Re cold outreach: it depends. The bar is abysmally low, and most outreach is just an untargeted spam cannon. Don't be like those people.

If you manage to make the outreach warmer, it can work surprisingly well. I built a tool to identify high-intent leads on LinkedIn which gets me acceptance rates of 60%+ by finding people that comment on relevant content to my niche: https://www.getibex.com