LinkedIn profile come up and my brain went: what the f*** is this? If you can do this for other people who show up on my landing page, you’re in business.”
— Lilly Chen, Founder, Brainstory

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Warmly solved Brainstory’s core PLG challenge: people sign up with personal emails, but Warmly reveals which company they actually work for. That lets Lilly’s team build relationships with the right people at the right companies—long before any sales conversation happens.

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The Results

The impact was instant. Brainstory maxed out Warmly’s free tier on the first day—their landing page gets heavy AI-curious traffic, and Warmly finally turned that anonymous traffic into actionable intelligence.

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Lilly’s team now sees tech companies visiting their site that they’d never reached out to before. They can identify which organizations have multiple users signing up, and start building relationships early—so when the enterprise conversation eventually happens, it feels organic, not salesy.

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“Getting a head start into knowing what company they work for allows us to build that relationship in advance. When we eventually talk about an enterprise contract, they’re like ‘Oh yeah, we’ve been chatting for months, they never tried to sell me anything.’ That’s what we want.”
— Lilly Chen, Founder, Brainstory

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For technical founders who are allergic to sales tools, Lilly has a message:

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“If you’re a tech founder, especially developer-first, you have that allergy to sales, maybe you’re a bit introverted like I am—try Warmly. You have to do sales no matter how much of an engineer you want to be. Warmly makes it so much easier.”
— Lilly Chen, Founder, Brainstory