Cold and warm outreach

Phase 1 is 250 cold emails. Without this they land in spam and you burn the domain.

X, LinkedIn, Reddit, GitHub, Product Hunt, Discord, YouTube, Bluesky. Same name everywhere.

PNG, SVG, 1024×1024 square, favicon. Every directory form asks for a different one.

Even with nothing to send yet. The list you start today is the launch audience in Phase 2.

Separate domain or subdomain from marketing mail, so one cannot poison the other.

The list you are embarrassed to use is the list that converts first.

Pull them from people who described your problem in their own words in the last 90 days.

G2 and Capterra 2- and 3-star reviews are a list of people actively unhappy with the incumbent.

Hiring for the role, a new person in the seat that buys, a funding round, a migration announcement, a public complaint. Free places to watch: the Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby job feeds, SEC Form D filings, and the ad libraries. If what you sell replaces the role, one still open after two months is the strongest of all. A trigger from a year ago is not a trigger — date every one and drop the stale.

Problem, trigger, and whether you can actually reach them. Cut anyone failing the third.

Dead waitlists, a shut-down side project, the product that did not work. They already trusted you once, which is the expensive half, and nobody else can email them.

Pick the three accounts that already own your audience and read their comment sections: people mid-comparison, in public, for free. The signal decides who you write to — never what you write. “Saw you liked their post” reads as surveillance.

Association member lists, state licence lookups, or a Google Maps search by category and postcode, where the review count is a free size estimate. A licensed business is real and operating, and almost nobody else is writing to it from that list. Maps gives the phone number too: an owner who runs the business from a phone answers a call, not an email. In the UK a sole trader counts as an individual, who must agree before you email them, so call or write instead.

No template, no BCC. Ask for a reaction, not a purchase.

Name the two people you want. “Anyone come to mind?” gets nothing.

Trigger → one-line pitch → proof → break-up. Under 75 words each. Every email to US recipients carries your postal address and a plain way to opt out: CAN-SPAM makes no exception for business email.

Slow and warmed. A cold domain that blasts 250 in one morning is a dead domain.

Reference something they posted. Anything else reads as automation, because it is. On LinkedIn a free account can add a note to only a few invitations a month, so connect without a note and send the specific message once they accept.

A reply is a person who is interested right now, and that decays by the hour. The same replies produce different revenue depending only on whether someone answered in minutes or tomorrow.

A guessed or scraped list carries dead addresses, and a high bounce rate on a new domain is read as spam by the people you are trying to reach. Drop the unverifiable ones rather than hoping — the domain you are protecting is the one your invoices come from.