https://www.listennotes.com/e/2345dda094794ce8a24c934a87e2adc5

What are the different strategies, what are the tactics? And there's a lot of creativity in there or like what's changing in the market, what tools are coming out, you know, what's going on. And then a little bit of the drama, I guess, if you're in that up market, you're probably going to want to look at other channels, maybe calls or LinkedIn, use the connections you have. Now, if you're in the down market, it can be even better right now.

Because, you know, there's less people there, but you got to have a good distribution. Welcome back. to unfuck my startup. I'm not gonna get into introducing our very prolific guest yet because we need to give all, probably 500 people, a chance to actually get in the webinar, which is just bananas. I'm excited to have Jesse here. He's the founder of Lead Magic, the founder of the SaaS Yacht Club, which is a selective founder community, and he's a top LinkedIn voice. And Jesse, Dude, what is up? Thank you for joining.

Yeah, man. Really excited to be here. And thanks for everything you've done for me too, obviously with helping me grow on this one, the bootstrap world.

Dude, yeah. Every once in a while I get updates from Jesse and I love it because the number's always higher. My businesses are unfortunately- you're looking at that chart. Yeah, like my businesses have reached a point where I always get housed in the first quarter and we go backwards sometimes and it's so so depressing, but, like, yours are always higher when you send me updates. And I love that. And, dude, give us the most recent update. Where are we at? Where's lead magic yet?

You had it in your post, too, we're around there. So we just cracked a thousand customers. We're, you know, few people here. A couple of, you know, we're trying to keep a lean team. We have a very small two-person engineering, both contracts, sort of. Folks, and I'm yoloing a lot of this code out myself with cursor and some of the other stuff, right? So I'm getting pretty dangerous there. We'll get more dangerous too. I mean, they're making it a lot easier for everybody. So if you're not into lovable or bolt or cursor, you might want to go take a look. It's gotten a lot easier. Sean Pritchard.

Sean Pritchard, congrats. Let's fucking go.

That's right.

One full-time employee, Jesse, two contractors, 2.2 million ARR. That, my friends, is the way of the future. Pretty soon it's gonna be same staff, 5 million ARR, right? As Jesse said to me yesterday, he's like, dude, it's all about making pro athlete money.

Yeah, that's like, top draft pick, kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What else?

Yeah, so I'm gonna share the address for Charm right here in the chat. We're going to put two minutes on the clock for you, Alex. We will also have this running poll. Folks with the running poll, it basically says yes or no, would you buy? For some reason, every week, I don't know if this is like a joke, like 20 people will put no as soon as the thing starts. So we're going to the poll will be coming at the end to prevent the tricksters. I do want to say those people could also just be patient and wait till the end of the pitch. But hey, I know everyone's excited.

We're going to wait till the end. I appreciate the honest feedback either way.

Well, that early on, I don't know if it's honest feedback. I think it's like a prank they're trying to pull on us, but charm.io, I dropped it into the chat. Alex, what's charm.io all about?

Why should these people use it? Awesome. Thanks, guys.

So can you see my screen?

Yes.

Great.

So what we do is we track and analyze every direct to consumer brand in the world, currently about four and a half million brands worldwide across all product categories and countries. and the idea is to provide visibility to help retailers to make merchandising decisions, investors decide which brands to invest in, and B2B sales teams figure out which brands they should be selling their service or solution to. And so what we've done is we've aggregated every single brand in existence and enriched them with all different types of digital metrics, which we've then applied our machine learning models on top of to score every brand on their growth and success relative to their so you can select any types of criteria around the social performance of brands, the audience demographics of brands, like what is the age and gender distribution or location distribution of a brand and everything about the products that a brand sells, then filter based on that criteria to find the perfect brand for whatever it is you need, whether you're selling to brands or merchandising them or investing in them. Then once you found a brand, you could do a deep dive analysis on it. So let's say we wanted to look at summer Fridays, we could see how fast is it growing relative to the beauty category or how successful or big it is, what's driving its growth, in this case it's online reseller distribution, its social channels, et cetera, and then do a deep dive on any of these in more detail. So how quickly it's growing its engagement on social, whether that's TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, we actually just launched audience demographics, so you can now see the age and gender distribution or location distribution, We work with a lot of 3PL customers, so this is super helpful for them to understand, you know, where a brand's audience exists today, but where they may not be shipping to. And that could be a really effective value proposition for when they're reaching out to try to pitch their 3PL services to them, understanding the product distribution, what price points the brand is sold at, who else is selling it, right? Look-alike brands. So let's say you have a great customer and you want to find others, and then ultimately also who you should be reaching out to to get in touch with that brand. We sync all this data to your CRM or you can export it, save to lists, and we basically provide full visibility to every brand in the world.

So that's that.

Yeah.

And at a much deeper level than a Zoom Info or an Apollo, you take that segment of e-commerce and you go as deep as possible from a data perspective. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, that's exactly right. Zoom Info is great if you sell to all different types of industries and you don't need to go very deep. in terms of the metrics you need, where we really excel is understanding the e-commerce landscape and going super, super deep there.

Courtney asked, is this only for e-commerce businesses? This is people selling to e-commerce businesses. So if you are selling to e-commerce businesses, this is for you.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You're getting a ton of yeses. We got- yeah, you're getting a ton.

Of yeses despite the niche. So I think everybody wants it who would possibly have anything to do with the e-commerce world. Okay, well, well, look, we're even though you didn't get 66%, normally it's above 66%. You get a swag box above 33% of t-shirt. We're giving you a swag box. Jesse, we're going to give you a swag box, too. Have we given you swag box yet? And by the way, now is the magic. Okay. Who wants a demo? Type in demo. Let's go, baby.

Oh, yeah.

What's the pricing model? So we sell based on how many brand credits you need on a monthly basis. So small Customers may need just a small amount of credits. They only want to reach out to a small number of leads on a monthly basis. Others, you know, want the whole database basically.

Dude, yes. We're getting you lots of demos here. Lots of demos.

So am I supposed to furiously type every single person's name here?

So.

You can drop your calendar link in and then what I would do is I would just like.

Yeah. There you go.

Yeah.

Oh, wait.

Somebody. Somebody dropped a book of demo link in.

I did.

I did.

Oh, that was.

Dude, how did this not get a 100? It's bloody amazing. That's. That's. That's more enthusiastic than it was ever been about anything I've ever built.

So, folks, Sarah Kimble, Alex and myself, all dropped calendar links. It's the same link. We just did it 'cause it'll get buried. So click any one of those three. It's the same link, book some time on their calendar. And Alex, I'll connect with you after the show and send you a code for a swag box.

Thank you a ton for coming up. And Alex, I'm looking at 13 demos. So if it comes up less than that, then maybe just like scrape the comments and make sure, you know, figure out- Just DM.

You know what I mean? I'm sure Sarah's on here copying people's names.

Okay. Alex, thank you very much for being a part of the Pitch Slap badass product. We've been happy customers for many years.

Thank you, guys. Take care.

Thank you, Alex. All right, let's get into the show, Jesse. Before we went live, you were telling me kind of a little bit of a Genesis story of lead magic. So my first question here is, I guess before we get into that story, everyone's saying cold emails, dead. Is cold email dead?

No, I mean, it'll die for some people though. I do think it will die for some people. There's definitely a reason that's out there and it should have died a lot much earlier, actually, but it's probably they got a gift because it's still alive.

Yeah, I think the barrier to entry to send that 100,000 emails a day has become so low that now our inbox as well, fixer, who's a company we actually had their founders on, their whole business is around eliminating those emails for people's inboxes. So that's how bad it's gotten. How's it changed? You were telling me you were trying to overhaul a large company's email infrastructure, their tactics.

I was just running, I ran sales strategy for one of my buddies, Andrew, I think he's even on the call. But basically we were having some problems with the email and it was, we were using outreach at the time. This was like years ago, right? Like four years ago about. And what happened was I found a couple of problems with it. And I was trying to, I didn't want to put the email signature on because it was gonna, you know, you see these email signatures come through and you're like, that thing's not going to get through any spam filters, right? They'd have pictures of their kids or whatever, you know, whatever weird things are on there. But so I ended up doing that. I said I wouldn't put it on and they fired me for it. But then they realized it was like a big problem for the company. But either way, it wasn't going to be a fit anyways for me, but it was kind of pre-COVID everyone was going crazy when it hit, so. But that's what happened basically. So that's where I said, Hey, I'm going to go start something here with an agency that sort of helps people generate leads, do that. That's where I was skilled. And then obviously agency to SaaS was the move. So I want to talk about kind.

Of what is working today for the customers, clients of Lead Magic, whether that's on the agency or the software side. You had shared this awesome cheat sheet on LinkedIn, which I'm going to share with everybody. Don't worry, we're going to go through it. It's so in depth that we won't be able to go through every single thing on there, but let's talk some like top, kind of some main principles that people can follow because my belief here is cold email is not working for most people, not because of the infrastructure, but because of the message that they're sending. Now, yes, you have to land in the inbox, that's for sure. But what are some principles people can follow? Maybe we start with like subject lines, like what's a basic principle you- the.

Biggest, I mean, right now, if you're emailing people that are in, like if you're a smaller ish company or mid-market company and you're emailing, you know, if you have 150 employees or under and you're emailing a company that has security firewalls, they've got Mimecast, they've got Proofpoint, they've got all these like AI destroying, you know, you're not going to make it through them. I mean, let's just put it that way. Like the amount of effort and infrastructure and investment you're going to have to do that. And when I say not make it through, you're going to have like with a sequencer sending 150-200 emails a day, you're going to start getting really, it's going to get harder there. The high end of the market, the fortune, every one of them has a very sophisticated security model. It's their number one attack vector. So they can't even show people the emails now, right? Like they have to block everything. So if it's not plain text, don't even try with even the open pick, like nothing. Just go in with that and then the message is next. But starting there, your audience, if you're targeting that very up market and you don't have very relevant, like super relevant for that person right then and there, and you're sending it at any sort of volume, you're probably just going to get blocked in all those companies, right? It's just not going to happen. There's just too much. They're too good.

Can I, I'm thinking about this story from, I had a founder reach out to me about this app that she described and I just didn't understand it. And she's like, no one's responding to my cold outreach. I set up Apollo and all this stuff. And I'm like, well, what are you sending? And like, I'm like, okay, I'm not in real estate, but like, I'm trying to imagine that I was. And, like, nothing about this email is making me stop what I am doing right now and engage with the email.

Right?

Like, that, that I think. It's like. It's like, dude, like, unless you have something that is. That you are sending that will stop someone in their tracks and say, I'm gonna stop what I'm doing and go check that out. Don't even bother.

Yeah. Especially if it's in that up Market, like, what's changed in the last. 'Cause if you have an investment on the IT side, right? Even fewer companies even have an IT department now, right? But if they actually have one and you, if you go to the, like even go to Reddit, like look at the IT groups there, the entire conversation is all about how spam issues they're blocking, right? This is like their entire job. And then they have, you know, multimillion dollar tools. And the second one of those tools sees you get something out there, It's going to phone home. It's going to tell everybody about you, right? And all of their enterprises, it's going to phone home. It's going to call everybody. It's going to say, don't take any more emails from this domain. Now, you can burn the domains. You can do whatever games you want to play there. But if you're in that up market, you're probably going to want to look at other channels, maybe calls or maybe LinkedIn, use the connections you have. But it's that really, really up market that's really getting crushed. Now, if you're in the down market, it can be even better right now. because there's less people there, but you gotta have a good distribution. You gotta have like a wider net to cast on email right now. And it's working very well for certain people. That's why you're seeing like, it's working for me, it's not working for me. A lot of the times it can be summed up as how technical is the audience you're emailing, which if they understand how to click the report a spam button, that's number one. And number two, it comes down to how big is the company and what's their spam filters, right? Like those are the, big. Then it goes to everything else. Copy relevance, you know, are you putting clay tables together for these people, things like that? Like, okay, cool. That. That's like the next level. But the first two are. Are gonna outweigh anything else.

Okay, can we ask a technical question? What is just for purely definitional purposes, what are you defining as up market and down market?

So I'd say it's anybody with a. With a, you know, if they're. if they can afford a $50,000 a year software to protect their email, that's probably up market now. And what I mean by that is like, I'm not talking like the, like the Google settings or like the default office, I'm talking like Mimecast, Barracuda, they're using like services like that, very, very difficult to inbox consistently, right? It's going to get even harder, but it's, clearly it's a time where you got to send less to that group, but maybe more to it. You got to figure out your Market. If that's the channel you do, you know, you might want to, like, choose a different ICP. So it can be, it's high-tech Finance that are going to be probably smaller, but if they have any, like, Health Care Insurance, like, stuff like that's going to get really hard. You know, the ones you want to go after now probably would be your, you know, maybe these. Crazy SaaS founders who are bootstrapped have no time to go buy at the Y or bootstrapped or just raised a round of funding. They have no time to go buy spam filtering services. So they read everything, you know, when.

They'Re scrolling on the phone. And I'm going to go to Apollo and I'm going to search for prospects that have no fingers to click the spam button too.

And that's where again, that's where we're starting. I think charm has that filter.

Getting harder to describe who's the right person for. so there's a couple questions in the chat, like people asking, like, what's the best tool for evaluating the spamminess of my emails? I've used mail tester in the past. Are there ones that you found to be super reliable, maybe free options for people?

Yeah. The best tools, if you have a friend who works at a really, really big company, and you could get, you could, you could, you could send them a couple emails and see if they got coming gold like that actually is the It's a weird one, but like that actually works pretty well. But I mean, at least basically what's happening is you're getting blocked at like a domain level, right? So it comes down to the domain. I mean, I guess IP and domain, but for all intents and purposes, if you're sending from Google or Microsoft, you're probably going to be on, it's just the domain, right? Because everybody has the same, at least initially everybody has the same IP or domain IP address. So then you go down to the domain and then it's like, well, how many people, how first of all, the first thing they ask is how new is it? doesn't go well with everybody, right? That's the first, that's the first shooting.

It needs to be what? Like at least, I mean, I know the principle is like, it should be active and being warmed up for at least three weeks. Does that change? Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, that's a good number.

It's just what can also happen is like, it's not even that even as much as it is, what does it mean? That helps it, right? But it's like, well, what hurts it? It's like you could be a really good person and then you go out and do something really stupid and get arrested for it and do whatever. You're probably not going to get looked at it very easily again. So you probably need more domains. You're going to need to send fewer emails per inbox, maybe 25-30. The number's just going to keep going down, at least depending on who you're emailing. So if you're a cold email agency, take clients that have less technical people to email and they have a wider distribution map, right? And they're less likely to click report spam, which is the other one.

I think another, so all of that is like fantastic infrastructure. I think it just, it has to be done today for all the reasons you just described, Jesse. The cybersecurity and, you know, IT is just, it's really a cat and mouse game. But let's start to talk like, okay, let's say people get through to the inbox, they set up their infrastructure well. By the way, I also want to just point out another thing that will help your domains last a while is not sending a ton of emails to people who are not going to care about your service. So just being a little more targeted, you should do that anyway, but if you needed another reason, you got one. But let's talk like, okay, now people get into a message the message itself. I also want to say, I think these principles you're going to talk about don't just apply to cold email. I think they apply to brand messaging across domains. So I know subject lines. I'd seen a post from you. I'll drop a link in here. You said keep it to three words, max, keep it super short. But getting into the body, I see it. I get a ton of emails where there's just like, 10 things they're trying to sell to me, right? They're trying to tell me a whole long story. Do you have some guidelines on, you know, maybe the number of benefits or how that offer should be articulated within the, within the message itself?

It all, it's weird that like, it all, all of it is the answer will always come down to depends. But it's like where I think you got to go with it is like, if you're going to test something, you're going to test a market, you're going to do a growth test or whatever. what you're going to want to do is you got to kind of figure out early, are we going to go and try to be very relevant to everybody one to one? Are we going to build and invest the time and money that it's going to take to build sort of the clay tables and, and the different, you know, enrichment strategies or AI, you know, doing some of the things even Eric talks about, are we going to do that or are we just going to go out there and try to get people to see who we are right now? I think if you're in the down market, you know, you're selling to $10,000 a year software to up to maybe, you know, or under, or you're selling something under $50,000 a year. And there's a lot of businesses that you can call on. Okay, maybe you can take the approach where you're not investing a ton of time and doing the relevant stuff. If you're going up market though, and you start to get any report of spam, it really comes down to that. It's that one button that's, and look, people are busy. They don't have time to click report of spam, right? But if you click that, like that thing is so toxic for your, Like the numbers they're looking for on that is like one or two on a, like no more people, normal people don't get their emails reported as spam, right? Like if your email gets reported as spam, it's just so tragic for your, your, the health of that inbox continuing to send emails. And it's not the inbox, it's the domain. So, so if you work at a company that's a small company and you have an SDR that's doing this, like, you could really do some damage early on, right? So you have to be smart about it, alternative domains, of course. And I think just that's what I would do. I mean, you gotta just be careful on that report of spam. If you can prevent that from happening, like the subject lines and all that other stuff sort of kind of will fall into place if you do that.

Yeah, is this, so I remember years ago when I was working in email marketing, the sort of threshold to stay under was like, you wanted to be under one spam complaint per thousand cents. Has that changed? Has it gotten more strict? Or is that still the.

So, you know, the, the terrible thing about sending to, not really, you, you can't really tell what it is right now because they don't really expose it to you. Right. They give you, they give you some, it's getting better. I mean, I've seen, I've been watching to see when they actually do tell you more, right? It's not like your normal mail providers. Like when you use Google and Microsoft, generally speaking, you have no idea, right? The only thing you can really use, and that's why open tracking wasn't really a point, but the only thing you can really use is the reply rate, right? As a guide. And that is loose because depending on what you send, you could have, you know, it's like a polarizing email. Maybe you're getting five people to report it. five people that love it. You know, like you got to be careful there on some of the numbers, but it really comes down to are people replying? Are you engaging them in something? Are they going to your website? I have seen some people have success on just driving SEO traffic, right? They're going to go to Google, look for your brand, probably click it. If you send a lot of emails, I'm sure, you know, when RBDB was doing even more emails, I'm sure there was a huge uptick in organic traffic, which does help, right? Like that does help, especially if you have high converting landing pages and things like that. But a lot of the times you'll see companies that don't have any of that stuff and they're looking for the quick fix. That's probably who it stops working for. Yeah. And I.

So it's just. I wanna. We're gonna do our unfuck my startup section in just a second. Just a second. I'll do a little recap of section one, folks, if you would like to come up for the unfuck my startup section by folks. I mean you, the audience. So audience, if you want to come up. For unfuck my startup. Let's keep it a real, I would love to have somebody up who whose email campaigns are just totally blasted. Like they can for not for the life of them get somebody to respond or maybe it's one per 100,000 cents or just something, something crazy. Raise your hand. Joel said pick me and SaaS founder just launched CRM sequence. Yeah, that could be cool. All right, let's pick Joel. And Vadim, we can grab you next week. Just raise your hand again. But so we'll start this section in one minute.

This section- By the way, can we answer David DeRemerio's question? Do pixels in the email tracking read negatively impact deliverability?

Yeah, I mean, definitely. It depends on the reputation of that, where that host is, right? So there's probably an argument that Certain cases, it could be positive, but I don't think so. I mean, I can't think of a case where it'd be positive at all. So that's why, and it also triggers another problem where if you do that, they put the reported spam button higher in the email now, the Gmail UI changed. And what they do now is they put, and you can obviously hack it and change the CSS and hide it, but like still at that point, you're like not really getting anything and you don't really know. And that's the problem. You don't really know. So at the end of it, Probably know open tracking, open tracking is not a good marketing emails. It's basically just, don't, I wouldn't use open tracking. You're not gonna get an accurate number. These companies cost a lot of money and they know how to fake. They can click on your, they know very well how to make it look like they opened it, but didn't. And your sequence provider, there's no way they're investing amount of time that they need to figure out if they actually open that email or there's just no way.

That's why there's, there's on every campaign, there is somebody who opened that email 300 times.

They love throwing those gray lists. They shadow ban you, right? They tell you that's what it is. It's a shadow ban, right? That's what life's about.

Life is about shadow bands.

You know what I'm talking about, Adam.

We don't have to talk about it. Oh man, I've been shadow banned. I know you. Oh, like last week, I got 200,000 impressions on one post. Now I got 7,000.

What happened?

Who did I piss off? All your emotions were gone.

Who did I piss off at LinkedIn with what I wrote? Man, even I've got, well, I don't wanna say it's shadow banned, it was, they thought I was doing automation, but I was just trying to count our UGC posts every 15 minutes. Anyway, let's get into the segment. By the way, guys, we have our first sponsor. I don't know if you knew this, I actually didn't tell Adam. The segment is brought to you by RBDB insiders. This is basically, if you're a SaaS founder, you're banging your head against the wall with growth. This is the community for you. It's a community run by us for folks just like us, Bootstrap founders building lean, profitable businesses. A couple of things, we do a lot of stuff in there. Every Friday we do a live event. Last week we were literally going through people's email copy, tearing it down, pointing out why it wasn't working. Literally everybody had a completely new sequence by the time they left that event. We do it every Friday. This week we're actually tackling sales decks. Cold outreach is great, but you gotta fill the funnel. But if your close rate is somewhere under, you know, 65%, something is probably off. You can come out, hang with us in the live event in the community this Friday, see what works, what doesn't, and we'll give you feedback. To help you try out and figure out what the heck is going on in RBBI insiders, we're actually giving away a course for free today. Based on the conversation we're having, I want everybody to go and insiders.rbbi.com Right here, insiders.rb2v.com and you can hop in. Check out lesson three of the zero to one secrets course. All the courses are up there for you, but that module specifically has a ton of great info on breaking down the core pillars of great messaging, covers outreach messages, sales decks, all that stuff. If instead of that you would prefer to just hop on the phone with me and see what the heck insiders is, drop insiders into the chat, I'll reach out to you, I'll shoot you an email with a calendar link, and we'll chat, see if it's a good fit for you.

By the way, for what it's worth, I'm on these Friday calls doing these teardowns.

That's a value add. And we'll usually grab a, we'll grab a special guest too. Nice, insiders, insiders, insiders, heck, yeah. Also, if you finish the course, if you go in there and do lesson three of the zero to one secrets course, We'll give you these mugs. We tried to drop them on LinkedIn and, you know, we got shadow band.

You're getting shadow band for that one. Yeah, they're like, dude, we can't do it right now. Cheat sheets is all the vibe right now.

Yeah, they're like, bro, you can't put a Mr. Beast lookalike photo on LinkedIn. That's YouTube shit.

No dice. Nobody gets the mugs.

No dice. No bueno. So insiders.rbd.com, I just dropped it in there. Is Joel in here? What's up, Joel?

Joel, what is popping, my man? Hey, guys. Hey.

Where are you calling at?

To start.

I'm in based in Austin, Texas.

Oh, my man. What is up? Adam, get this guy tacos.

Yeah. Gotta send you some tacos.

But how far, where are you in Austin? I'm over like north east Austin, near Mueller.

If you're familiar with that, obviously.

Yeah, I'm in Clarksville, like between Terrytown and downtown.

So.

Nice.

No traffic.

10 minutes.

Traffic.

20.

Hey, awesome. So you guys want me to go into my pitch on the, on the platform?

Would that be helpful?

Yeah.

Tell us what, what it does for maybe a minute and then how you're stuck. Like, what, what are you stuck with? Is it, you know, I mean, especially if in the cold Outreach game, you got Jesse here, so just so you can make the most out of that. But, yeah, yeah.

Give us, tell us what's going on. Oh, okay. So I started this company a few years ago when I was at actually Indeed, and the problem I saw was we were paying a vendor about $10,000 a month that we actually never implemented. And by the time I figured it out, we had paid them almost $100,000 to a vendor we actually never used. And it kind of set me down on the path of, you know, how do people actually manage different vendor contracts? And it turns out it's a really fragmented space. So as a company scales up, They're adding, you know, some are adding, you know, hundreds of SaaS tools every year, and they end up finding that a lot of them go inactive. The event of all software spend is actually gone and wasted. That's according to Gartner. And so we built a solution, a software solution for that. So it's a no tech, like tech lift for the companies to use. We integrate with their SSO, their G Suite, if they have Azure Outlook, integrate with all of that so we can see full SaaS visibility of what the company is using. Then we ingest all their contract data, parse it out into an Excel-like view so they don't ever miss a renewal. They can see actual utilization by vendor. We even can do price intelligence so we can tell you if you're getting a good deal or not. What we sell into is mostly the staffing space actually. Our first customer came from Reddit, a CTO of a PE staffing firm, and that became our niche. We also sell it to accounting firms. And where I'm stuck now as a founder is primarily getting more demos, selling the software solution. We have about like a 10x ROI, so it's a good value prop. But as you guys can imagine, every company is pitching cost savings. Our platform really does it, and we have proof for that. It's just getting that address in front of a CTO can be challenging. I'm happy to pull up my screen and actually show you my email copy or my sequence. Or if you guys have questions on them, however you guys want to take it. Let's see some copy.

What do you think?

Yeah, let's see some copy. Let's see some copy. Dude, let's start it. Let's let the master, Jesse, unfuck your email copy.

By the way, Joel, I've, I, my previous business, I was pitching, I was doing sales and pitching and marketing, just pitching the heck out of cost savings. So I empathize with the challenge of selling that as a value proposition. But they've gotten millions in ARR bootstrapped. So, you know, hey, you can do it too.

Did you say CFO or CTO? I was wondering, are you competing with like a vendor, V-E-N-D-R?

They actually, so they would be, yeah, they'd be more like an enterprise level solution. They actually turn away customers that have less than 300 employees. And for us, that's like a 10, $20,000 deal. And so we'll take that all day. you know, if they're turning those folks away. So, yes. And they also offer a little bit more, I would say, like full suite package. We offer like contract management, license management and price intelligence and like some automation around that. So a little bit more like, you.

Like their, I really like their new site or PSEO that they did. Like, I really like that thing that they built. I don't know if you've seen that, but that's something you should think about the, yeah, where you're looking at the pricing and the comparison.

They did a really nice job on it. Yeah, oh yes, absolutely. And yeah, we have a similar tool we have built in our platform. There's is obviously a little bit more bigger, but yeah, I agree. So this is my first email sequence. This would be going to like a CTO CIO, if you guys can see my screen here. I use like the smart tag, so it's variable, so it's less likely to get flagged. And then most companies have over a hundred SaaS vendors or all of them in this list. and so I'm addressing some SAS bloat and then seeing if they're aware of it. And then I kind of go into, like, a soft pitch for a loom video, not like a meeting or anything like that. And then social proof of a customer that, you know, they might be familiar with that we've been able to. To help out. But, yeah, Jesse, I'll let you kind of.

Yeah. So what I'm thinking right now, I kind of done so many of these that I. So this one, you want to get out to as many. You're gonna need volume because it won't. It's not going to convert very well. It's going to get, you're just going to get them to go to visit your website and if they're interested, maybe. If you're going to get intent or you're like, you're like, they're going to, you know, maybe they get people that are on your website. That's like one group, obviously with Adam and everything there. But the other one we hear would be is if you took the change of their tech stack using like Crunchbase or something like that to figure out like what they had for SaaS tech that they had before and after and maybe call that out. And I don't think you're going, I think you said the CTO, I don't think this is the CTO, I think you're gonna want the CFO or like the finance people, right?

That's it, I guess interesting. The CFO seems to care more about obviously like cutting costs, CTO and CIO care about that too, but also maybe more on like probably either one.

I mean you could probably, it's like the CTO who just got slapped for doing it or the CFO, it's probably either one. you probably want to test that, but I'd say you're going to need something in here that's a little more relevant to that person. And I hate even saying that, but like, because then you get into this whole other world of like, does that really matter? But relevant here would be the signal you could use would be like, you just saw them increase their spend in, you could use like the crunch base. I'm thinking about the column right now, but basically they've increased their spend. and they bought six extra tools this quarter or something that you've noticed, then maybe you could, you know, or you've seen some information out there. There's review sites. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of places you could go. Like, if they're, if there are companies leaving reviews on software or they're on case studies or they're, or they're in built with, you know, whatever, now they got a higher spend, you could reference that. And this is something they might not be thinking about. Now you've got them in a little more relevant. Right now, you're gonna have to rely on volume, which is meaning, which makes it a lot harder. Right, you'd wanna probably set up, if it's your whole company, then I would probably take the time to do it. Even though what I would do is I would go probably try to find, like you could definitely get like an idea of like what tools they had before and after and say, look, I see you're hiring a sales team. You're gonna be investing a lot of money in tools. I'm sure, you know, you just grew this much percent. here, you know, and you want to go increase, you just increase your spend now, 100, you know, whatever that is. But like, there just doesn't seem to be an actual reason to reach out to them. You know what I mean?

I see. So like, what's the reason why we're getting a target is a fit for.

Your business, not for their, they're not like, you're basically reaching out on, it's called reaching out like on fit. Like, it's like they're a fit. Everybody's a fit because you want to build the biggest TAM ever, right? That's what VCs want. But the point is, is that the relevant to that person, like the person actually has the problem, they might not be thinking about it. They're going to take a little extra note that you looked at something and got relevant with it. That's what I would say. And I don't know if the soft CTAs are, they're okay. I just don't know. Like the people that buy stuff, I don't know. I might debate people on this, but I don't know, like that video better converts somebody, 'cause you just wasted another whole cycle getting that video out to somebody.

You know what I mean?

Like, if you got 'em, just get 'em.

I have two things to add. Number one, this sort of like using over a hundred SaaS vendors and then you put the according to built with, that just screams to me that this is a sales email, you know? The little one that refers to them, I just don't think you need to say stuff like that. But if you're going the right, and by the way, I dropped some tech in here. It's called Sumbel. This is like a Brandon Short favorite. That will also give you, it's just another way of giving the build with information that they're doing it. It's like job postings or listening or something. I love the idea of like you added all of this software. Were you even aware of that? Like, did you, you know, it's not all going to be used, right?

Yeah.

And then I always like an outreach to prompt somebody to reply to you. So it's like the CTA isn't like, do you want to book a demo? It's like, how do you get them to write something back? You know, like, I don't know how you feel that about that, Jesse.

Yeah, so I think it's more of your, is your sales motion, it's to get them to take a call with you, right?

Yeah, that would be the, I think.

You could ask for a compensation, right?

Like something relevant there, but I think what you got to work on, what'll make the most difference is in that beginning, it, the first two to three words, like it just starts to sound sales email and then they, they just ignore it if they've gotten into it. I think what you got to do is you, you got to look for a, some, something that's showing you that you're not just reaching out to everybody, right? Which is what everybody thinks about. And the signal is gonna be they're hiring people. You're looking at a job description on like Lead Magic's Jobs Scraper or you're looking at like what texts they're adopting in Sumble and Crunchbase or one of those. And then you use that information to actually you know, reach out to them and you're just like, this is the information I have. Like, and I wouldn't call out like you're using a data. You don't even need to call out the data provider. Just call out exactly what they're doing that they're not thinking about and then just, you know, go for it there. I think that's because they're, it's just a message that they're going to have to look at. And then you want to have a backup plan on, like, maybe some ads, maybe brand ads on LinkedIn around your founder brand, you know? some posting, the origin story, you know, all that stuff that they should be seeing while you're emailing them is another real sort of thing you want to do.

I really appreciate that, Jesse, and I've got like a follow-up question for you. So I can see their technologies, like if they're using HubSpot and Salesforce or let's say like HubSpot and MailChimp. And so I originally went down the path of like say, Hey, did you know that you guys are using both MailChimp and HubSpot? This is usually a signal for SAS bloat. It got really complicated at scale. Am I missing the point still for what you said about that signal?

No, I mean, you're there. I don't know if you need to go to that level. I would just say, you're hiring 10 reps, you've got Slack, and it's not Slack, some product that's maybe going to be like $150-$200 a seat, the old old model. Now you're hiring people. Have you thought about this sprawl problem you're gonna have? Right. I mean, it's, it's more like that, really. And I would be, you know, if you're going after the, like, the down market, which is like, maybe like sub 50k deal, it sounded like vendors get in the up market, you know, go wide and send a lot of emails because you're gonna, you know, you're gonna need to get the copy going and you're gonna get a little bit more, but that, that's. that's what I'd say is like using a signal, but then also coupling it with, you're also hiring six people and that's gonna mean this and you're gonna spend a lot more. Have you thought about this? You're right. That could mean that or, you know, growth rate of the company, things like that are gonna be important to this.

We're getting a lot of comments too in the chat about just CFO versus CIO, CTO. Just from past experience, I've tried to sell cost savings to companies before. when I tried to sell, or we tried to sell to the executive that was actually managing that specific piece of cost, which in this case was shipping costs, parcel shipping, I think it came off to them that like, Hey, if I was to actually implement this at my company, it's going to expose that I've been doing a bad job and letting these costs go wild. That was just our observation. It's also not the case with every single company. There are plenty of COOs that I had sold to and operations people. But the finance people really would take lead on it and dive in further, whereas the other folks would actually become blockers. Like we wanted- Probably the IT person.

That, it's probably the IT person that got tasked to go out and search what license management software is out there.

Yeah, right.

That's actually a real observation I've seen with one of the larger companies is like the CFO doesn't really trust Cto is doing their job and it's, and they're like kind of becoming the champion, which is really ironic because the CTO's team is the one who's gonna end up using our tool. That's kind of, interesting.

Can you make it so they can come in and use the product and they can like, I mean, you can hook up to the, OAuth and everything and like, they start to get something out of it. Maybe give them a free, hey, connect in and find your bloat of whatever, like, that could be, oh yeah, that might be a better, because the videos don't, I mean, the video has got to be good to convert, right? And you're going to have to deal with pre-booking and you're going to have to deal with all the logistics around that. It's just a pain because you got them right there, you might as well offer them the sale, right? Which is a good conversation. That's where the videos, people get extra excited about these videos converting and then they have to go chase the person down for like six weeks for no reason at all when they had them right there. if the person had the problem, they probably would have taken the call. So that's where I see some of those things failing, too. But, you know, it depends on the campaign.

Always, always goes back to that. Joel, I think you're about to have a much different campaign, my friend. So we thank you a ton for coming up. And thanks, Jesse, for all the, all the real feedback. I like this, like, sharing thing. I don't wanna my startup. Let me know in the comments. I think it's a good format. I think it just provides a lot of great context too for the others that are watching. So love it, love it, 100%. Fantastic. Thank you, folks. Well, Jesse, I want to get into something at the end here. By the way, Jesse has been sharing these cheat sheets on LinkedIn. They're so freaking good. There were two in particular that I just loved. One was his outbound email cheat sheet, and one was his prompt engineering cheat sheet. I'm going to share them on LinkedIn right after this. That way we don't have to, hop around a different links. I think you guys have opened probably 100 tabs so far on this call. But yeah, I want to talk about a elusive founder community. I almost thought it was fake. I thought it was mythical, like this little unicorn that I hear about from people like Adam. It was called, well, why don't you tell us what it's called and why you started it and what the impact it's had on growing Lead Magic.

Yeah, so it's interesting. At first, I didn't realize it was just sort of a group of people that we had. We had a WhatsApp group and it was mostly either like people employed or sort of looking to maybe become unemployed. At some point, I guess is what it's boiled down to. But it's a group, it's a WhatsApp group, and it's really nothing more than that. Tried to keep it that way just for a lot of reasons. But there's been a lot of success out of there. So it's been around for about three, maybe about three years, a little over three years. And there's just been some very interesting stories come out of there, like, you know, some There's a lot of companies that have like mind being one of them that have come out of there. And a lot of it's been distribution. I mean, if you if you hear Varun, he talks a lot about reverse demos. He'll talk about it like he was in that was like one of the groups that he's in. And there's just a lot of it's really like a no BS kind of what tools are you using kind of thing, but it's also more like what's working for you? What like what are the different strategies? What are the tactics? And there's a lot of creativity in there. And it also gives me a good understanding of the group or like what's changing in the market, what tools are coming out, like who's using what, what's going on. And then a little bit of the drama, I guess there's a little bit of that kind of in there you coupled on, but it's just been an active group and I think it's so it hasn't had a day where there isn't like 100 messages in there.

That's what I was about to do. I was trying to pull my phone. Yeah, I haven't looked at this in 24 hours and there's like 140 49 messages.

It's hard to keep up with, but there's a lot in there and it's all centered around, you know, I think people do things for reasons and, you know, you see a lot of groups out there and they're just like doing things for a certain reason. They say they're doing something, but listen, people do things to profit and make money right now. If you can help a lot of people along the way, that's awesome too. Right. And that's what I think has been the most, genuine part of the group is that the philosophy, the incentives align always in these situations. And it's even aligned more than I even thought. I actually didn't think it would, I was getting tired of it for a while. I was even thinking about closing it off a few times. I still am, but you always want to keep that going. But at the same time, there's a lot of, and we're talking Clay Smart Lead, there's been a lot of there, and then there's a lot of other people like Eric and I'd say Eric and then Max over at Triggify, some other people that have started in that group and they've grown pretty large. And there's other ones, Taylor, your email, Taylor started in there, right?

Yep, for sure.

We'll have Taylor on, I think next month, month after, but he's great.

And it's everybody, CROs, there's a lot of CEOs, VCs in there. There's a lot of people building businesses, really, and it's great because efficient and the model is a cost effective model. Everybody wants that.

That's awesome. Lastly, I want to talk about something that you talk about quite a bit on LinkedIn. And I know a ton of people are going to come in here and follow. But other people are asking, how do we join community? Just pop into insiders, make a free account. I'll shoot you a message after that. Just click that link, make a free account. You can see the courses. We'll go from there. But what was I saying? Oh, yes. Prompt engineering. I want to share this cheat sheet that, and by the way, I'll share this on LinkedIn afterwards. If you go to Jesse's profile, you will find it super quickly. I think this is the one. So you're a huge proponent of, of LinkedIn or, excuse me, on LinkedIn of AI.

Yeah.

Why don't you like, are there, I know there's a lot of people out there who feel like they are behind when it comes to AI. They feel like, you know, maybe they've asked chat GPT for some recipes. or whatever, but like they just feel from a productivity standpoint, they're a little bit behind the curve. Yeah, I don't believe that.

This is a good place to start because what you're seeing, what I'm seeing is like, and if you see people that are on LinkedIn that have prompts and they're like, Hey, here's a lot of them are just, I've like questioned some of them like that was like, that's not even that good. But there's a strategy for how you can prompt AI and do it. What, what's really important and look, some of the new models that they have coming out, like the the 03 and all that. The biggest thing that they've realized is the step-by-step reasoning is what really differentiates it. And then adding in their strategies, and this isn't technical either. This is like plain natural language, right? So if you're doing a mod, if you're prompting for something, if you employ some of these strategies, and I put out a guide and I put out actually a microsite with it, Prompt guide. I'll even put it in the chat. But basically, if you do these prompts the right way, you can get a lot more out of the LLM, right? The language model. And it can be incredibly valuable. And it's, for me, it's meant really, like, I mean, like, I don't have any, like, I have, like, two developers on our team, and we have a very small team, and our marketing is the same way. Like, everything is really done with AI. Like, I'm coding. with AI, right? Like it's coming out that way and it starts with prompting, really. It's really the first part of it. It quickly goes into the tools, but I mean, if you can get good at the prompting, you can do any sort of... Like there's a major difference between somebody who knows how to do a reasoning action prompt versus somebody who doesn't with AI, right? They're gonna get a lot more out of it. So I'd encourage you to do it. And I haven't seen a lot of people talking about this, at least on LinkedIn, It's been a little bit dry there. So that's why I put it out there. But it's definitely a signal through the noise here.

Well, everyone, go to Jesse's, his LinkedIn. I'm going to share the link right here. Uh, we're going to share a couple of links. So pop over to, I think the most recent post, two of the most recent three that you've shared are guides, on these, on these things, which are just so fantastic. So let's pop Jesse's, LinkedIn into the chat here. Everybody go follow along on Jesse. and one other thing I want to, I want to remember to, to say we. So Adam and I are starting a new show. It's a new recorded show, so you won't be able to join live, but you'll be able to watch it on YouTube. Hopefully it'll be a better recorded show. This is a great live show. Anyway, point is, we still want to have some sort of audience interaction here. We want to hear more stories from you guys, the audience, and and when I say stories, I mean successes, failures, crazy stories about entrepreneurship, whatever it might be. So we're going to drop a link in here where you can leave us a voice note, and then we can listen to it during the show and react to it, talk about your business and your story. Just another way to, to share what you guys, the audience are working on, because You know, we're just like you guys. We're just people trying to figure it out, grow businesses. So Ely, our video producer, just dropped a note in there. Leave us a voice note here, speakpipe.com, you'll see the link. You can click there, drop us a note, or that show will come out sometime in May.

And.

Next week- Kevin Dorsey.

Kevin Dorsey. KD, Kevin Dorsey. Anybody know who Kevin Dorsey is? Let us know in the chat. Kevin Dorsey is like the OG sales influencer on LinkedIn, but that's not why he's a legend. He's a legend because like literally every word out of the guy's mouth is like just like quotable, repeatable value. So he knows his stuff, man.

He knows his stuff.

He just has like anything you're like anything about sales, you ask him about like how to sell, how to hire, how to train, how to, you know, go from like, zero to one with sales. It's like he's got a framework for everything on the tip of his tongue. It's unbelievable. So he's going to be great.

Yeah, we love those. Someone said, Any relation to Jack? Jack Dorsey? I'm guessing absolutely not. I just remembered, too, I had a dream last night. Jack Dorsey was a cashier and I was like trying to pay him at the grocery store. And I was like, he was like, We can't accept that. And I kept instead of handing him money, I was handing him like cups and scissors and like random shit. Anyway. that's what was going on in my mind last night. Look at that. Bringing some comedy here. He wanted crypto. That is good stuff. Jesse, you were the freaking man. We gotta have you back. Thank you so much for joining. Definitely.

Yeah. Thank you for having me, guys.

If you want to get higher response rates, you gotta get in the inbox first. Guess what? I always tell people this. If my abuelita, you know, messages me and or emails me, I'm gonna I'm gonna open that email. I don't give a shit what the subject line is.

Right.

Most people that you talk to about cold email today will say cold email sucks, it doesn't work. And I go, really? The subject line is the most important part of the email? No, it's not.

It's actually getting the email in the inbox. The second most important part of the email.