Cold email, in one-liners: "Just checking in" has never checked anything in. The shortest emails take the longest to write. Nobody ever loved the four paragraphs about your company. "Hi {FirstName}" is a personality test you fail in front of a stranger. A follow-up at 2 AM says more about you than the email does. Write less. Mean it more.

My subject lines got boring on purpose. Not "Unlock explosive growth today." More like "question about your warehouse." Short. Lowercase. No hype. Something a colleague might send. A subject line has one job: get the email opened without making a promise the email can't keep. The clever part can live inside. If there is one.

Every family dinner, someone asks what I do. I say "cold email." My aunty nods slowly. "So you send spam?" "No. I send emails people actually want to get." She thinks about it. "Ah. Nice spam." I've stopped correcting her. Honestly, it's the best summary of my job I've heard.

Most cold emails don't have a copy problem. They have a list problem. People rewrite the same email over and over. New subject line. New opener. "Hi" becomes "Hey". Then they send it to the same people who never needed it. A perfect email to the wrong person is still spam. An okay email to the right person gets read. Fix who gets it before you fix what it says.

Unpopular opinion. Most cold emails don't need more personalization, they need a better reason. "Loved your podcast" is a compliment. "Saw you're hiring your first sales rep" is a reason. Buyers forgive plain. They don't forgive pointless.

Small B2B teams rarely fail at cold email because of the copy. They fail because the founder writes 400 emails on a Sunday, sends them all Monday, and declares the channel dead by Wednesday. Cold email is a habit, not a launch.

It's mid October, which means every B2B founder is building a 2027 plan where pipeline magically doubles in January. Quick reality check I keep coming back to: most of the deals you close in Q1 start with conversations you have in the next six weeks. So what's the one channel you're actually going to work through November and December, even when it gets quiet?

Grok @bot is the app of the century. I can’t even imagine what it’s going to do in coming months and the impact globally.