Do you recommend using Instantly for email campaigns, or is Make automation sufficient when starting lean?

Yes, a LinkedIn connection is viable and very viable, but it needs to be heavily personalized. The highest‑ROI way to personalize these days is a Loom video, because video has far more bandwidth than plain text—a picture is worth about a 1,000 words, while a video at 24 fps is worth roughly 24,000 words per second (even more at 30 or 60 fps). If you’re good at what you do, there’s a multiplicative relationship between the medium’s bandwidth and the value you deliver, so using video greatly boosts your conversion rate. After you’ve spent five minutes making that Loom, you should send it through email, your LinkedIn profile (the easiest path for scrapers), and any other platforms you have—Twitter/X, Instagram, etc.—because each extra channel adds another chance of being seen, which raises the expected return on your time investment. As for Instantly, if you’re trying to send emails one‑by‑one with Make, you’ll realistically manage only about 10‑15 a day before you start getting blacklisted, so a dedicated cold‑email service like Instantly is worth using. They offer cheap plans (around $37/month) and let you avoid burning your main domain. While you could split several Gmail accounts and wrestle with Make authorizations, the simpler, more scalable recommendation is to use a cold‑email service to handle your campaigns.

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youtube ↗Lead Generation

What is your advice for personalized LinkedIn outreach when just starting out, and is a LinkedIn connection viable?

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youtube ↗Cold Email

What’s the current effective cold Loom video strategy on LinkedIn in 2026, and how many follow‑ups should I send when I get no replies?

Sending just a few Loom videos per day (e.g., nine in three days, about three per day) yields low reply rates. Successful students in Maker School send 20‑30 videos daily, seeing a 30‑40% connection acceptance rate and a 30‑50% reply rate, which translates to roughly 10‑15% overall reply rate and about five warm leads per day. To improve results, break your outreach into a funnel and boost volume at each stage. The Loom video itself should be dynamic—start with high‑value content in the first few seconds, avoid AI‑generated templates, and add personal touches like zooming in on the recipient’s picture or embedding a short GIF. Consistently send more videos (20‑30 per day) and follow up as needed; there’s no strict limit, but higher volume with personalized content drives better engagement.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

Are you referring to using Loom videos for Upwork job applications when you say they're the best form of cold outreach?

Email deliverability isn’t a simple spam‑or‑not‑spam binary; it’s more like a sliding scale. Adding a link to an email nudges it toward the spam side, but excellent copywriting can pull it back toward the inbox. Adding images moves it further toward spam, yet a strong warm‑up routine, a pristine list, and high engagement can still keep you in the inbox. If you send a Loom video that’s incredibly high‑value and gets a great response, you might willingly take a small deliverability hit because the back‑end conversion makes up for it. Likewise, cutting your daily email volume—say, from 25‑30 down to 5‑10—improves your sender reputation and helps the mailbox provider see you as a real user. Platforms like Instantly let you run separate campaigns (e.g., a Loom‑video‑only campaign) and monitor deliverability on just those mailboxes, so you can isolate any impact. In short, when I say Loom personalized videos are the best form of cold outreach, I’m talking about using them to apply for jobs on Upwork (and similarly via Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn DMs, and email).

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youtube ↗Lead Generation

Should I use cold email or paid ads to transition from cold calling to a more scalable acquisition channel for my SaaS launch?

I wouldn’t recommend cold calling today. While it’s cheap to start—just a phone and your voice—the biggest downside is that it’s synchronous, meaning over half of your leads aren’t available when you call, cutting your efficiency in half right away. It also forces you to block time for calls, makes you vulnerable to spam patterns, and requires years of practice to become effective, with most of your time spent talking to unqualified prospects and having to convince them of your credibility. In contrast, asynchronous methods like personalized Loom videos let you work in short windows, avoid the 50% availability loss, and create a reusable asset you can send via email, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. When hyper‑customized, such videos can be seen by about two‑thirds of prospects and generate reply rates around 50 %. Spending an hour a day on Loom outreach can yield five to ten times the results of cold calling. That’s why I’ve shifted from cold email to warm inbound and scaled my agencies, and I advise you to use Loom videos for your SaaS launch.

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