linkedin stopped my invites at about 100 in a week - worth the wait or put the hours into email

21% accept is fine for cold with no shared context. It drops fast if your headline reads like a pitch and rises a lot if it names the specific problem your buyer has.

The cap is real and it's a rolling seven day window rather than a calendar week, which people get wrong and then decide they've been shadowbanned on a Monday. The way to beat it isn't volume tricks, it's making each invite cheaper: comment on something they wrote first, wait a few days, then invite. Accept rate roughly doubles for me and the conversation starts warm.

Do the arithmetic on both before choosing. Email: no cap, you control volume, reply rates on a well-targeted 400 person list are single digit percent, and the list is exhaustible. The other: hard cap around 100 invites a week, but a connection is a durable asset - you post and they see it for years.

They're different shapes. If your buyer lives in that feed, the cap is annoying and the compounding is real. If your buyer is a lab manager or a plumber, you're fishing in the wrong pond entirely.

Four conversations a month from a channel you don't enjoy isn't a failure, it's a slow channel. My mistake was declaring a channel dead at month one. My second mistake was staying on one for a year out of stubbornness. Give it eight weeks with exactly one variable changed - I'd change the message, not the volume - then decide.

Don't pitch in the connection note. Don't pitch in the first message after they accept. Ask one question you would only ask someone with that job.

Nobody told me this: your profile is the landing page for this channel, and mine was still describing my day job. Changed the headline to name the problem, added one featured link to a two minute demo, and the accept rate moved noticeably within a couple of weeks.

I also stopped sending invites on Fridays after noticing almost nothing gets accepted over a weekend and it eats your rolling window for nothing.