Identifying Opportunities for Cold Email

Passive Perception

I've played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. In the game, characters have a number of abilities, including Passive Perception and Investigation.

• Passive Perception is a character's natural awareness of their surroundings.
• Investigation is a discrete action the character can take to discover something.

The two abilities draw from the character’s Wisdom score, so improving underlying skills improves both abilities.

Most importantly, increasing your Passive Perception means that you have to make Investigation checks less often, as information simply presents itself to you. This saves time and effort and reduces the chance of failing an investigation.

So, Passive Perception is noticing situations where sending a cold email would be useful. Investigation is looking for an opportunity to send a cold email. Leveling up your passive perception will help you continuously maintain your email practice.

Finding Opportunities

The best way to find a consistent source of people worth reaching out to is to join communities. I've reached out to people from:

• Twitter
• Hacker News
• Reddit
• Indie Hackers
• Discord servers
• Email newsletters
• Blogs and publications

This is a starting point, not a definitive list of places to find prospective connections. Find groups of people online who share your interests, join the general conversation, and message people individually as merited.

With experience, sending a cold email becomes a natural process:

• Step 1: Hey, this person is cool
• Step 2: There's an interesting thing I want to tell or ask them
• Step 3: Oh, neat, here's their email address

To identify opportunities for cold email, don’t set a goal of writing more messages. Instead, tune your Passive Perception for finding more cool people and interesting things to talk about. And then when it’s time to use cold email as a tool, your Investigation check will be that much smoother.

Best,

Philip