42 messages. One call.

George Holliday

🍀

9h • General discussion

One of our members tracked his outreach properly for a month. Not vibes, actual numbers. Here's what it looked like:

42 artists contacted

11 replied

3 asked for his portfolio

1 booked a call

That's a 26% reply rate. For cold outreach, that is genuinely good.

And it still took 42 messages to get one conversation.

This is the bit nobody tells you. Most people send eleven or twelve, get a couple of polite nos, decide outreach doesn't work for them, and quietly go back to waiting for someone to recommend them.

They weren't bad at it. They stopped at message twelve.

The number that decides your month isn't your reply rate. It's your volume. The members who get clients are not better writers than the ones who don't. They just send more.

One thing that does shift the reply rate: I tested sending short video messages instead of text over a single weekend and got 124 responses. Same offer, same people, different format. A face gets answered. A paragraph gets scrolled.

Now, if 42 messages a month sounds like a lot, you're right. It is. And the messaging isn't usually what beats people. The admin is. Remembering who you contacted, who replied, who needs chasing on Thursday.

That's why Carl and I have been building Homegrown. It's a CRM made for this exact job: finding people worth contacting, keeping track of every conversation, and telling you who's gone cold and needs watering. We built it because nothing out there did it without feeling like a spreadsheet with extra steps.

The waitlist is open and this community gets first access. Link below if you want in.

So, honestly, no judgement:

How many outreach messages did you send last week?

Zero is a completely valid answer and I'd genuinely rather know. Drop your number in the comments 👇🏼

2 comments

42 messages. One call.