[PaulHoule]

Last time I did cold outreach for an enterprise product that didn't quite exist yet (about 10 years ago) I sent hand-written emails to individuals and can't recall not being able to get an audience with someone that I wanted to get an audience with. [1]

Last year I knew somebody in a similar situation who had a long list of "fish that got away" but they were pitching to celebrity bloggers, people in the gatekeeping-idustrial complex, etc. He was getting much worse results but he was pitching something really hard to sell.

[1] looking back I find that hard to believe but I think that selective recall helped me handle the hustle

[solarisos]

Selective recall or not, that 100% success rate from 10 years ago points to a different era of the inbox. Back then, a hand-written email was a signal of 'Proof of Work.’

The problem I'm seeing now is that AI has made 'hand-written' style emails incredibly cheap to forge at scale. If an enterprise lead receives 50 'personalized' emails a day that all look like they took 20 minutes to write (but actually took an LLM 2 seconds), the recipient’s internal filter just shuts down. Do you think the 'gatekeeping-industrial complex' you mentioned is now purely a social barrier, or have the technical filters (spam/quarantine) finally caught up to the point where even a genuinely 'hand-written' cold email from a stranger might never even be seen?

[felixdoerp]

I think this is a very interesting problem. I feel we would already win a lot if we had something like a bot-protection / captcha for inboxes. That little increase in friction would already up the relevancy I feel.

[PaulHoule]

Well the people he was talking to were at places like The New York Times who are so convinced of their superiority that they wouldn't talk to startup royalty (founder of Waze, backed by a16z) who had a polished product, never mind us!

I dunno how bad it is with email. My current adventure in marketing has been a hybrid of in-person and social media, I go “out” as a fox-photographer to get smiles from people, get approached several times a day, hand out a lot of business cards, my fame spreads and I get approached more often. It’s changed my point of view on a lot of things.

[solarisos]

The 'fox-photographer' approach is brilliant because it’s a high-friction, high-signal activity. It’s the ultimate proof that you aren’t a bot.

My takeaway from your story is that the 'inbox' isn't just a technical place anymore; it's a social one. Ten years ago, the barrier was just finding the address. Now, the address is public, but the barrier is 'Proof of Humanity.'

Do you think we’re heading toward a future where B2B 'cold' outreach only works if it's preceded by an offline or social signal? If so, the entire 'Verified List' industry is essentially selling a map to a city that has already pulled up its drawbridges.