Zaid

You can have the perfect script and still lose the call. The thing nobody really tells new founders is that prospects arent listening to your pitch the way you think. Theyre reading your tone, your pace, the pauses you take before naming the price. They decide whether you actually believe in what youre selling within the first few minutes of you talking. Confidence on a sales call isnt about being loud or persuasive. Its about sounding like someone whos solved this problem a hundred times and isnt anxious about whether they buy. The script matters way less than how you sound saying it.

Your outbound wont land by sounding professional. "Dear Jack, I hope this email finds you well. I'm reaching out regarding our innovative solution..." Nobody wants to read that. Jack doesnt even want to read his own emails, let alone yours when it opens like a corporate apology letter. Now compare with: "hey jack, saw you crushing it with ABC, thought you might wanna hear this..." Same offer. The difference in reply rates is wild. Ours are around double the industry average for exactly this reason. The thing most people miss is that "casual" doesnt mean "lazy". The second version is still personalised, it references their actual company, uses their first name like a friend would, and gets to the reason youre reaching out without ten lines of throat-clearing first. Implied personalisation hits way harder than a custom paragraph about how youve been following their work for months (which everyone knows is fake anyway). The actual rules I use: - Drop "Dear" and use "hey [firstname]" - Cut every word before the actual point (no "I hope this finds you well", no "I'm reaching out regarding") - Reference something specific theyre doing, not generic compliments - One clear ask, no double questions - Sign off like a person, not a vendor Run your last cold email through one filter: would you say this out loud to someone at a meetup? If no, rewrite it before you send another batch.

Honestly the hardest thing about being early in business is filtering content. Every YouTuber selling a "cold email blueprint", every Twitter guru offering "$10k month playbooks", every podcast claiming theyve cracked outbound. Most of it is just repackaging things you already know in a fresher hook. What actually moved the needle for me was paying for 1-2 people whod actually done the thing, and doing the work for ~6 months straight without checking what anyone else was doing. Hard to do when the algorithm keeps showing you new ways to "level up".

@danieldwalton ❤️

@ZaidAD_ dropping whole game thanks for this man 👊

How to not add 10k to your revenue next month: 1. Spend 3 weeks perfecting your offer instead of sending the first email 2. Pitch "AI automation" instead of a specific outcome 3. Use the same email copy for every niche 4. Charge $500/month because youre "still building reputation" 5. Stop following up after one email

I see most agencies pitch like a job application instead of a sales pitch. "We offer cold email services. We have experience with X, Y, and Z. We use Apollo and Instantly." It just reads like a CV. The pitch that actually closes is "I book 15-20 sales meetings a month for marketing agencies". Specific outcome. Specific niche. People dont buy what you do. They buy the outcome they can stop worrying about.

@jimheskel Know your buyers problems more than they know them

Most creators position around themselves. What they like. What they know. What they feel called to share. Business owners position around the buyer. What hurts. What costs money. What needs fixing. That's why they get paid.

@scaling_shields Always keep your email short, especially now with all the AI slop in cold emails people receive.. theyll appreciate a short upfront email

i spent zero minutes writing the email that generated a client $255,000 in pipeline not joking it was a 5 line template a 12 year old could have written every operator on this app is in a google doc agonising over their opener like its a netflix script heres the take that ends that whole industry: the prospect NEVER grades your writing he grades your offer in about one second and decides if the risk is worth a reply your beautiful 6 sentence email with an average offer always loses to a plain one with an offer he cant say no to the accounting firm campaign that did $255k: - 36,771 emails - 1.1% reply rate - 253 opportunities - $255,000 in pipeline - 91 calls booked in 62 days heres the literal script structure we used, copy it: "hey {{firstname}} {one line opener that proves you know who they are} {the irresistible offer in one sentence} {one low friction CTA} james" thats the whole email no story or clever hook was needed the only line that did any work was the offer line everything around it was packaging the prospect never read an offer like "we book you 10-30 qualified calls a month and you only pay for the ones that show up" does not need beautiful prose wrapped around it it carries itself. an average offer like "we help agencies scale with cold email" cannot be saved by the best copywriter alive you can perfect that sentence for a week and the prospect still has no reason to reply operators spend 90% of their time on the 10% that doesnt move the email was never the product. the offer is.

@NickAbraham12 if ur offer genuinely adds value, any sort of targeted outbound will work

I know a guy selling slot machine placements to gas stations in Chicago with nothing but cold calling. His entire outbound operation costs less than $1,000/mo. Here's how it works: The offer is dead simple. A gas station or bar owner gets a slot machine placed in their location for free. No cost to them, no equipment to buy, and no maintenance. It keeps people in the store longer and they get a cut of the revenue every month. This is the definition of a no-brainer offer. The cold call sounds like this: "Hey, do you have a slot machine at your gas station?" "No." "Would you be interested in one? No cost to you, we handle everything, you just collect a revenue split." "Sure, tell me more." The SDR doesn't need deep product knowledge. They literally just let the offer do the work. The operation goes: 1. Pull a list of gas stations and bars in Chicago 2. Hire one outsourced SDR 3. Put them on Salesfinity to dial through the list Total cost is under $1,000/mo Nobody else in his space is running organized outbound. Riches in the niches.

@AlexHormozi its worth sitting down and actually reflect on what u want

Nothing makes you more dangerous than figuring out exactly what you want.

Find a boring problem in a boring niche. The kind nobody wants to post about. That's where the money is. Everyone is fighting over AI agents for coders. Meanwhile dentists are paying $5k a month for someone to answer their phones. Pick boring.

Honestly the AI agent space right now feels like the early app store. Tons of new tools dropping every week, everyone claiming theirs is "the future of work", and 90% of them will be gone in a year. The ones that stick around will be the boring ones solving boring problems. Lead enrichment, calendar parsing, email triage. Not the flashy "autonomous agents that replace your team" pitches that demo well but break the second you actually use them. Most of what I've built that actually saves me time is unsexy.

The hardest thing about building anything alone is staying accountable to yourself. The fix is finding a community, a business partner, or one person working on the same thing as you. We do this at our agency through a Discord channel where every day we log what we got done. Sounds simple but its made a real difference. Helps us catch stuff like: are we making the most of our time, or are we just busy with things that dont actually matter? Are we both pulling in the same direction? Accountability isnt really about pressure. Its about having someone notice when youre slipping before you do.

Honestly the biggest productivity shift for me has been blocking out 2-3 hours focus sessions for specific tasks. No Slack. No email. No "quick check" on Twitter. Just the one task. Most days I get more done in those 2-3 hours than I used to do all day.

Your follow-ups dont have to be boring. @AlexHormozi recommends using a Kevin Hart gif as your follow-up. The point isnt the specific gif, its that the second message can be literally anything as long as it sounds like a person sent it. Most people copy paste "circling back on this!" and wonder why nobody replies. A 4 word message with an emoji 😅 will get more replies than that every time. Send the meme. Send the gif.

Honestly I dont really get why agencies are still paying for LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Used it for a while at Synteria and moved everything to Apollo + Airscale plus some organic scraping for the gaps. Combined stack pulls better data and costs way less.

The difference between founders who win and founders who dont is honestly way smaller than people think. Its not skill, not capital, not even ideas usually. Its just whether you can sit down and do the boring repetitive part of the work for 6+ months without quitting. Send the cold emails. Post the content. Build the system. Iterate when it doesnt work the first time. Most of the people Ive seen quit honestly quit way earlier than they should have. Usually right before something would have clicked.