If you get really good at cold emails, comms and positioning, you can run circles around people who rely on warm intros in smaller networks. But at an individual, tactical level, a cold email will very rarely ever live up to a warm introduction. You have to be 10x more interesting.
You can plead with people to spend more time considering cold emails, to read them more closely, take them more seriously and so on. You might persuade a few – particularly those who were outsiders themselves. But overall it’s swimming against the current of human nature
If you want to get on the radar of a busy person whose attention is gated, the straightforward approach is to start by finding out who the gatekeepers are, and what their motivations and incentives are. For REALLY major players, you might have to repeat this process 3-5 times
let’s work through an eg. suppose I want to get on, say, Joe Rogan’s podcast. It’s not a priority for me right now, but maybe it might be something I want to do someday. How do I do it? Emailing him would not be a good idea, bc of the lemon problem. He likely gets thousands
So I’d work backwards from his process, not from what I’d like. How does he choose his current guests? What’s his selection process? How can I get about 5 people that he trusts to all independently say “yo, you should check out this guy Visa and get him on your podcast?”
this is the part that people will think is crazy: I’d then go through ALL 3,881 people he follows on Twitter, ALL 2,858 people he follows on IG, ALL 1529 podcasts he’s done so far, and look for people I know. I immediately find at least one person who I have mutual friends with.
But I play a really long game here, I’m not going to just annoy her with “yo can you pls tell joe rogan to get me on his podcast”. That’s tacky and needy. I would want her to personally want to refer me without me asking.
And I wouldn’t want to rely on just one person’s referral. I’d want at least 5. He should be thinking “who’s this goddamn visakanv I keep hearing about?!?!”, from multiple people, ideally from diverse and different contexts – people who don’t know each other, even better
by the time the connection happens, it’s not because “visa pleaded for this to happen”, but because “this is obviously going to be fantastic for the JRE”, and everyone who makes the referral acquires status for making the referral. To do that I have to do several side-quests first.
I have used this process to meet several people who were “out of my league”, and even become close personal friends with several of them. I don’t consider anybody “out of my league” any more, it’s just a matter of the amount of work I have to put in to facilitate the connection.
Stuff you make is the best wingman. It never tires, never sleeps. People quoting your book, sharing your videos, posting your tweets in the company Slack or whatever. Making stuff online is often an even better investment than talking to people.