you don't need ai to personalize the invite

friday we ran a live session, charles, emiliano and me, walking people through how our system works.

and charles said the quiet part out loud.

there are a lot of people in cold email right now doing fancy, super personalized ai emails. scrape the linkedin, read the last three posts, mention the podcast they did in 2023, compliment the dog. we tried that too.

"if you have a good offer, you don't need to complicate yourself with like super ai personalized stuff. all you need to do is a podcast invite that is relevant to them"

the campaigns we run are a plain invite to come on a show. relevant to who they are and what they do. that's it.

everyone thinks personalization is the lever. if the open rate is bad, personalize more. if the reply rate is bad, personalize harder. there are whole companies built on making the first line sound like you spent an hour on someone's profile.

but personalization is a way to make a weak ask look less weak. if the ask is good, it doesn't need the costume.

think of a wedding invitation. nobody writes a custom paragraph about your hobbies on it. it's a card with a name and a date. you still say yes, because the thing you're being invited to is worth going to.

the pushback we hear every week is some version of... my people wouldn't accept a podcast invite. they're too senior. too busy. too technical. too private.

charles calls that a supposition, and he had receipts. on that same day, by his account, he'd signed two billionaire clients. technical people say yes. introverts say yes. the people you're sure would never do it are the ones who've never been asked properly.

his reasoning is the best line from the session.

"especially if you're important, especially if you're successful, the last thing you want is to be pitched. but you will accept that spotlight, right?"

important people get pitched all day. every inbox they own is full of people who want something. a good pitch is still a pitch. it lands in the same pile.

an invite to be heard lands somewhere else. even people with more money than they'll ever spend want to be interviewed by someone competent, and want to tell their own story in their own words. controlling the narrative is worth more to them than anything you could sell.

and the invite isn't a trick. the episode is real, the page is real, the conversation is real. the sales part comes later, and only if it fits. in charles's read about eighty percent of guests take a follow up sales call afterward, and somewhere between ten and thirty percent of those close. those are his numbers from running it, not an audit, but they're the reason we stopped chasing clever first lines.

so the work moves upstream. instead of spending an hour per prospect polishing a first line, spend that hour making the offer better. a better show, a sharper episode page, a host who's done the homework. that's personalization too... it's just in the conversation instead of the subject line.

where ai earns its keep for us is behind the scenes. finding the right people, handling the simple replies, keeping the follow up from slipping. the invite itself stays plain.

long term, ai personalization is a race to the bottom. when everyone can generate a custom first line for free, a custom first line means nothing. every inbox will be full of emails that pretend to know you. the scarce thing will be an offer worth saying yes to.

you can see how the whole invite system fits together on the gtm page.

so take your best cold email and delete the personalization. is what's left still worth a yes... or was the first line doing all the work?