Overcome cold-email procrastination

It's child's play for me to write & send sequences on behalf of my clients. When I write for myself, I struggle. This article is meant to help future me, the next time I'm cold emailing for myself.

Desired Outcomes of This Checklist

1) Procrastinate as little as possible while putting together your list and sequence.

2) Feel good about your progress from the moment you've started, and never get stuck

3) Send to your 1st prospect as soon as possible, starting the virtuous cycle between your effort <> replies <> sales calls <> new business <> cashed checks.

Go through the following list and pick the easiest ones. Do the ones that feel easy to you. Check them off as you go. Don't do them in order. The idea is not to do all of these. It's to do anything at all.

Sequence Writing

List-Building

List-Cleaning

Amazing work, you've sent your 1st Quickmail to your 1st prospect

Take a moment to celebrate. Great, now it's time to send you second email. You're probably stressing right now about how you want to say something slightly different. That's okay.

Handling Infinite Variations

Now you've sent to two people, and you're equipped to make any edits you want without messing up emails you've sent to past prospects. And you didn't have to make the decision to throw out any past writing.

Keep repeating the above process until you're done with all your prospects. Or, send to them with the defaults, that's perfectly okay too!

Yours,
David Trejo
EngineerOverflow.com

PS Want exact instructions on how to ask all your friends for referrals using Quickmail?
Buy my book. The referrals chapter also includes the exact sequence I used. It's a considerate 2-step sequence and got me 30% reply-rate.

David Trejo

Engineer at Chime & consultant. Past clients include Credit Karma, Aconex, Triplebyte, Neo, the Brown Computer Science Department, Voxer, Cloudera, and the Veteran's Benefits Administration.