How should founders balance personalization versus email volume in cold outreach campaigns?

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Accepted Answer

Good question:

The short answer is I would look for "minimum viable personalization": I would be asking, what is the least effort I can put in that will make someone think, “There’s actually a reason they contacted me.”

Personalization isn’t mentioning their college or latest LinkedIn post. Relevance matters more than personalization. If you know that companies like theirs, at their stage, consistently have a specific problem, you can write something highly relevant without spending 20 minutes researching each person.

It's also an approach that is going to change over time.

Early on, I would lean toward more personalization because at this point, you're outreach is also research. Those first 50 conversations are going to teach you which problems, language, and signals matter, so it's worth putting in a disproportionate amount of effort to get someone to response.

But what you're looking for are the signals that will let you standardize things based on what you've learned, so you can become more efficient and increase volume.

You know my basic rule: when you start, you don't need to be doing things that are repeatable or scalable. You are doing things long hand because it doesn't make sense to automate something you don't yet understand. And so it goes for email personalizaion: Learn what matters, then scale what works.