Why You Still Haven't Sent Those Cold Emails
There’s a Stoic concept called “suffering twice,” which is easily the most important lesson for most entrepreneurs to learn.
The idea is that most people spend a ton of energy anticipating and worrying about things that’ll never happen, or as Seneca says: “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
Along the same lines, here’s Mark Twain: “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
Since so much of entrepreneurship is new (send 100 cold emails about a thing that’s incredibly personal to you and be ready for 98 of them to be ignored), your subconscious will push you away from doing it. It’ll make up stories about what’ll happen if you send those 100 emails - sure, 98 people won’t respond. But each one of them will also hate you, remember your name, tell their friends how awful you are, laugh at how dumb your idea is and possibly come to your house and kick your dog.
That’s only a slight exaggeration.
Back to those emails.
Let’s say you can stomach sending 50 of them. And these aren’t the nonsense ChatGPT garbage that everyone else is sending - you spend time hand-picking each recipient and you write something at least partially personalized to each that makes your case. If it takes you seven minutes per email, that’s almost six hours. That’s a full day of work, and it’s tedious. It’s something you might look for any excuse to avoid, but you power through.
What happens:
44 don’t respond
3 respond with interest
2 say some version of “not for me, but good luck”
1 writes “UNSUBSCRIBE” in all caps, despite you having an unsubscribe button
0 people kick your dog
The realistic worst case was that someone wrote UNSUBSCRIBE and you felt bad about that for the rest of the day (or week, if you’re like me). And that happened.
Now, the best case. Maybe one of those three people is your champion. They teach you how to actually talk about your product in a way that’ll land with your customer, they refer you to two more customers, they write a testimonial that leads to more inbound, and six months later you have 12 paying customers and each traces back to the champion.
The downside potential was that someone having a bad day wrote you an email in all caps. The upside was a cornerstone of your business.
Is that worth one day of work and a sassy UNSUBSCRIBE?