Skibidi Mama asks: I’m using LinkedIn Sales Navigator for targeted outreach limited to ~20 prospects per day, which feels underwhelming. I can’t afford expensive cold‑email tools, so I have time but don’t know what to post without being repetitive. How can I hyper‑boost my outreach pacing? Have you considered all the ways to reach out to people you’ve never met to pitch a product or service?
If you haven’t considered it yet, let me walk you through it. LinkedIn is just one of many platforms; you can copy the same approach to virtually any other social media site. For example, on X you can skip the connect request, which would double your outreach, and on TikTok you could triple it. Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms work similarly. If you’re running out of outreach capacity but still have time, simply expand to other platforms using the same method, making minor platform‑specific tweaks. On Instagram, a common hurdle is getting funneled into message requests; a strong opener like an open‑ended rhetorical question—e.g., 'Hey, do you do one‑on‑ones?'—can move prospects into your chat box. The core strategy stays the same; only the tactics change. Beyond social media, think about email, phone calls, or even walking up to a local business. With so many channels, a rational person could easily fill an 8‑hour day just reaching out. So, get after it—put the pedal to the metal. If you finish your outreach in the first hour, you could easily 7× your current volume, and with more reps you’ll gain efficiency and effectiveness.
Make it a daily habit to reach out to 80‑100 people through any channel—LinkedIn DMs, Reddit posts, your own social media, etc.—and keep that volume for a few months while iterating based on results. Pick two or three specific outreach tactics (e.g., 10 LinkedIn DMs, five Reddit threads, one social post per day) and stick to them every day for about 90 days. The main bottleneck is simply being seen; focus on getting visibility first before worrying about hiring, features, or other downstream issues.
When a campaign isn’t working, pretend you are a prospect on LinkedIn (or the platform you’re using) and walk through every element you control: profile picture, title, how recent your post is, and the actual message text. Optimize each piece—use a clear, professional photo that shows you as young, motivated, ambitious, and intelligent; craft a title that conveys credibility; consider posting timing (you may prefer to engage bottom‑to‑top); keep your message concise (around four lines before it cuts off) and experiment with capitals and emojis to grab attention. Treat the video or content you’re responding to as another input you can adjust. By enumerating all possible inputs and independently optimizing each, you compound small improvements (5 % here, 5 % there) into a large advantage. Apply the same logic on Upwork: use bright profile pictures, keep profiles to six lines or fewer because Upwork truncates after that, and write a tight, high‑quality CV (about 150 characters) with a strong, face‑focused image. These micro‑optimizations add up to an unstoppable edge in outreach.
When you set up a bunch of social media profiles, you're not doing it primarily to increase the quantity of leads you talk to; you're doing it to increase the quality of those conversations. This acts as a mandatory background check that everyone performs before signing a contract. If you get a proposal you like, you’ll Google the person before paying. If nothing shows up or you see spam, your chance of closing the deal drops dramatically—maybe from a 30 % close rate to just 7‑8 %. One of the easiest ways to legitimize yourself is to sign up for every social media platform and large directory listings like Crunchbase, Capterra, and similar sites. When I start with a new company (or an investment like Clearview), the first thing I do is apply to about 500 directory listings. You can now use AI models such as Stable 5.1 via a browser loop to automate those applications. This is the first step I take for any new web property—for example, I’m doing it right now for the Stacked Podcast. People need to verify you’re not a scam, and this is about as simple a task as you can do to achieve that.
No problem, you should definitely double down on other forms of outreach. There are two ways to get clients: money‑intensive methods, where you spend money to acquire clients fast, and time‑intensive methods, where you spend time instead of money. In Maker School I focus on money‑intensive tactics, but the amount of money needed is actually very low compared to most businesses. For example, cold email might cost around $220 a month (software, mailboxes, leads), which is about 44% of your $500 take‑home — still a lot when you also need to pay rent. Upwork Connects cost about $2.50 per application; using the Connect strategy 20 days a month adds roughly $250, bringing your total outreach spend to about $470, or 94% of your income. Clearly, spending that much on paid outreach isn’t realistic. If you don’t have money to spend, you trade your time for what that money would have bought you. Start with cold DMs: combine the best of my cold email and Upwork approaches, and send them on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, and Reddit — about 20 per platform each day. At three minutes per message, that’s roughly four hours a day, yielding around 1,200 outreach attempts per month. Even with a modest 5% reply rate and a 25% booking‑to‑close rate, you could land a few clients and start generating income. As you reinvest those earnings, your outreach becomes more scalable and your hourly effective rate improves. Another time‑intensive tactic is community posting: join relevant Slack, Discord, LinkedIn, Facebook groups, answer questions daily for two weeks, then start posting your own value‑driven content. When you gain visibility and authority in those communities, people will DM you for help, letting you pitch your services and turn those interactions into leads. The core idea is to trade time for money early on; as your earnings grow, you can gradually shift back to money‑intensive methods and reduce the time you need to spend.