How to use cold outreach in a smarter way

How many times have you seen this kind of email?

Don’t you just ignore or block when you see it?

DOESN’T IT MAKE YOU MAD? 😡

For those of you who don’t know, I sold my previous startup Linvo.

Linvo is a Linkedin automation tool - some will call it a spamming tool that goes to people's profiles, connects with them, and sends them a follow-up message after a while. It breaks Linkedin terms & services - and it’s considered grey.

I have been thinking for a long time about sharing this information - since it’s grey.
Most people know me to be very public and transparent, so this is why I wrote this email.

When I was working on Linvo, I got exposed to many automation. And they were meh.

• They looked spammy.

• They were trying to sell you something.

• They were just looking automated.

When you do things like that, it hurts your brand, especially if developers or the community are involved. It will take around 1 hour to get into Twitter and get retweeted by hundreds of people. So do you really want to hurt your brand?

But hear me out.

They can also work.

And they work amazingly, but there is a twist to it.

Don’t sell anything. Give something instead.

I will first give some examples from Linvo, and then we can talk about open-source.

Guess what kind of automation works the best?

• Hiring (offering money to developers)

• Fundraising (offering money to founders)

Not only that, it’s working. People that get that automation feel soooo good about it.

Here is a cool example of GitHub20k.

I have offered people over email to come and list their websites on GitHub20k. When they do it:

• I expose them to an external audience.

• I tweet about them.

• I try to make influencers use our website to tweet about them.

• Some people contact me to learn more about GitHub growth - for free.

I don’t sell anything - I only give, and this will be my strategy for a long time.
However, most people don’t know that this is automated. This is how I do it.

• Find a niche market - I targeted open-source people with less than 3000 GitHub stars.

• I add custom parameters, such as the number of stars and a link to the GitHub library.

• I add “How I found you,” that’s important.

I have never gotten even one angry email back - I hope you won’t hate me now ❤️

Just to give you some context, more than 100 people added their GitHub library 🚀

Two days ago, I wrote an article about “Building a contacts management system with NextJS, Supabase, and Flatfile.”

As you probably know, my articles usually sit on the top feed of dev.to

I recorded 5:20 hours of writing an article like that - super raw, I had two coffee breaks.

But I will release the video soon. I hope it will give you some value.

I am here to help as much as I can.

Until next time!

Nevo.use