founders.menu 032 » quickly identify prospect emails on LinkedIn

Happy Sunday. ☼

Read time this week → 6.25 minutes.

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Starter » take bite-sized action

TOPIC: QUICKLY IDENTIFY PROSPECT EMAILS
We’ve all been there. Lengthy searches for the right kind of prospects to reach out to on LinkedIn, but even after reaching out, it becomes clear very quickly that a direct reach-out on LinkedIn is probably not enough because most people don’t check LinkedIn often enough or simply won’t reply to a “connection request”. Reaching out via Email on mass, however, tilts the prospect’s willingness to reply in your favour. I’ve seen this personally as have many other people also – this is how you can quickly identify prospect emails:

1. Go to Clay, create an account and install the Chrome extension.

2. Go to LinkedIn and perform a specific search for the ideal prospect profile you want to reach first and foremost.

3. Now run the Clay Chrome extension and see what profiles have emails that you could use.

4. Next, go through a couple of pages until you have spent the first 10 credits on your account and make sure to open each LinkedIn profile, so you can use ChatGPT to personalise a reachout message that is highly specific for their profile and expectations.

5. Now, reach out to them individually. Do the thing that doesn’t scale first and you will learn the most to find the best way that scales next. Keep the emails super simple, tying the prospect personalisation into a single-sentence “what you do“ pitch alongside why their current status quo would make you two a good fit to work together. Everything after this is follow-ups and more reach-outs through trial and error.

There are of course other Chrome extensions to help you do the same like Hunter.io, useartemis.co, snov.io, GetProspect and many more, but Clay honestly has the most generous free plan – just pick one and try this out!

Main course » founders.menu update

䷀ Reads – 10x update highlights

• How to start building programmatic SEO → This is a skeleton framework you can use to rank on Google for a group of long-tail keywords related to 1 main keyword.

• A guide to leveraging SEO 2.0 → This is how SEO 2.0 helps websites get thousands of new visitors per month. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Everything you wish you knew about hiring → Advice for early-stage companies that might be scaling from a handful of individuals to their first growth phase as a team (~10-20 individuals).

• The Ivy Lee method → The daily routine experts recommend for peak productivity. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Why differentiation is so difficult → How to make your product better on some value proposition that is important to your prospects vs others in the market.

• Are you hunting antelope or field mice? → How to better structure your to-do list towards peak productivity by prioritising hunting antelope and avoiding filed mice. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Elon Musk's, Steve Jobs', Albert Einstein's Secret Sauce → More than innate talents, first-principles thinking, having a theory of change, or systemic factors, it’s their deep belief that they can have a meaningful impact that makes all the difference.

• Why 37signals chooses profit → Why run a profitable company in an industry that so often eschews profits for potential. – MEMBERS ONLY

• Love the mission or love the game → Find out whether you are a Type I or Type II entrepreneur.

• Zero-sum vs. Positive-sum products → One isn’t inherently better than the other, but it’s valuable to know which you’re building. – MEMBERS ONLY

Desert » hack your founder’s mindset

Ponder this →  where are you about to make a business decision based on an already-made conclusion? How could the ladder help you tackle underlying assumptions to reach a more informed decision?

Sides » this week on early.tools

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Fín » food for thought

Greg Isenberg runs latecheckout.studio and The Startup Ideas Podcast amongst many other things. He is a prolific entrepreneur who has leveraged online community to grow startup ideas faster than most other entrepreneurs. His recent breakdowns will make you rethink certain ways you could apply AI to boost your startup growth in 2024 – here are my three favourites:

1. Use Gong.io to analyze and improve your pitch calls with potential sellers → you can also use this tool to analyse and optimise the revenue your startup is making.

2. Deploy Mailshake for A/B testing cold email campaigns → you can leverage this for early-stage reach-outs to find out the top strategy.

3. Deploy Adext Al for autonomous optimization of ad spend across platforms → you can automatically optimize audience segments and budget allocations maximizing revenue.

And so much more of course. There are so many creative ways to use AI tools together to get even more productive these days, I know it might not seem very obvious at first (I know it isn’t for me), but if we try to at least ask ourselves how and where AI could make something we need to do faster and better, I am sure we can rely on our brains to do the rest and connect the proper tooling to make that boost in work efficiency happen – give these a try!