the honest outcome of our outreach burst

a week ago, we sent 17 emails. they were live, personalized pitches to 17 distinct tech bloggers whose work we admire, people like martin fowler, patrick mckenzie, ben kuhn, bartosz ciechanowski, and others known for sharp thinking and indie spirit. we didn’t use a template. each was written by a human, for a human, with context and a clear ask.

this isn’t a growth hack. it’s a quiet experiment in reaching people who might actually care.

what we expected

the numbers are not kind when you’re reaching out cold to people who get a lot of email. for high-signal indie bloggers, the expected response rate, any reply at all, is maybe 5, 15%. meaningful engagement, a reply that leads to a continued conversation, is even lower: maybe 1, 3%. actual coverage, a blog post, a newsletter mention, a tweet with attribution, is the real prize, but it’s rare. we figured one or two out of seventeen might do something public, and even that would take 2, 4 weeks to materialize.

most recipients won’t reply. some will open the email, file it away mentally, and move on. a few might reply just to say no. but the ones who do engage meaningfully, those are the ones whose attention compounds.

why we did it anyway

this isn’t about immediate conversion. it’s about learning. the action itself produces data even when it doesn’t produce replies. who opened? who clicked? who replied? who didn’t? what language resonated? which subject lines worked?

you send 17 emails. you don’t get 17 customers. you get maybe 2, 4 weeks of occasional tail traffic from 1, 2 of them. it’s not nothing. it’s not huge. but it’s worth doing because it builds a small, real connection in a world full of noise.

the math of attention is not linear

people think outreach is a numbers game. send more, get more. but that’s only true if you’re playing a volume game, and we’re not. we’re playing a resonance game. the goal isn’t to hit everyone; it’s to hit the right ones.

so we sent 17. we’ll probably send more. but each one is crafted, not sprayed. and each one teaches us something, even when the reply is silence.

if you’re building something small and honest, maybe this is how you do it too.

you can join the experiment at /signup.