Reaching Out to 100 People via DM and Email

May 3 2023 |

A month ago I had never had any success with cold outreach.

Today I’m behind on work for Tribe of Builders because of successful Twitter and email outreach.

Over a month I reached out to more than 100 people via DM and email. And so far this journey has been surprisingly positive. I received responses from day one. But I also made a bunch of mistakes.

In this post I’ll list some of my lessons learned.

Daily progress

I put daily progress over everything else. Reaching out drains my energy. So I focused on taking small steps every day.

I also did not want to spam Twitter as that may put my account in bad standing.

This graph shows how I reached out a few times daily:

Graph showing daily outreach progress over 30 days.

Most days I reached out to 5 people.

Some days I didn’t reach out at all.

Overall I failed my goal of reaching out 4 times a day. (A lesson for another day).

Positive vibes only

I have received nothing but positive vibes from the people I sent cold emails or DMs.

If people don’t like your outreach they’ll just ignore it.

So if you are scared of reaching out, give it a try. They won’t bite.

I have some social anxiety so reaching out was tough at times. But the more I did it, the easier it became.

Don’t take it personally

People will ignore you though.

And that is completely understandable. We all have too much going on.

You don’t know why they did not respond. So don’t take it personally. They may really like your offer but life is in the way.

I tried my best to not focus on one outreach but instead pay attention to the overall journey.

Be grateful 🙏

Be grateful for the people who do respond.

Focus on them.

Be grateful for their time and respect it.

Use templates

Create a template for every message you send more than once.

It will save you time and energy.

You don’t want to formulate a new response every time you interact with someone.

Here is one of the templates I used:

Hey,

I love what you are building and I would like to feature you in my new project:

Tribe of Builders. (https://www.tribeof.builders/)

It's a spin on Tim Ferriss's 'Tribe of Mentors' with a focus on interesting hackers, developers, and builders in general.

I just started the project but it has already been well received. If you are kind enough to answer a few questions I promise I'll do my best to spread your knowledge as wide and far as I can. 🙏

If you are interested let me know and I can send you the questions.

All the best,

Mat @ Curious.Builders

And another one once their draft was ready:

Here is the draft:

It goes live on _ unless you have any comments/suggestions/concerns.

Again, thank you for your time 🙏

Be human

I went too far on the template idea myself.

Don’t copy & paste your template directly without any modifications.

A message like that reeks of “mass outreach”.

Take some time to know who you are connecting with. And make that clear in your message.

Quality over quantity.

Build a system

I created my own outreach system for Tribe of Builders.

I’m in this for much more than just 100 people.

You should set up your own system too.

If you don’t, you’ll quickly end up lost.

Follow up

Once I had a system in place I had a systematic way of following up.

That boosted my success rate A LOT.

If people reply to your initial message but don’t act, follow up and see what is going on.

You may learn something about your product in the process.

Make it easy

This was my biggest improvement. By far.

In the beginning I just sent out my tribe questions directly once someone had agreed to answer. That put a lot of work on the guest. They pretty much had to figure out how to respond in a good way themselves.

So few people did.

After a bit I created a Google Document instead. With the questions and clear instructions on how to answer. And then I made a personal copy for each of the people I had reached out to and sent it to them.

With this they could now answer directly in the document and just ping me when they were done. My response rate increased after this. And so did the quality of the responses.

Make it easy for people to act on your message.

Once you have made it easy. Make it even easier again.