Week 7 - Making cold outreach warmer 🥶

To begin with, I’ve transcribed 10 episodes of the Creator Spotlight podcast, transcribed them, went to ChatGPT, and asked this for each episode:

After I’ve had 10 summaries, I asked this:

And here is what I’ve got:

I can’t say I learned a lot, but it definitely proved that I’m moving in the right direction, so from now on, I’m adding one more quick weekly task:
to transcribe a new episode and see if there is something interesting inside!

Also, I decided to work the same way with Simon Squibb’s business podcast because it’s not really worth my time listening to it, but I can still get a lot of value by transcribing and summarizing episodes!

Next, I met with Irina (when you finally ask who this Irina is, message me, and I’ll connect you 😉), and she told me about scorecards, which are an amazing way to score potential clients and invite them into your pipeline.

It’s like a quiz for your clients that will tell you if they’re really your clients, meet them where they are, and propose the best offer based on their current journey.

Let’s be honest, everyone loves “What kind of a unicorn are you?” tests 😁

So I’ll make my scorecard funny and engaging with really good results in the end, but I’ll do it a little later, so stay tuned 😁

Before that, I sent The Business Community Playbook to a few dormant leads and a few folks from the community world to help them connect the community with businesses, get their feedback, and spread the word a little bit about what I’m doing (yes, everyone needs some word-of-mouth marketing 😉😁).

Talking about word of mouth, while sharing this playbook with folks, I decided to really start building it publicly and share it openly on LinkedIn.

So, to avoid manual work and collecting emails, I’ve created a Gumroad account, a simple pdf carousel with Chapters of the playbook (to increase attention), and made this post on Linkedin (please support it if you haven’t yet 😊)!

Btw, the Gumroad account was easy:

• logged in using a Google account

• verified my email by receiving a code from Gumroad

• clicked “Create your first product”

  

• added name of the product

• chose “E-book”

• skipped price added 49 euros price (initially I decided to give it for free, but then remembered that free stuff is usually not valued, so after talking to a friend, I put 49€ price tag with the ability to stil get it for free if someone helps me spread the word - like, comment, and re-share the LI post)

• added description (asked chatGPT:

  “hey there, check this business community playbook, and please make me a quick description to add to Gumroad to highlight how it benefits people and encourage them to download it”

• customized the URL

• created the easiest cover image (1280×2720px), literally, with a CTA on a white background and a similar thumbnail (600×600 px)

• a one-sentence CTA of why people should download it

• number of pages

• a custom filed - number of chapters (why not? 😁)

• clicked “Publish”

• and voila, my first Gumroad product was ready! 🥳

Anyway, it was something I came up with by accident without even expecting (and already received good feedback and proposals to share this playbook with a broader audience), so let’s finally go to the cold outreach 🥶

Here is the action plan:

• use LinkedIn X-ray search to find startup and scaleup founders

• add their names, companies, titles, and LI links, and find emails using an email finder

• send them The Business Community Playbook using mail merge for Gmail with a CTA to connect on LinkedIn

So, let’s start with the X-ray search.

I decided to search for “Startup founders/entrepreneurs” with extra keywords “CEO, CMO, COO, tech, scaleup, community”, and… got nothing because it appeared to has AND operator, and there is definitely noone with all these keywords in their profiles 😅

So I changed AND to OR and tried again!

Next, I found thousands of startups in India, but I’m not sure they are my potential clients, so I refined the search once again using different locations, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Denmark, Germany, and Poland.

Since the tool I used for the X-ray search allows the use of only one location at a time, I made 10 requests and had 10 search links. I wanted to copy the first 10 results for each link and add them to Google Sheets.

However, this search gave me totally random people with about 10 connections, so I've checked each profile and added only those who matched my ICP and had at least 1000+ connections—a total of 12 people…

And that’s how I knew I did something wrong 😲

So I asked ChatGPT:

Here is what I’ve got, which is great and can help a lot with the search in the future:

All answers were pretty good, but Since Crunchbase is focused on startups, I chose it.

There I’ve created a trial account for 7 days and used their AI search to find what I needed:

This search gave me 313 results (after an extra filter for those who alreayd raised $1M+ it was 225), so I’ve just needed to copy-paste to my Google Sheet next info:

• title (cell A2)

• stage (cell B2)

• investments received (cell C2)

• lead investor (I have an idea to reach out to investors in the future, too 😏)

• website (cell F2)

• LI page

• description (cell H2)

And yes, I’ll be honest: I didn’t copy all 225 companies in a row because good is better than great. I’ll copy all of them later, but for now, I will test the next steps with what I have!

After that, I created a formula in Sheets that helps me to ask ChatGPT more easily and waited for the results :)

="Here is the company named "&A2&" that recently got "&C2&" in a "&B2&" funding stage. Here is a short description of what this company does: "&H2&".

Please analyze its website ("& F2&") and tell me:
1. Who are their customers?
2. How do they solve their problems?
3. What kind of a community can be built for them?
4. Who are their potential community members?
5. How can a community help them specifically grow their business?

And addittionally give me 3 most specific bullet points of how exactly a community can help specifically this company to achieve the best business results!

Thank you in advance! :)"

With that, I went to chatGPT, but I still needed to refine the first version, asking to make it less salesy and more human, and here’s what I’ve got (with a few human tweaks from my side 😁):

Okay, the email copy is ready, but I need email addresses!

To find founders, CEOs, owners, etc., I manually went to each company’s LinkedIn page and checked the people connected with it.

The fun note: that still works, but while doing that for seven times, I learned that you can simply add to LI’s search: “ “Company_name CEO” 😅

After that, when I had their name, surname, and company website, I went to Findymail (I had to create an account there to access only 10 free searches, so I’ll definitely check other tools in the future—if you know some, tell me ) and checked if it helped me find an email.

Sure, it didn’t find every email, but I’ve found 10 of 12 emails (and that’s totally good!), so let’s do the next step: cold emailing + connecting on LinkedIn! 🥳

But to be super honest - all the things before took rather a long time, and not doing them, but trying, testing, and finding the best way to continue doing it on a bigger scale!

So, sending emails will happen next week! Stay tuned for more insights into how it will work, and for now, I’m adding one more daily task: to find 10 emails of founders or CEOs 😉

Daily actions:

• invite 5 people to join the database of amazing humans

• find 10 emails of founders or CEOs

• read a self-development book/listen to a professional podcast for 15 minutes

• make a valuable post/comment on LinkedIn

• work 30 minutes solely on my business 😎

Weekly actions:

• transcribe one new episode of the Creator Spotlight podcast and learn something from it

• transcribe one new Simon Quibb’s video and learn something from it

If you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions, please 👇

And if you’d like to walk The Road To $1M+ Freelance Business with me 👇

See you next week! 👋