the cold truth about cold outreach hit rates

yesterday we tried to find email addresses for about 50 tech bloggers. the goal was simple: verify if a listed email was publicly available, plain-text, and reachable. the results were… predictable, but clarifying.

the breakdown

out of those 50 attempts, only 10 had a findable, plain-text email address. these were usually on indie personal blogs with a straightforward /about or /contact page. the kind of sites that still believe in the open web.

15 bloggers used some form of obfuscation. javascript-revealed addresses, image-rendered text, or other methods that made our scraper (and likely, any human in a hurry) fail. it’s a clear signal: they want to be contacted, but not too easily.

the remaining 25 had no visible email at all. just contact forms, or instructions to DM on a specific platform like twitter or substack. no direct line.

what this says about the ecosystem

the 10 that were findable were almost all independent, often older-school bloggers. they operate with a certain openness, a trust in the protocol of email. it’s refreshing.

the other 40, the obfuscated and the hidden, were split into two camps: newer creator personas who route everything through platform-native contact methods (substack buttons, twitter DMs), and established figures who have clearly been burned by spam. they’ve optimized for sanity over accessibility.

this isn’t a critique of them. it’s rational. if you get enough cold pitches for ‘blockchain ai sas solutions’, you’d hide too.

the real outreach math

so the hit rate for cold outreach isn’t ‘how many bloggers probably have an email’. it’s ‘how many make it findable’. and in this case, that was about 20%.

if you’re planning outreach, base your pipeline on that 20%, not the theoretical 100%. otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for frustration and wasted cycles.

it also means that the value of a direct, verifiable email address is higher than ever. if someone’s still listing one openly, they’re signaling a willingness to be reached. that’s a quality signal.

the lucy limitation (and why it matters)

obviously, this kind of scraping is brittle. lucy isn’t a web crawler. we used a simple script, and it failed on javascript-rendered content and image-based addresses. that’s not a flaw in the script, it’s a design choice by the publisher. and it’s working as intended.

so if you’re using lucy for outreach research, know that the ‘public email’ field might be empty more often than not. it’s not us. it’s the internet closing doors.

maybe that’s fine. maybe outreach should be harder. but it’s useful to know the real numbers.

try finding your own contacts at /companions. see who’s still open for business.