JUNE 2028. The S&P is down 38% from its highs. Unemployment just printed 10.2%. Private credit is unraveling. Prime mortgages are cracking. AI didn’t disappoint. It exceeded every expectation. What happened?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ citriniresearch.com/p/2028gi…

We start every client on cold email. Not LinkedIn DMs. Not cold calls. Not ads. Cold email first. Always. Here's why. The problem: LinkedIn has reputation risk. If you test bad messaging on LinkedIn, your personal brand takes the hit. Your connections see it. Your prospects remember it. There's no reset button. Cold email is anonymous. You can test 10 different positioning angles in a week. The ones that fail disappear. The ones that work become your foundation. What makes it worse: Most teams test messaging on the channel that matters most. They run experiments on LinkedIn—where their CEO's face is attached to every message. Then they wonder why sales feels risky. The fix: Use cold email as your messaging lab. People are painfully honest in email replies. They'll tell you to F off if they don't like your angle. That honesty is data. It tells you exactly what your market thinks. Once you find what works—the situations that resonate, the language that lands—you graduate to LinkedIn with confidence. But here's the thing: LinkedIn is a complement, not a replacement. More people have email addresses than LinkedIn profiles. You can reach your entire market faster through email. And you're not outsourcing your thinking to a black box like ads—you know exactly who replied and what they said. Plus, LinkedIn has friction email doesn't. On average, only 40% of people accept connection requests. That means 60% of your outreach never even lands. And without content backing up your profile, LinkedIn doesn't convert as well anyway. The sequence that works: 1. Test messaging on cold email (low risk, precise targeting, fast learning) 2. Find the positioning that resonates 3. Scale through LinkedIn with proven language content Stop testing on channels where failure has consequences. Start where failure is free.

"We're at $30K/month with 85% margins!" My brother in Christ You work 87 hours/week. You haven't seen sunlight in 6 days. Your family and friends are concerned. Give up some margin and get back your sanity.

if you're a b2b founder just read this paid ads pixel everyone who touches the site remarketing across all channels email nurture newsletter weekly product update podcast interviewing target customers clips for social send podcast to newsletter SEO for bottom of funnel keywords that is all the marketing you have to do and that covers basically every channel

As an AE, I spent months trying to get into an account at “senior” levels. No one responded. I started reaching out to entry-level professionals. One agreed to meet. I could have quickly disqualified them as they were clearly not the right contact. Fortunately, I still decided to run a full discovery. They gave me insight into a C-Level goal (NPS at 60) and a breakdown of internal systems. Using this information, I created a business case for how we could help them achieve that goal within their current internal systems. Sent a message to the CEO with the subject line, “NPS to 60?” and attached my business case for how we could help. He responded immediately, and we kicked off the evaluation. Here’s the lesson: stop thinking that initial conversations are only valuable if they convert into an opportunity. Your first conversation with an account is probably not with your eventual buyer. If you worry only about “converting” the opportunity, you’ll leave the call without being any closer. Shift your mindset from “how can I qualify an opportunity” to “how can I better learn the value I can add to this company,” and you’ll end up with the strongest opportunities of your career. Then, translate what you learn in that initial meeting to an executive business case using my “value proposition” prompt available in my (no cost) AI Sales Advantage here: salesintroverts.com/ai/

Most common DM mistake? Trying to close the sale instantly. I spent 6 weeks talking with a lead. Now last week he paid me $1.5k/mo. I first dmed him on 1st of July. No offer. No pitch. No pressure. And now he became a high ticket client. The best leads aren't rushed. They're built.

Marc Andreesen explains Elon’s management approach: 1. Engineer-first organizations and find truth by speaking with those working on the floor (avoid management layers). 2. Every week, find the most important bottleneck at a company and parachute in to fix it. 3. Keep model of all engineering and business moving parts in his head (obviosuly, not many can do this). 4. Create cult of personality in and outside of the company (continually drive attention, without marketing or PR).

Met with a brilliant young American student He desperately wants to build a startup But he's disheartened by the lack of regulatory oversight provided by the government "I want to build, but the government isn't telling me what to build," he lamented. I suggested that he move to the European Union We have exactly the environment that young entrepreneurs are looking for

If I were launching a services business today, here are the 10 tools I'd use to hit $1M in year one: 1. @n8n_io - Build an AI workforce. Automate proposals, client onboarding, reporting. We saved 20 hours/week on repetitive tasks within month one. 2. @SpaceChenst (Good Operator) - Your outsourced finance department. Real-time P&L by client, cash flow forecasting, and fractional CFO guidance. Know your margins before they know you. 3. @NotionHQ - Operating system for everything. Client wiki, project tracking, SOPs, team knowledge base. Start with templates, customize as you scale. 4. @WisprFlow - Dictate proposals/emails/anything. 3x faster than typing. Perfect for busy founders. 5. @useMotion - Calendar that thinks. Auto-schedules tasks around client meetings, ensures nothing drops. Like having an EA before you can afford one. 6. ContactOut - Find decision-makers fast. Email and phone for any LinkedIn profile. Turn cold outreach warm by reaching the right person immediately. 7. @TallyForms - Beautiful forms with conditional logic, payment collection, and Notion integration. Goodbye, Google Forms. 8. @loom - Async communication superpower. Record SOPs once, use forever. Client updates in 2 minutes vs 30-minute calls. 9. @mixpanel - Track what matters. Which services drive retention? What's your client LTV? Data-driven decisions from day one. 10. @mercury - Banking that scales. Virtual cards for each client project, expense management built-in. Clean books from the start. What should I add to this list?

You should send follow ups until someone tells you to f*ck off. Just closed two separate deals after 23 and 62 follow ups. Wild.

Scaling isn't about selling more... ...it's about fixing what breaks when you sell more.

The difference between $100K/month and $1M/month is just math and the balls to execute it

An entrepreneur friend texted me, asking my opinion on whether or not he should start a podcast. Here's what I said: