Breaking The Ice: A Beginners Guide to Cold Intros

So, you’ve just finished developing your website/app and finally, after months of hard work, you are ready to show the world. In your mind, this thing is the next Facebook; no doubt about it. All this rocket ship needs is a little bit of exposure to fuel the fire and it’s off to the races. Only problem is… nobody else seems to really care.

Why is this? What happened? Is it the software? Is it you? Turns out it may well be none of the above. If your experience is anything like mine was when I was developing hatchli out of a run down college house in Columbus, chances are you’re not around the right people and not in the right place. I don’t have to tell you that when it comes to user acquisition and adoption, network, coverage, and connections will make or break any young startup. The real question here is how to leverage these assets as a metaphorical midwestern college student with limited network and access?

Before we dig in, disclaimer: there is no perfect solution here. I can’t promise that this guide will make you and your product an overnight success, or that it will be a perfect substitute for a traditional network that is built through years of industry experience and collaboration. What I am giving you are a set of tools and tactics that will help get your foot in the door; the first step in creating a network that will require continued attention and hustle in order to be maximally beneficial.

With that being said, knowing how and when to utilize cold intros can be a crucial component in jumpstarting user aquisition for your startup. Below you will find my personal top five key factors to remember when considering cold intro utilization.

1: Be Cognizant of the Numbers Game

This first one is a no brainer, but often times it is critically overlooked or misinterpreted. Cold intros will always have a lower rate of success than other more traditional form of network building. You have to be prepared to put in work; building a rolodex of cold contacts that is at least 5X — 10X bigger than the network you really need (more on how to go about doing this later). Preparation is key here, and not having enough volume will severely hamper your chances of success.

With this being said, playing the numbers game should never be misinterpreted as a quantity over quality approach. This is a mistake that you see so many young companies make in attempting to get coverage and build a network. Ask any prominent tech journalist / blogger and they will tell you that spamming NEVER works. In fact, the tech journalism community in particular is relatively close knit, and even a few poorly timed spammy cold emails can land you and your company on the blacklist.

The takeaway here: when it comes to cold intros, play the numbers game insofar as putting in the work up front to compile your rolodex, just remember to treat each cold introduction as the beginning of a relationship, avoiding obvious spam at all costs.

2: Know How to Find the Right Info

When it comes to actually compiling your potential contacts, there are a few tools that have worked well for me in the past. Having the right information gathering tools at your disposal can be the difference between an 8 hour job and a 20 hour job. Since email is largely still considered the de-facto method of communication for those in the tech space, knowing how to effectively find emails of potential contacts is a must. Two of my personal favorites are:

Email Hunter: A Chrome extension that crawls the web for email addresses matching the format and domain of a specific site. Really useful for mass email collection from some of the more prominent tech blogs. Just be prepared to pick out the truly useful emails from the massive list that it generates for you.

Rapportive: Another Chrome extension that will validate emails that you type in real time and cross reference them with the recipient’s LinkedIn profile. This serves as an easy email validation tool as well as a good way to see degrees of separation on LinkedIn (you might find that some of these intros might not have to be so cold after all).

3: The Rule of Seven

This is one of the oldest marketing rules out there. For those who aren’t familiar, the rule of seven basically states that it takes about seven conscious or subconscious impressions of your product / service before someone will convert and purchase / sign up / use it. Turns out, a very similar rule applies to cold intros. The more times a potential contact has encountered your company in some way, shape, or form, the more likely he/she is to take an interest in it when you execute on a cold intro. This means making as many points of connection as possible, Twitter / Instagram follows, retweets, like, favorites, responses, etc. Planning out a timeline over which to steadily engage with a potential contact puts you and your company on their subconscious radar. What you are doing is essentially making that cold intro subtly less cold from the contact’s perspective.

4: Provide Real Value

When you make a connection with or get exposure from a hight profile contact, they are risking social capital to do so. A classic example of this is you not wanting to set your friend up on a blind date with someone who turns out to be a total square. The same concept applies to the tech community.

Your challenge is to offset the risk that your potential contact is taking on by providing a clear potential for equal or greater value. Said differently, why is it worth their time to go out on a limb for you? In the case of tech bloggers, is it because your tech is absurdly badass? Do you and your co-founders have a great story to tell? Does your company spend a little too much time in the ethically questionable areas of the tech space? All of these can be spun to provide value for the potential contact; the important part is to sell the story, whatever it is.

5: Timing is Everything: Create Timely Buzz

Last but certainly not least, having the right environment when the time comes to execute on a cold intro must not be understated. If you put in the work up front, build a subliminal relationship, and nail the intro itself, you might just catch someone’s attention. Once you have their attention, the first thing they are going to do is… Google your company. No one in the tech space wants to be involved in something that feels unpopular or dated; what this means for you is that the result of that Google search is make or break in determining the outcome of a cold intro. Coordinate your cold intros in large batches. Plan ahead and make sure that you have the bandwidth to generate some sort of social media buzz on the day the cold intros go out.

If a potential contact sees that other people care about and are involved with what you are doing , they will be much more hospitable. Again, in the case of tech bloggers, articles are driven by views, and unless it appears that there is an existing audience that already cares about what you and your company are doing, your chances of any sort of coverage are slim.

I hope that I’ve been able to provide some useful information that will help you think tactically when it comes time for your next outreach campaign. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the tools and tips that can be used; it’s simply meant to set you off in the right direction and hopefully avoid a few very costly pitfalls along the way. I would love to hear your thoughts on this post as well as any further questions you may have regarding the information presented here.

-Ian Hansborough

Want to read more, or join the Hatchli community? It’s easy and free — click here!