Julius Forster plans to launch a cold-email campaign for a pay-for-time service, modeled after a WordPress hosting founder's successful outreach. He'll manually send 30 emails today from his personal address to test deliverability, then set up warm-up for scale. He's also onboarding a PHP engineer from Upwork and using the stream as an accountability checkpoint after a slow period.
Okay, what is the plan for today? That was actually my plan. Every day when no one's here yet, when I start the stream, to kind of plan out the day for what's going to get done, right? I look terrible, by the way. This is so I can look back, so I can look back in the future, watch the start of every stream, and see what I want to get done on that day. Now let me check Caligraphe right here. The goals for today, because I've been procrastinating on that for way too long. The goal is to just do the thing that actually matters, which— oh, I have to plan out my weekly goal as well. It's Tuesday, haven't done that after, after family visited, and my grandparents obviously are still here for another, I think, week. Um, Okay, so my— firstly, for my daily goal, typically you would want to set up the weekly goal based on the daily goal, but my daily goal is actually, um, for today is to launch quite a simple, um, email campaign. Um, So that is like an email campaign. Pay for time. Yes. Okay, the pay for time email campaign, which is quite a great campaign. That is the one that was used by the founder of the, like, the WordPress hosting service, like the biggest WordPress hosting service that was in this kind of controversy not too long ago. He had, when he started, quite a simple email campaign where he just Let me pull up the task here called email campaigns where he just said, let me read it out loud. Oh, where is it? Offer to pay for the time. Oh, I added it here. I added it here and it is gone for some reason. There we have it! Basically what he said or wrote was— quote block quote— "Hey, I'm the founder of a new WordPress hosting company. It's designed for folks like you." So I'd love to talk about any pain you've got with WordPress and get some feedback. Now I know your time is valuable. You're a consultant. I don't want you to feel like I'm trying to grab time from you. I am— I'm very happy to pay whatever you think is fair for an hour of your time, even if it's more than your normal hourly rate, because I appreciate it's a weird one-off thing. Jason. That is pretty much what he wrote. I found that on, I think, Marketing Examples or whatever it's called, um, and I think this is great copy. He sent that years ago, and even today the email copy is still much worse than that. So this is pretty much— you don't ask them to jump on like a sales call, you ask them for feedback, right? And I want that feedback, right? I have so many target audiences, meaning I can translate I can translate this into a ton of different target audiences. So I just create like 5 target audiences. I customize it. There are no AI customization. I hate AI customization. Whenever you customize something with AI, it is so obvious right away. It is, yeah, most people just can't do cold email properly. But something like that, no AI customization stuff like that needed. You just research the target, like you, you create a proper lead list, email list for every target audience. You have a custom copy slightly modified based on the target audience, and all you customize is, hey, first name, and then you start, I'm the founder of a new XYZ, right? That's pretty much it, uh, and send like that. And what he had, like a ton of, a ton of people go come back, like pretty much every single one reply. And then, um, and no one wanted money for that time. And like, like a ton of them, a ton of them signed and said, okay, let's, let's do it. We are not happy with the current hosting companies. Let's, let's do it. Uh, let's, let's sign with you. Now this is one that I've been keeping in the back of my mind, and I think this is one that could actually work really, really well. Um, yeah, so that's pretty much the one I'm, I'm customizing kind of. And what I want to do is today, like, I thought about should I send this actually from my personal email, like from my direct email, or should I set it up as a cold email campaign? The upside with direct email is if they look at the sender email, they see 'Oh, it's from the real— sent from the real email.' Um, and, and the thing is, in my cold email program, I was a bit, a bit stupid, and I just created a ton of fake personas. Um, like Amy, Beth, Chris, Dan, Kate, Laura, Matt, Mac, Nick and Tom instead of just having myself as the persona, because I would reach out as the founder, which obviously is better than some random person. Um, so yeah, based on that, that's dumb. I have— I mean, I have all of them warmed up a lot. I've been warming them up for a long time. But I would— if I did, I, I could— I mean, I could change their names to my name, which I already did. For each of the emails, but they will still see it came from amy@gomonira.com and the name is Julius Forster. That is not ideal. That is, uh, that is not ideal. I can try it, um, but I am not sure how well that would work. I mean, I can send one test email to myself and see, like how much do you actually see the email address, and then I can launch it. But especially if I do a few more, I thought let's just keep Instantly on the back burner, maybe create a few more emails like for myself, for my own name, for my own domain, and start warming those up. And then for now test this email by just emailing it from my own email address, just sending 30 of those emails today and then, um, sending maybe another, another 30 or so tomorrow. Um, I know this might, might not be great for, for, for the domain and for the email if they reported as spam. That would be terrible, but I think the copy is good enough for me to send it as a normal email. So that is really the decision. So what I'll probably do is I'll send 30 or so today manually, find best possible leads, send them manually, and and then set up, set up some sending, some sending emails, some more sending emails for, for myself with my name actually. So that's, that's pretty much the plan here. Um, that is my primary, primary thing. And the second thing is I'll have to check with the new person I've gotten onboarded if he is a good fit. So I have him hired through Upwork right now. Yeah, let's see, let's see how well he, he turns out to be. Um, yeah, that is kind of, that is kind of my second task, see how well he works. So in terms of communication, he likes to communicate a lot, which I firstly appreciate. He even overcommunicates for useless things, which is kind of annoying at the moment, but I appreciate all the communication. And yeah, he seems to be quite, quite good so far, I guess. So yeah, looking kind of good right now. And I guess if, since I'm in contact with him, he's been an engineer for, for years, like he's PHP, PHP level. If he seems to be good, he would obviously be my door into finding other good people. So that would be absolutely awesome. Yeah, um, that's pretty much the plan for today. So I'm probably, probably going to get more done today, more useful stuff done today than I've gotten done in the last 10 months. Okay, let's get to it.
