founders.menu 020 » LinkedIn outreach tactics & The Johari Window mental model

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 6.3 minutes.

A warm welcome to 4x new subscribers who got a template, an account or signed up directly for the founders.menu newsletter – it’s great to have you!

It’s time to restructure this newsletter. :) Over the past week I reflected and spoke to some early users who wished for more actionable items in this weekly newsletter. Interestingly this coincides with a much-needed refocus of my time to warrant the effort I spend on this weekly newsletter. What better time to do this than issue 020 this week with a new structure:

• Starter » take bite-sized action

• Main course » founders.menu update

• Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

• Sides » this week on early.tools

• Fín » food for thought

If you found the “past week’s startup highlights” useful/something you looked forward to every week, let me know in reply to this email. It was sadly the most time-intensive item on the menu, so I decided to let it go.

One ask → if you have a minute at the end of this newsletter, feel free to reply with your thoughts & suggestions for this structural change to the newsletter.

But without further ado, let’s get into this week’s edition. ↓

Starter » take bite-sized action

Recently I started doing about 20-40 daily LinkedIn cold reachouts for an agency I am trying to build. The connect rate is about 10-11%, with 5x Nos and 4x interested prospects with calls yet to be scheduled. I am quite confident that this strategy will work out with volume (which is honestly the only way to approach sales in 2024), so I summarised it in a quick tweet.

I highly recommend you try this, even though LinkedIn automation services exist… Why? Because you take time to look through every profile to determine whether they’d be a good fit, it forces you to put serious thought into who your ideal customer profile is, instead of building a network of useless connections.

I even went as far as creating a funnel-type Notion template to track these reachouts and conversions, so I always know who to follow up with. If you would like a template like that, simply reply to this email. :)

Main course » founders.menu update

ϟ Tools – 5x update highlights

• QRBud – Generate easy & customizable URL QR codes in minutes.

• y.gy – Shorten Links. Make QR Codes. Analyze Traffic. Stop Bots. Do everything by API. – MEMBERS

• Bitly – URL shortener, QR Codes, and Link-in-bio pages to engage your audience and connect them to the right information.

• Share.Clinic – Fix your ugly social media links and create richer links for better results. – MEMBERS

• OSlash – The only AI system you need—to craft delightful user experiences, automate workflows across apps, and transform data into insights.

䷀ Reads – 5x update highlights

• Sales email templates 60%+ open rates – A list of the best email templates used by real HubSpot reps — plus a few bonus templates to get you started. – MEMBERS

• 9 business models that work for solo founders – Understand the business models that are the most effective for a 1-person business.

• Idea machines – Where do tech's ideologies come from, and how do they influence what’s accomplished? – MEMBERS

• Should you charge more? – Why the advice to "charge more" in the indie startup community isn't always the right advice.

• From 2 failed startups to $3,000/month in 4 months – How two co-founders built ScrapingBee, a web scraping API that handles proxy, chrome headless and captchas for users that is making +$3k/month. – MEMBERS

⦿ Streams – 5x update highlights

• How to build and validate your startup idea in 48hrs – How Nico Jeanan made an AI startup in 48 hours and sold it for $65,000 just 3 months later. – MEMBERS

• How to get your first 5 customers – Learn and apply how Alex Hormozi approaches going from 0 to many customers starting with giving away the first 5 for free.

• Waitlist strategy that'll boost your business – Learn why creating a waitlist is the most important thing if you want to build excitement and generate leads for your upcoming product launch.

• How to grow a SaaS to $300K in 12 Months – How Vasco Monteri grew a two-sided B2B services marketplace for a niche-specific service. from $0 to over $300k in just 12 months. – MEMBERS

• What makes a great founder succeed in the long-run – Marc Andreessen advice to Lex Fridman on how to start a company

What’s next? Finish curating the entire distribution tool section, ship item detail pages next week and write more articles to rank better on search.