Direct outreach is pretty much the only way to get your initial customers. If you have warm connections, use those, sure. But those can be a false signal as warm connections tend to talk to you or feign interest just to be nice. A cold contact owes you nothing, so if they do take the meeting or engage in your product, that's a lot stronger signal.
Anyone have a business they built without using direct cold outreach? Would love to hear alternatives
I have a brimming spam folder full of people who are “just communicating their offering directly to people who may be interested.”
Sometimes these people are apparently elderly or alzheimers sufferers who don't have the cognitive ability to distinguish spam from official sources, and are easily exploitable.
I imagine the worthless specimens sending these emails have intricately woven strands of faecal material in their cell nuclei instead of DNA.
Is everyone who sends cold email seeking to exploit this group? Is everyone who sends cold email seeking to exploit?
Clearly not. That is why the sentence begins with "Sometimes".
Right, but the people who sent those mails -- what reason do they have to think that you're interested in <checks spam folder> orthapedic multizone mattresses, Microsoft teams room equipment, or a talk about Amber Engebreston's transition from Supply Chain Manager at Chipotle to her current role?
(OK, that last one was a weird.)
If, on the other hand, you've posted a job opening for someone to do direct marketing, there's a good chance your company sends cold emails; in which case, maybe you'd like to outsource some of that work to make it more effective.
The thing I dislike about spam is the offloading of filtering from them to me. But if someone has actually put in effort to figure out what I personally might actually want, I'm a lot more willing to take a look.
What kind of campaign messaging? How did you define success? Were you getting no replies at all?
"Use a VPN and inbox warming techniques to hide from Gmail the fact that you're doing bulk emailing" is pretty scummy.
Because you can skip the scientific/investigative validation of the hypothesis that there is someone that wants what you offer/sell/provide. That is, you should assume that there is someone out there (a small number of people at least, really) that wants to pay you for what you provide. I know this goes against common startup wisdom. But there's a massive cold outreach campaign type that needs to function and it needs to function with some confident assumptions within its technological engineering implementation. I guess.
I'm just speculating on some theoretical startup founding that doesn't suck.