The Physics of Startups
Most 0-to-1 and product-market fit advice is a pile of things that worked for someone, once. This show is built on causal relationships, not tactics.
Rob Snyder has helped 50+ startups go from $0 to $1M ARR. He's the creator of the PULL framework and author of "The Power of PULL" which explains why customers buy and why some startups scale and others stall.
For VC-backed and bootstrapping founders who are tired of advice that sounds smart but doesn't work.
More about Rob: https://www.robsnyder.org
The Physics of Startups
Cold Outbound (from Rob's a16z talk)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Everyone's favorite topic - outbound!
Think about your LInkedIn or email inbox - what makes most cold outbound so bad? Rob breaks down what actually causes someone to take a meeting from a cold message, and what you are probably doing that's shooting yourself in the foot.
Rob introduces the "hierarchy of interestingness," a way to rank what's actually interesting to your recipient instead of what you want to tell them, plus the specific landmines that quietly kill response rates even when the core message is good.
Post: The Phenomenology of Cold Outbound
Links
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Ron, good to see ya. How you doing, man? Good. Good, good, good. How are you? I'm doing great. Uh, and today we uh you have given a gift to all of us who are constantly demanding insights into outbound because we're trying to generate meetings and you've got a formula that works. And I I know it's uh it's an act of sacrificial love for you to take any of your time to write about it. But uh, anyways, for the for the listener today, we're talking about LinkedIn Outbound, we're talking about cold calls, we're talking about email, um, and the upstream thing that uh that causes those to work, which I'm excited to dig into. Um Rob, just uh I laughed out loud when I when I read this uh part, the the way you open uh this week's uh blog, which is called the phenomenology of cold outbound, which um actually before I read that, Rob, what does phenomenology mean? I've been reading some haggle.
SPEAKER_00It's um it's uh experience.
SPEAKER_02The the okay, so the the Ivy League highbrow uh experience of uh of cold outbound. Uh but what you what you write here is uh when you receive the typical outbound message, your reaction is to shake with indignation. What kind of psychopath thinks it's okay to send something like this? Yeah, when you draft an outbound message that will elicit this exact same response from the recipient, your reaction is, heck yeah, baby, let's ship it. Which is I've, you know, looking back at some of my early outbound, it's like, wow, what in the world was I thinking? But anyways, Rob, uh I you've been thinking a lot about out um outbound lately. Why don't you give us the context on uh why it's on your mind?
SPEAKER_00Uh well, so everyone always asks me about outbound, like everybody always, and uh for some reason I don't I somebody asked us in the like private AMA for people who pre-ordered the book, like, why do you hate outbound so much? And I was like, you know what? That's interesting. I haven't thought about it. I don't know why. I actually don't know why the topic is annoying to me, but for whatever reason, the topic is annoying to me. And so I I've kind of like every maybe every year I'll write something new about outbound, or every six months I'll write something new about outbound. Um, because you know, like I do go about uh helping founders crack outbound, especially in the zero to one stage. And so I've I've learned things, I kind of like do things, we we iterate on things, and um, I just like every time I write about it, I want it to be the last thing I have to write about it. Uh last time we did pipeline megapost, which was my ultimate like, please stop asking. And I'm done. Yeah. There we go, done. Um, and then this time, um uh A16Z speedrun asked me to come give a talk, which is awesome about the book, about the and they're like, so the one thing we really want to focus on is outbound. It's just like great, cool. Um uh but anyway, the the uh the other thing I think it's it's an example of demand in the market. Like we we there is demand for outbound. I feel like if I if all I did was like I'm gonna help you craft your founder outbound message, like I would be a trillionaire. Um I don't want to. Uh the um but anyway, um, but yeah, and then I've also like people have been using AI Rob, it's a kind of limited release. And the first thing everyone does is is outbound message. So it's like, all right, whatever. Uh and so and so yeah, so this is just um the the the experience of doing this forced me to think a lot about what have I learned in the last year about outbound and what's what's my maybe a new way I can say things that I've been talking about before that will make it easier for you to do your own outbound and stop bothering me about it. And and so uh I came up with a couple new concepts. Um can't share the the official presentation, so this is like a um this is just like my my thinking after running through the presentation and uh and all that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and there's some really good ones in here. My my favorite that is uh a newly minted Rob Snyderism is the hierarchy of interestingness, uh, which we'll get into here in a second. Um, but why don't we start with uh what you write here, like kind of a foundational element of this, you write perhaps the most difficult part of outbound is that it requires you to treat the recipient as the main character. Um Rob, why don't you give the context on like what are you what are you communicating by treating them as the main character? And how does that contrast with the way that we typically approach it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we we usually come to doing outbound. In our minds, it's like, cool, I'm doing outbound to convince them to meet with me to buy my product. And those are my goals. That's treating myself, me, as the main character here. And when you come at it from that direction, you by default approach it in a way that guarantees you get none of the results you want. Because if I'm coming at this from a kind of transactional, here's what I want lens, how good is my message going to be? And it would be weird if that message happened to resonate with you, the recipient.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. One of those instances where it's like, you can accidentally do that if you find pool that's strong enough. Um, but uh, especially early on before you know what pull is, uh a tough, tough place to start. Um yeah, you know, you you write that a couple things that founders um uh often take with their outbound early, um is that it's to convince someone to buy your product or to see if they have relevant pain points or problems. You know, I I think the first one you just hit on like why outbound is not to sell. Why is it not to see if they have relevant pain points or problems?
SPEAKER_00Because that's not the point of the message. The point of the message is to get somebody to meet with you. The and so the yeah, maybe if you send a message uh about pain points or problems across, they will meet with you. But you're optimizing for something that isn't relevant here. And so by default, like think of there's a set of things that will cause people to meet with you. Just like imagine a kind of like circle. Well, in inside this circle, there is a set of things that will cause somebody to meet with you, and then there's a totally different circle that is pain points and problems that you can communicate. And there may not be any overlap between those two circles. You're like, it's just like it's not guaranteed that there is. And so when you fo it you want to focus on the circle where success is within the the bounds of the likely bounds of the odd of the circle. And and and you know, so focusing on the wrong thing, it just you succeed only by getting lucky.
SPEAKER_02You know, there was uh you've written in the past about how you often uh when you focus on the wrong thing, you'll send messages that are just offensive to people. I got one of those the other day that it just pissed me off for like an hour. And I thought about responding to the person and being like, this is the like biggest outbound turnoff that I have ever received. But then I was like, I'm just gonna, I I hate this person, so I'm just going to block them and hope that it makes it harder for them to send outbound in the future. But it was like kind of the it did hit a pain point and it hit it in such an insensitive way that I was like, I hate, I hate, I literally hate you. I would never talk with you. Um but hey, Rob, you you talk about um uh I'm I'm gonna pull up a graphic that you have uh in the in the post and you talk about what uh in cold outbound, what causes and what prevents somebody from uh meeting with you? And you you give a rundown here. I just want to hit a couple of these, um, you know, just running through the list and then we'll choose one or two. Uh things that prevent people from uh meeting with you. AI slop, uh any anything that Claude gives you. Let's get let's come back to why Claude does it wrong, does it wrong confidently? Um and then bearing the lead, uh, meaningless personalization, um, uh info about what you want, nothing about what uh the prospect wants, um saying dumb nonsense like I'm not selling anything, seeming like an average sales rep. Um, Rob, which ones of these do you see most frequently? Um, and you know, what's going on with them?
SPEAKER_00So before like we need to get to this point because there is a very, very important thing here that is like that that is upstream of this. So our goal, remember, we're drawing the circle of like what causes people to meet with you? That's the goal of the message, is to design a message that that gets people to meet with you. It is not to talk about pain points, it's not to talk about problems, it's not to sell your product, it's not to do any of those other things. If you optimize for those other things, okay, great. But but now that we have this kind of circle, we have to say, okay, what are the boundaries of this circle? What makes what happens, what causes this circle to work or to not work? And what I've realized is that there are kind of two elements at the highest level, there are two elements to a message. There is what uh causes them to meet with you, and then there are a series of things that, if included, will prevent them from meeting with you. So there are things the a cause is much more important than something on the prevent list. Because if there is not a cause, no matter what else you do, they will not meet with you. But if there is a very strong cause, and there are a couple things from the prevent list, they might still meet with you, but but but but like just solving like you have to you have to first figure out what the cause is and then avoid the things that prevent them meeting with you. And so that's the like that's the that's the big thing that I have realized here, and that every single message that you send has a theory underneath it, it has a theory of what's going to cause this person to meet with me. And so when you read out any one of these messages, typically, the underlying theory, if you ask yourself, okay, what is my theory about why I think you will meet with me, that theory is almost always, I think you will meet with me because I'm the main character and I want to meet with you. Which, again, if we think about the circle, what's gonna cause them to meet with you? That's not likely. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. You know, I was I really like this idea that you introduce here. You know, this is basically it's as simple as I believe you will meet with me because blank. I've I've actually taken that and pasted into the the uh document that I use when I'm running the pull sprints, um, because I craft outbound, you know, that the outbound is tied to the hypothesis, it's tied to the person you're reaching out to. It's tied, um, and so I, you know, I I try I'm trying now to make myself explicitly finish that sentence. Yes. Um, and also reflecting back on some of my early, early outbound, and like I was like, okay, what was I implicitly, what was I thinking? And um, you know, for me with with Cumbray, we have an impact side, we have a, you know, there's the business side, there's marketing side. I think my it evolved from, I believe you'll meet with me because of the positive impacts we're having in the world, which turns out almost nobody will meet with you for. Um, it moved to uh because of these impressive things that we're doing. Um, and that also, I think it was headed in the generally right direction, but it was also wrong because it turns out it wasn't really all that impressive. I think, and I don't know, there's like more diamond dozen. And then it came this third one, which has like really improved, was I think you'll meet with me because there's something different and interesting we're doing that you can help us shape. And that's like there's there's something in that angle, which it has some of the same elements as the like quote unquote impressive things, but it's more about like they're able to bring their expertise into it. But it, you know, it's tied to you know going through that exercise of thinking about it has helped me refine uh you know what's the what's the right approach.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, cool. And like a jump uh jumping from there. Okay, so that's on the cause side. What's going to cause somebody to meet with you is that you have a theory of what's going to cause them to meet with you. I believe you will meet with me because blank. Now, there's a bunch of possible things that could fit in the blank. And so that's where the hierarchy of interestingness comes in. Um better terms, welcome. I love it. I think it's I think it's awesome. Yeah. Do you want me to pull up the graphic? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pull up the graphic. So, so the way, so um this isn't quite right, but it's directionally right. Like they will meet with you if it's interesting enough for them to meet with you. If there's something in the message that makes it interesting enough for them to meet with you. Again, that's not exactly it's basically if if something in the message will cause them to meet with you, they will meet with you. But that that gets so it could be the hierarchy of causes if we want to be super precise, but I don't know. I like interestingness because it it's it's more fun. Um, but okay, so just imagine that there are a laun, there's like a list of things that are interesting to your potential customer. And some of those things are about you, some of those things aren't about you. There's just like there's a there's a list of things that are that are some level of interesting. And then we force rank them into a hierarchy of what's most interesting to what's least interesting. Now, somewhere on that list, there is a line below which it is not interesting enough to cause them to meet with you. That's the hierarchy of interestingness. So if your theory falls anywhere below that line, it would be weird if they meet with you, even if you craft a nice message. If it falls above that line, they they the cause is present. You can still, with the rest of your message, shoot yourself in the foot, but at least it's interesting enough for them to meet with you. And the things that are on that list, again, it's not necessarily pain points or problems or ROI or anything like that. It could be that you were a plumber one summer. Like it could be a variety of my favorite outbound message ever is um hey, Snoop Dogg invested in us. I thought you'd find it interesting too. Would you be open to chat? Right? That that is there's nothing about the product in there. There's no personalization in there at all. There's nothing, but it's interesting enough for them to meet with you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. That that was one of the things that was jumping out to me while I was uh you know looking at this. And I I think it's or the the the fact that it is not tied to value, um, like specifically, like it's it's almost like divorce your brain from the value proposition and like you like you mentioned, just focus on you know what's gonna what's gonna cause a meeting or a response. Um, you know, Rob, like here you you run through some and it's you know there are examples. I imagine this is every founder has to, or every person that's doing outbound has to go through this themselves and like it may it is the way they should do this like make a list of the things and then just try to put them in order? Like how how would they how do you come up with a first set and then try to you know figure out what's gonna work?
SPEAKER_00I mean you could you could just like YOLO guess it if you want. Um, and and that's probably fine. You write out the list. And again, the list is not for what you think is interesting about yourself, it's about what your potential customer thinks is interesting. So if you're selling into plumbing companies, they're not gonna know what speed run is. And they're not gonna know what a founder or be impressed. Yeah, they're not gonna care about any of that. And so don't, yeah, like focus on your so again, this is the way you figure this out, the same way you figure everything out. When you follow the no speculation rule, which we covered, don't guess. Go go in person, do the thing, find find first hand um uh uh answers uh to this. Don't don't and like without pound, you can kind of just set up campaigns and yellow it, but um you know if when you're wrong, when you're wrong, you get no feedback, and so you can't iterate from from from a point where you're getting no feedback. And so yeah, so it's like, I don't know, you can guess, but what one thing I've seen people do is there's two tactics I've seen be useful. Go in person with potential customers and have them show you the outbound they actually receive and have them talk you through like what pissed them off, what didn't what stood out to them, what they responded to, what didn't. Um and then the other one is find people who have sold into your same customers. Former sales reps, former whatever, they love to share their say their like tactics and messaging and things that work for them. Um just they like to brag about it. And so you can allow them to do that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Uh uh another one that I've started doing is like, or that everybody should do at the start of the message, just like really pay attention to the first question you ask, like why did you take this meeting? Yeah, and have that tied directly to the outbound. Um, you know, was there something in the message that jumped out to you? And then, you know, some of them, I actually had one that I think took me in the wrong direction. Um, but in general, they'll start telling you in themes that uh you know you should pay attention to from their from their context. Um and I, you know, another one, I think something I love about being in the founder community, Rob, um, is that when we do these teardowns and we see other examples, it's like, oh, that's cool. Like what I had never thought about. And so just like see, even from totally different industries, seeing what kind of outbound is working and what are the elements and why why is it working?
SPEAKER_00And the other thing you can do too is you can look now you now with the hierarchy of interestingness and the list of landmines that we're gonna get to in a second, you can look at other outbound templates online and stuff and just laugh at them. Uh but it's not gonna help at all, but it's gonna make you feel a little better. Uh, and so I recommend doing that.
SPEAKER_01Let's hit okay.
SPEAKER_02So the the second thing that you've coined in this one, the laundry list, the prevent you call them the preventers, the laundry list of land vines. Um and here's how you write about it in general. Uh uh, when you know what causes someone to meet with you, focus your message on that thing and get everything else out of the way. Um, and then you give three examples here, kind of like broad buckets of them. Uh the first one is non-salesy, salesy things. Uh, just want your feedback, not selling anything, no pitch. I know you're busy. Um, the second one is anything Claude drafts. Um let's let's hit that a second. And then the third one is personalization for the sake of showing you did research, which is uh that is my outbound uh version of giving the ick. Um but what would you uh say? Maybe let's take that first one. I I've done all these. Like I've there is like, you know, I I think probably a lot of folks are gonna hear things that they've done. What why do things like just want your feedback and not selling anything? Like, what's going on there that that those things are actually preventers instead of uh yeah, like causes?
SPEAKER_00So these are these are basically saying I, the main character of the universe, want to meet with you and am not selling anything, so therefore you should meet with me. Right? Like just think of how absolutely egotistical that comes across as. And we that's it's the exact kind of thing because we're focused on our goals, we read that and we're like, oh yeah, we got and then the other person on the other side's like, who the heck is this? Like, they want to pick my brain, cool, go away, right? And they just like close, you know, uh put Mark as spam or whatever. And so it's yeah, it's it comes back to like, what's the theory of this message? This is a theory, but if you don't, if you're not thinking of the theory of this message, this is going to sound acceptable to you. It's gonna feel like you're being gracious and generous and just asking for feedback.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I I think with that one, there's an element that's like, I already don't believe you. Like you're going through the trouble of doing outbound.
SPEAKER_00Like I not selling anything is like the stupidest line ever, or like no pitch. It's like I know what comes after that. It's a pitch. It's trying to sell something. I know it. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02This the second one here is anything Claude drafts. Do you know why uh why Claude just swings and misses on Outbound?
SPEAKER_00Um yes. Uh so so the joke here is that like is that like by default, Claude is gonna write you a message that sounds good and gets a 0% response rate just as punishment for your your um not thinking for yourself. Uh the actual reason is something that's been interesting with me as I've been building AI Rob. And like a bunch of people have created their own AI Robs who then use the official AI ROB to like, wow, this is way better. And what it turns out is that Claude will basic can basically f follow any number of reasoning paths. Just any number of reasoning paths out there. And so if you say draft an outbound message that's not salesy, there are infinite reasoning paths that Claude could take down that road. And and so it's by default going and and within that. Path. Within those infinite options, there are a couple where it actually develops this kind of thinking that we've talked through. But it's so unlikely that Khan will choose those reasoning paths that it by default drafts a message that is horrible while seeming, well having the appearance of being good. And so the reason that AI Rob actually might be a thing is because, and it's not, it's like better than just ingesting all of the kind of materials, is because when you ingest all of the blog posts, all of my book and everything, it turns out it does not install very strict reasoning rules there. So it gives Claude the ability to go towards the infinite on the reasoning path and go down something that is a plausible but wrong path. And so unless you really strictly put rules in for Claude that will say X is more important than Y is more important than Z, and like here's how to think about it, then you're gonna wind up with something that sucks.
SPEAKER_02That's fascinating. We're gonna have to dissect in greater detail at some point. Maybe when uh AI Rob is like fully, fully public. Is it is it fully public? Is it accessible for no uh no, not yet? We're kind of like baiting it with a smaller, uh, smaller group of folks. Um I I love it, so everybody stay stay tuned. Um uh okay. Let's not hit the let's let's not slow down for the personalization for the sake of showing you did research. I think everybody's probably received messages that were awkwardly personal and like artificially personal.
SPEAKER_00We got ones for this podcast. Your recent podcast with RC talked about blank. I was like, I know I was there.
SPEAKER_01They're probably pitching you on. You you know your reach could be seven times better with a better co-host.
SPEAKER_00Like, yeah, I don't need six more people to listen to this.
SPEAKER_01Good. Um yeah, you know, you're right.
SPEAKER_02So uh, you know, the the method here that that you propose for folks is come up with a theory, just to recap real quick, come up with a theory of why they will meet with you centered on their heart hierarchy of interestingness, uh, and then write a message that fully embodies that theory. One thing, Rob, to to hit here, how long should these messages be?
SPEAKER_00Wrong question. They should be as long as is appropriate. That's the point, is when you have all like all of these tactics. This is my frustration with everything related to business like best practices out there, is that we're like when you ask a question, like not you specifically, but when somebody asks a question like that, when just like a random moron asks a stupid question like how long should a message be? Um But but that's a downstream question. The the upstream thing. So if, for example, your your theory of what's most interesting to them is the fact that you worked with every relevant nonfiction business author, well, your message is going to list out all of the relevant popular nonfiction business authors, and it's going to be long. And that's fine. If your message has a different theory, it's going to be something else. So it's it is the appropriate length to embody the theory that you have about what's most interesting to them, not less and not more. Often it's shorter than what you typically write, but it's not by default short.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. The, you know, there's some elements that you're you're frequently cutting out of mine or cutting out of other people's, is like the introduction. Like there's there's something there about communicating quickly. Yes, what's the thing in the in the list of interestingness? It's almost like what's gonna get them to read or to continue like reading their stuff and not just completely shut down. Um, but I hear you on the uh on the great response to a stupid question. Um let's let's hit templates real quick. Everybody, uh we're not gonna uh Rob includes in this post uh a this is a great reason for everybody to pull it up. Templates um uh for LinkedIn outbound, for uh outbound email sequences and for call scripts. Um uh you know, maybe Rob, are any of those you want to hit real quick? I've got a question or two on LinkedIn, which is mostly where I'm I'm at personally with mine, but anything you want to hit on either any of the three.
SPEAKER_00No, the only reason I include templates in here is because if I don't include templates, you're gonna ask me for templates in the comments, and I don't want to have to deal with that. And so um, and so don't just use these templates, use them as ways to think and then write your own message, do your own own version of them. Um yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, uh maybe one on LinkedIn. You great, uh you recommend the empty connection request. Is that a hard rule? Or how you know how why do you do that? And yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh so uh whenever you send a connection request with a message, it is almost always interpreted as this person is selling me something. Now, um, and so I've seen hundreds and hundreds of startups, and I can think of exactly two cases where the connection request in the message or the message in the connection request worked better than an empty request. Um, and so you should just assume that 90 something percent of the time a message in the connection request will not help and actually will hurt everything.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And it's uh uh instead of the message in the request, which I've done at times, now I do the empty ones because I figured it doesn't work. Uh I think what I was doing wrong actually when I felt like I needed to include it in the message was my the the bio, I guess is that what you call it, uh was not properly uh communicating what I was trying to put into this. So you can usually you can do it in a couple words there. Or if you think, okay, they're gonna click on my uh on my profile and read about me, like just make sure your quote unquote LinkedIn landing page is uh interesting enough to cause them to accept it or to meet with you. Um you know, Rob, one other thing that you hit here and then we'll and then we'll wrap is uh targets. And you've got some really uh, I would say like interesting and directionally helpful uh targets here with you know with cold calls, uh one to two percent of your of calls uh uh leading to a meeting, uh emails three to five percent, but you say it varies wild uh wildly. Um and then LinkedIn, I think if you do the math, it's something like seven to ten percent, like it going through the going through the the sequence of accept and then respond and then response that leads to meetings. Why are they different across the three? Or how should maybe uh instant actually before that, um how should people think about targets and what they should be, you know, trying to reach?
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, I mean I could I could have done more here, but I but I didn't want to. And so the um way to think about targets is that um these are rough ballparks for what good looks like that you can then compare yourself against and say, okay, cool, I have a 30, I have a 29% acceptance rate. Good is 30 to 40, or like average is like 30 to 40 percent, but I only have a 1% reply rate of people who connect with me. And so I don't know if that's good or not. Well, okay, that's actually really bad. And so if I focus on things that will make my acceptance rate increase from 29% to 35%, but my message reply rate is still 1%, that won't matter at all. So instead, I can focus on the the constraint, the bottleneck. And instead say, okay, base based on this, if I go from 1% to 25% reply rate, well, that's 25x the like number of meetings or whatever I will I will get. That's the bottleneck, therefore I can target that. Um and then just like generally, I just uh it emails hard like LinkedIn is useful because you can see the kind of like in-between steps between like, and so you can kind of like debug more clearly. You can also do that with cold call with like connection rate, pitch rate, like all these other things. Just didn't feel like putting those in. Email, um uh email is also uh email is tougher because you tend to want to turn off open tracking uh so that deliverability improves or or whatever is what I've heard. Again, I'm not a cold email expert, but um, so there's not really there's some sort of reply rate, some sort of meeting rate on that. But um that and you can just like blast out a ton of volume on email. You could email everybody in the world next week if you if you really wanted to.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02I think eventually you're gonna start going into spam folders. What one thing you've you've said with that one is make sure you're not or you have like a separate domain that you're using for your cold outbound so that you don't poison your uh your primary. Um uh well and and maybe one one other question, Rob, how do they choose? Like, how should somebody how does somebody know if cold calling is the right way to approach, if emailing, if LinkedIn, if it's a combination of the three, you know, increasingly like WhatsApp or or other communication media, like how how should people know that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I tend I tend to try to, again, we try to avoid the whiteboard here as much as possible. And so what I'd say is like go find somebody who has sold into your end customer, as like a startup that has sold into your same target end customer and figure out what they did early on and um and do that. I'd say basically everybody has some percentage of the audience that is actually on LinkedIn, even if you're selling into HVAC, even if you're selling into like some random local business, some percentage of them are on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is easy to get started on. And so, and and also if you're the kind of person who listens to this, you're obviously uh uh attractive and intelligent and but like your LinkedIn profile is likely interesting, and the other that doesn't come through on a cold call or an email. So you'll you actually have some alpha on LinkedIn relative to the dingos who don't listen to this.
SPEAKER_02I I include a link to my personal portrait portfolio in my cold outbound on uh on email, just uh so that anybody have to do it. Your modeling picks. Yeah, that's great.
SPEAKER_01Um well, I'm thinking of the George Costanza.
SPEAKER_02I don't know if you're a Seinfeld fan, but he he does a modeling photo where he's just like reclined without a shirt on. Anyways, the big thing. That's uh anyway, uh Rob, why don't we uh why don't we wrap here? Is there are there any other thoughts on how founders should apply this, uh uh apply these lessons or yeah, what what they should do with it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean like it try this. Um do like actually think through it, try it. Um we I I think like the go-to-market accelerator thing that we're doing in September is going to be good, or we're kind of like we're gonna be one-on-one. I actually will, as much as I it pains me to do so. I I spend a lot of time on this with people, and like it's it's very interesting when we're focusing on one individual person. Not very interesting when like lecturing in the abstract about it. Um, but but yeah, so consider those things as well.
SPEAKER_02Honestly, they're great. And what what we or what you've done in the past uh with the Go to Market Accelerator is like one of the sessions is specifically about outbound, and what you have everybody do is like they basically submit their outbound and you do teardowns of their messages, you pull up their LinkedIn profiles, and you're saying, like, okay, this doesn't make sense, this looks great, move this up. Um, and it ends up there's been some pretty amazing transformations, basically, like where there was a pre somebody that was just totally there was a huge bottleneck in post, they're like, Awesome. Like, I'm getting like 10 meetings uh a week.
SPEAKER_00The cool thing about this is it's kind it is kind of wizardry. Like it's like you're do you can be doing all the right things with the wrong message and you'll get zero. Yeah. And if you just change, if you just kind of like develop this theory on the hierarchy of interesting and design a message accordingly, like you go from zero to very much non-zero, changing nothing else, which is really it's like it is kind of cool in that way. So maybe I will uh change my my mind on outbound eventually.
SPEAKER_02I love it. I think it's fascinating. And uh and I also like seeing other people's reactions uh to it because the other founders are in there participating, giving feedback, and there's some really insightful things that they're bringing from their own industries. Um, but anyways, why don't we uh we'll leave information about the go to market accelerator, about uh working with Rob um and uh the the link to Rob's substack in the show notes. And if there's nothing else, uh Rob, why don't we uh uh wish the best for everybody in their outbound journey and we'll catch everybody next week.