The Most Creative Cold Outreach EVER

0:00I don't know if you've seen this deal. This is the most creative cold outreach that I've seen yet. so check this out so sherry rodriguez sends you two cents over here and then the it says hey tom wanted to give you my two cents we took rippling's ig from 36 followers to 6200 and over 150 likes by using our targeted media buying strategy um got 14 minutes to talk about doing the same for your company i get one of those every single day from you get these two cents no mine's not two cents what do they give you i pick a random name like uh i don't know sherry rodriguez and it would be you just sent sherry rodriguez you know three thousand dollars if this wasn't you click here so i get the opposite yeah i get the scam ones every single day and i get tons of them from paypal but it's not really paypal they make it look like it and i'm like yeah i think it's creative but look man i i think what matters more than the creativity and this kind of goes into the topics that you had earlier is a cold email with good offers, right?

1:03So right now what's working for us on the carrot side is we send, like, if we say, oh, we're reaching out to MP digital, we'll send you a personalized landing page just dedicated to you. And it's, it's personalized with your logos and things like that. Right. That converts decently. Well, now we've changed it over into, um, cause we have a wait list right now for carrot, but now it's just like, Hey, Neil, um, private invite, right? So it's private invite. And then what you get is, um, it's, it's like a 30 day free trial or something. you can just log into the app and just start using it. Right.

1:31Um, then you can bypass the wait list. And so we selected you specifically for it. And this, uh, exclusive offer will only be around for the next seven days or so that type of thing. There's exclusivity and it's expiring and things like that. Um, but you know, it's, those are the types of things that are, that are working for us. And there is a little creativity in the second one, but the first one is just a good offer. So by the way, have you started charging yet? Yeah, we charge for it. So you have revenue yeah uh you don't have to reveal your revenue but if i were you i would do a uh Groove HQ did back in the day what did Groove HQ do uh we're going oh shit to yeah from oh shit to aha excuse my language but it was from oh shit to aha uh we're the built in public yeah we're going to a hundred thousand dollars a month follow our journey to learn more or we're going from zero to a hundred thousand dollars a month fuller journey to learn more and i'm paraphrasing it here the oh shit to aha again excuse my language that part i know was in there um and because i use a similar one and i gave him credit i'm like yeah i ripped this from grew i did that but i'm going from zero to a million visitors or a hundred thousand visitors then a million visitors and then it didn't work as well because then it was not relatable like i'm going from a million visitors to 10 million a month and you're like i don't even have 10 000 so when you do a smaller numbers It's great.

2:49But if I were you, I would map the journey from zero to a hundred thousand dollars a month in MRR and make it public. I bet you would get you tons more traction and revenue. I would go for. So what I would go for building in public is probably more on the ad side of things because I don't want to reveal revenue numbers. I don't want because right now we have. It's so interesting because there's there's people inserting spies to like check. So somebody reached out recently. They're like, oh, oh, we're really interested in using carrot. We're considering the competitor that ripped off of all of our stuff, right?

3:22And I was like, oh, okay, cool. So he's like, yeah, can you send me your entire product roadmap? And can you tell me exactly what it's going to be, by which date you're releasing? I'm like, why do you need to know those things so specifically? And I forgot that person was an advisor to the other company. But there's a lot of... I don't want to draw any unnecessary attention. That's what it is at the end of the day. I think the unnecessary attention will help you versus hurts you because if someone knows that you're doing features, dude, the space is small enough where people already know what customers want and they're working on creating similar features to you.

4:03Some of their features may be better than yours. Some of your features may be better than theirs. But the space is small enough where people already know what their ideal customer wants and they're just focusing on building a lot of stuff. I'll tell you what we've learned so far. um so this is actually this actually goes to my other topic on why you should ship marketable features and what that means is actually giving away a lot of these features and splintering that like let's let's say you have three features with uber suggest right um and typically the yours is more difficult because it's self-serve right let's use it for scout so neil has a tool called scout it's not self-serve right it's it's a managed service correct uh software but yes it's managed software okay it's managed software so point is people can't sign up for it on their own right so my point is um what we're doing with carrot is we are we're actually going to build out a lot of these features and then just give them away for free but then gate all the other stuff and let them in so we are building more top of funnel by giving away a lot of these features for free um and that's going to be our way our trojan horse to get people in more but when i look at like managed software and it could be a little bit different but like my team has to set it up for the customer and get it going for them and they just could end up using it what i look at what you're doing, I get there's handholding because it's not pure self-serve, although it could be self-serve.

5:21It totally could be. Yeah. I would still push stuff out in public because when you write social content and create videos on what you're planning to build in the next 30, 60 days and sharing it and giving previews, it creates more buzz and anticipation. And then when you release it, it creates more buzz and anticipation as well. If your competitors beat you to the punch and take that feature and release it a week before yours, it doesn't matter because the market's also big enough from a consumer standpoint where just like Instagram, if you post a video on one topic and I post the same video on the same topic, there's going to be a lot of people who don't see your content and there's going to be a lot of my people, vice versa, right?

6:04A lot of my people wouldn't have seen your content. A lot of your people wouldn't have seen my content. Even a lot of people who follow me won't even see my content because of the way the algorithms work as well. you never get even 10 % of the people to see your content. So why not just push it out there, get the press, keep pushing harder because when someone knows your MRR, it doesn't hurt you. It doesn't make you seem bigger or smaller. None of that matters. People want to pay you for the features, the product. So who cares? Your agency is big enough where the MR is big and people won't end up judging you.

6:38Here's what I, I don't care about the judging. I care more of, and by the way, I don't really care so much. I don't mind. I actually like it when the competitors copy because it shows, oh, you have no vision. Yes. So I'm actually okay with that because it takes them on this wild journey, right? I think, I don't think, I know. We have done episodes of this podcast on why we don't like building in public. And we've had our reasons for that. So I don't like building in public, right? So the MRR thing doesn't bother me so much because I don't care about the judgment piece. and I don't really, I'm okay with taking them on this ride, right?

7:13But there's other reasons why we don't like building in public, which we've talked about on the podcast. But I would consider at least doing the MRR one. And here's the reason being, when you look at MRR, the person that's going to follow you is usually another B2B SaaS company on your journey from going zero to 100 ,000 in MRR. They are your ideal customers. Here's the problem. Let me address that piece. so all of our customers right now are mid-market to enterprise they're not the small they're not small companies no no i know that but when people follow your journey you're gonna get businesses in b2b in sass that are gonna follow along to see if they can learn anything from you and implement it in their mid or large size corporation like when you do a conversion test when you share pricing seeing all these experiments, big companies can't run them like the way you can because it could have a huge negative effect on their earnings for a period of a month and can screw up their stock price.

8:14But when they see data from the smaller SaaS companies, dude, because if you look at my ad agency, NP Digital, our largest chunk of clients are enterprise SaaS companies that are typically publicly traded. It is the largest segment. I would say it's roughly 40%. The one thing that most of them have in common in the marketing department is they look at smb sass startups to see all the stuff they're doing so they can learn from them yeah bingo you got it right and then they take that and then they figure out what they want to experiment on because if three or four people write about something that's a failure they tend to backlog it and not do those things right away because you have to remember when you're publicly traded uh let's say you're doing an ab test and you're blogging about an A-B test you did with Carrick.

8:59A-B test that produces negative results, as a startup, we look at it as like, oh, cool, didn't work out what I learned from it. As a public trade company, you're like, oh, it tanked my new signups by 10 % or 20%. This is going to affect my quarterly earnings three months, I mean, three quarters from now or two quarters or whatever it may be. So this is where I would land. No, you can move on from this. So I have a thought around this too. so totally okay with sharing experiments and sharing the results of those experiments but the reason why i don't like the mrr piece as well is we have a mutual friend um we're not going to name names here um he he built in public one of his companies in public and he he's got a ton of impressions on linkedin a lot of followers a lot of views a lot of comments right hundreds of comments per per per linkedin post um that business has stalled out and it created i think he he he mentioned it was like 30 competitors or something like that.

9:53So whatever advantage he had went away and it's kind of just stuck in the water now. It's not really growing. It's not really going down. Right. And so that is another thing to be worried about. But I do, I think where I landed with this conversation is I think I would like to share much more of the experiments that we're running because we're doing some pretty cool shit. So, yeah. And the last point I have, and I won't keep going back to this, that person who shared on linkedin and now that you know what we're talking about okay i think i know who you're talking about they go to your retreats no no no okay so then i don't know who you're talking about yeah but that person if they have a lot of competitors now whether they posted publicly or not if they were in a business that's working out they would already have 30 plus competitors a great example of this is gong gong doesn't reveal their numbers but the moment everyone talks about someone in the space that's raising money or evaluation, it just breeds a ton of competitors.

10:53And you revealing numbers isn't gonna change how many competitors you get, whether you reveal them or not. If you're in a space that has a lot of money to be made and your space does have a lot of players who are making good money and over nine figures in revenue, you naturally will have competitors whether you wanna blog about it or not. So if you release a feature and you don't talk about your revenue, whether your revenue goes up or down if the sentiment for your features are really good they don't give a shit they're just going to copy it because they know that the market wants it which is exactly what happened with that linkedin post when we did that linkedin post which sparked us to work on it full time um again that post got 1300 comments and 700 likes or something like that and then immediately that competitor copied straight from that post started copying yeah took him three months to release it right um so my point is i think the action i know i'll take from this is we'll be posting a lot more about the stuff that we're building um and that's what it is and then i i do think we've been a little more quiet because we've been heads down building um but now we're getting to the point where a lot of these enterprises there's one enterprise right now um they're like dude when can we pay for this when can we pay for this like they're trying to like just get ahead of the pilot like we just want to pay for this we just want to pay for this let them pay for it yeah no we are we are but like we're like but also i think it's important guys um i know we can move on from this one um it's important to understand what your your your positioning is because right now we're starting to figure out our positioning right i think we've done like 22 of these pilots or something and we actually have a couple paying customers right now on actual mrr right um and when when you look at superhuman for example you didn't use superhuman right the email app i hate it you hate it so i i hated it for a while and then you've got me to use it right um but superhuman's positioning is what do you think it is we save you time making exactly they make you faster right with email and we're noticing now people are kind of starting to say the same things oh it's just you you have you either have way more value in this or just easier to use this right um and so my point of saying all this is that when you're building in the very beginning you have to figure out what your positioning is um and once you figure out your positioning you can just attack that and then when you're talking about pricing with people i'll go to neil i'll say hey um there's a couple pricing questions i can ask i say hey neil um what would be too expensive where you wouldn't pay for this thing that's number one.

13:07Then number two, I would ask, Hey Neil, what's too, if what would be too cheap, where you question the quality of this product, right? Like a, like a Louis Vuitton bag. If you bought it for$2, you'd question the quality of it. Right. The third one, which is the most important one I would ask you, I'd say, Hey Neil, um, what would be an uncomfortable price that you'd still be willing to pay? And that's the real pricing question. Right. And we're actually settling around this pricing range right now where it's around 1500 to 2000 or 5 % of ad spend whichever is higher per month per month yeah and that's what some people are paying right now so so two things the second one is more of um a general last thought that i learned from a private equity guy related to this but the first thing i have for you is the superhumans still do well or no i don't know yeah no one talks about them it doesn't mean that they don't do well it's just they don't get the buzz i think so so i just listened to a podcast with him recently they closed a big um consulting firm with thousands of employees and so i have to assume they're doing okay.

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15:49No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layout, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. um but i was years ago i met in person a guy named michael delaney he's a private equity guy from court square he ended up buying grayson's company uh power digital yeah and i remember we were in a restaurant in las vegas uh the four seasons we were eating dinner they were staying there and i asked him why he was interested in marketing agency they were courting us at the time they're looking at a lot of agencies uh we also had other offers but we decided not to sell to anyone and i'm not saying they would have went through but i just wanted to make my own decisions and not have anyone own 51 of my company oh same same deal here yeah i just and funny enough after our dinner he had to call me he's like he's like do you want someone who's a minority and not going to want 51 because he's he got the feeling pretty quickly at dinner but he told me something interesting at dinner he actually told me two things that were really interesting at dinner the first one's related to marketing the second one's more related to entrepreneurship the first thing that he told me was i asked him why are you interested in a marketing agency because there's so many agencies out there why'd you ask him that question because he's done so many investments right but but you would just these are a lot like scalable companies and like software companies.

17:38Correct. Yeah. And the marketing agency, service space, very people reliant. AI wasn't as big back then as it is now. And I bet you AI two years from now would be much bigger than it is now, of course. And he said, Neil, marketing agencies is like going to a party and drinking punch. When you go to a party, they usually have a really big punch bowl and it's big enough where everyone can get drunk. so he's like it doesn't matter how many competitors there are the space is just massive and there's just money to be made not for one person but for everyone just like at a party it's very rare that the punch bowl goes empty it's like but then everyone's already drunk and they've already you know had enough i that analogy just doesn't work for me all right did you drink some of that i haven't drank any of it it goes through the bottom but the point he was getting at is it's such a massive tam that it doesn't matter how many competitors there are, there's enough money to, for everyone to do well, similar to what you're doing right now.

18:38It doesn't matter if people have the same features or better features or worse features. You're in a big enough space where a lot of people are going to get drunk off of whatever it may be. And they're going to, everyone's going to make money. Sure. And that's why I don't, so you're completely right. Like the marketing space, my space, I mean, agency side. Yes, absolutely. Right. Um, even for the software side, absolutely. There's, there's enough room for everybody um i think for me though it's again you guys should check out that episode while we talk about we kind of made fun of building in public um but again my takeaway is i will probably share a lot more we've we've held back on sharing um we haven't shared enough to be honest so we'll be sharing a lot more and you have a second piece that you want to share before we move on yeah the second piece i ended up learning from him this more entrepreneurship he uh invested in a company back in the day called amerisaurus bergen which i believe has rebranded to sensora yeah sensora does what i think it's like two three four hundred billion a year in revenue it's a pharmaceutical distributor their margins aren't great hence their market cap's not as high but the last time i checked i think they were a fortune 10 company sensora uh i only know the software company sensora uh i think it's called sensora i would just type in amerisaurus bergen stock amerisource amerisource bergen's censura okay yeah 12.57 billion is there a market cap yep right but when you look at the revenue they do they're doing really well they do last year 2024 they did 293 billion in revenue low margins though net income of 1.51 billion it's a pharmaceutical distributor again right and he was telling me about merisource bergen because i I remember we had dinner and I was like, he was telling me that he was asking the type of companies we work with.

20:26I'm like, yeah, we just got a lead from Amerisourceburg. He's like, funny story, I bought them. And when he bought them, they were much smaller. And I was just like, okay, so what happened? He's like, when I started in the world of private equity, I'm talking as if I'm Michael Delaney. He's like, when I started, when I was in the world of private equity, we bought companies, we fixed them up, we grew them and you just kept holding them. And he's like, but over time, what changed is you started getting LPs. Because when he was running private equity, and this was in the early days, like when we were born, he was using bank money.

21:02And when I say bank money, imagine you're a bank like JP Morgan. You have all these depositors. You need to make money off these depositors so you can give them better returns. They were taking a portion of the money from the bank and investing it into corporations, buying them, holding them. it would spit off returns and it would be very uh uh fruitful for the bank because they were just owning stable companies that were growing and their balance sheet would just keep growing what yeah there you go sensor their stock stable it's very stable their stock just going up into the right and has continually done so and he's like then all of a sudden we started spinning out of the banks and us private equity companies started becoming independent and we had to get lps and the lps put clocks on our funds so he's like we had to liquidate assets and keep selling he's like one of the worst things he's like life was great he's like i just bought a company fix it all he's like why would i want to sell it and it was at that point that made me realize huh if i can grow a business buy and hold fix it or just hold yes and continue to grow it you're better off holding now if you can time the market which is really hard to time the market and the multiples are crazy during a certain period, by all means sell and then you can reinvest in whatever you want.

22:21But the big two takeaways I learned from him is if you go after the big TAM, which was the first point, that's key to doing well as an entrepreneur because even if you're not best in class, everyone gets drunk and everyone's happy as long as you go after a big enough market. And we know that in the agency space, there's just a lot of people who do well. And the second thing I learned from him is if you have a good company and you're growing, call it 20 plus percent a year, you're continually doing well why would you want to sell it for lower returns because a lot of these funds have lower returns than 20 or whatnot and if you're getting 30 returns why would you trade your paper for their paper unless their offer that they're giving you is really worth it for you remember what warren buffett or do you know what warren buffett and charlie munger said about their favorite holding period their favorite holding period for a company is forever meaning that if you find a good company, you ideally want to hold it for forever.

23:14Like, why would you set, why would you put this artificial clock on? Oh, within 10 years, you need to liquidate, right? It actually doesn't make sense if you have a really great asset. But, you know, I understand why they need to do that. Like, you know, some, they want to return, right? So then show me the incentive. I'll show you the outcome. Yep. Well, please don't forget to rate, subscribe guys, and we'll see you tomorrow.

23:41Thank you.