📰 65%+ Open Rates or How To Properly Send Cold Emails

Hamilton Helmer is one of the world’s leading experts on business strategy and the author of the seminal book 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy, which provides a comprehensive framework for understanding what it really takes to achieve and sustain a competitive advantage. With more than three decades of experience in the strategic consulting industry, Hamilton has advised over 200 companies—from burgeoning startups to Fortune 100 giants—on how to identify, build, and leverage their unique strategic powers. In our conversation, we discuss:

Potential sources of power that startups should develop from an early stage

Common misconceptions among companies about the types of power they possess

How power relates to strategy

The difference between a moat and a power

Practical strategies for non-leaders to leverage insights about power and strategy in their work

AI’s impact on competitive advantages and barriers to entry

Because of that we were like "ok lets implement all of it, this might actually work". So we did that. Then.. prospects started signing up on our site, even before getting on a demo call!

We were finally getting positive responses on emails, booked demo calls, and started getting conversions.

In the end, I realized, your prospects don’t write back, because they’re not interested and it's your job to make them curious. If you don't know know it's because you lack the skill of writing GOOD cold emails. The Title, Body, CTA, all of this stuff matters.

A micro acquisition occurs when a founder/builder sells a micro product, such as a micro-SaaS, a newsletter, a directory site, or any kind of product on the internet, to a buyer.

Since solopreneurs or lean teams generally build micro-products, these acquisitions typically involve IP & asset transfer rather than a corporate transfer like large-scale M&A transactions.

This means that the product rights and brand are acquired, but not necessarily the employees. In some cases, the builder may join as the developer, or the newsletter owner may join as the growth lead, but that's the extent of it.

Some artists create with pen.

Others create with clay.

And there are a few artists that create with… robots? Yes, robots.

In Santiago, Chile there’s an engineer, turned extreme sports photographer, turned visual artist that uses robots known as pen plotters to aid in the creation of his artwork. This artist’s name is Pablo Azócar.

If this sounds like one of those ads starring the Most Interesting Man in the World, you wouldn’t be far off.

As Reddit IPOed, the most interesting aspect of it has nothing to do with its core but with something else related to how AI is reshaping the whole business modeling landscape for these companies.

Let me give you some insight into how social media (and, more generally, user-generated platforms) business models might change.

I spent over $10,000 on Facebook Ads last month. I got back over $7,000 from Sparkloop. So my effective paid CPA (cost per acquisition) for new readers is about $0.25 cents. I make about $0.40 cents per reader per month (by selling ads in the newsletter)