Chapter 02I'm awesome, give me money

Almost every founder I meet is sending the same message, and when the message is an ask, the channel you send it through stops mattering. Email, ads, a booth at a conference, a warm intro from a friend: the person on the other end hears one thing and reaches for the exit.

I know this because I hear the message all day. I talk to dozens of founders a day, and somewhere in the first ten minutes most of them deliver a version of the same speech. I've heard it so many times I can perform it. On a call in September I did:

I'm Sunny, I'm awesome, I have a widget, it's awesome, I have a company, it's awesome, give me money. So, when that's the broadcasting message, the medium becomes irrelevant.

Nobody says it in those words, of course. Founders are smart. They dress it up in a deck, a demo, a careful subject line. But strip the clothes off and the shape underneath is the same:

So not in those Words, but that's essentially the energy that they're coming at with.

The speech

Let me walk you through how it usually goes, because once you hear it you can't unhear it.

A founder gets on with me. Maybe they're raising, maybe they need customers, often both. I ask them to go first. And out it comes. Who we are, then our traction, then the market size, then why we're different, and finally what we need from you.

Every sentence is about them. Every sentence ends, one way or another, in a request. I wait until they're done and then I play it back in one breath: I'm awesome, my widget is awesome, my company is awesome, give me money.

There's usually a pause. Then a laugh, the slightly embarrassed kind. I described one of those moments to a founder in August:

And they're like, oh, my God, I just finished telling them how awesome I am and how awesome my widget is and how I want money. So checkmate. I've already identified the problem with one sentence.

I don't do it to embarrass anyone. I do it because I did the same speech for most of my career, and nobody ever played it back to me. It would have saved me years.

What strikes me most is how universal it is. Biotech, real estate, fintech, robotics. Bootstrapped founders and funded ones, first-timers and veterans. On a call in October I tried to describe the range:

It's in different words, different industries, different haircut, different cultures, but it's always the same message, which is, I'm awesome. Give me money.

Different haircut, same message. That line makes people laugh, and then it makes them a little uncomfortable, which is the point.

Two currencies

Sometimes the ask isn't money. Sometimes it's time. The founder wants a meeting, a call, fifteen minutes, a quick look at the deck. It feels smaller, so it feels safer. It isn't. To a busy person, time is the same request in a different currency:

They go to them, they're like, hey, can I have your time? Can I have your money? We think that doesn't work.

Notice what both requests have in common. They start with you needing something, and they ask a stranger to go first. You're asking someone who has never met you to make the first deposit into a relationship that doesn't exist yet. Later on that same call I put the question the way the reader on the other end is asking it, silently, every time:

Why would a stranger give you time and money if they don't even know you?

There isn't a good answer to that. Your traction isn't an answer. Your pedigree isn't an answer. A stranger owes you nothing, and every line about how good you are is one more reason for them to wonder why you need them so badly.

Why the medium becomes irrelevant

When nobody answers, founders usually blame the channel. Cold email doesn't work. Everyone on LinkedIn is shouting. Conferences are a waste. Ads are too expensive. So they switch channels and send the same speech through a new pipe, and they get the same silence back.

Here's what I tell them. Look at where every channel ends up:

if you really think about it, all marketing efforts lead to one place, which is the inbox. So, if you can show up there and not have to pay Google, not have to pay conference organizers and all these middlemen like Reddit, blah, blah, blah, why wouldn't you just show up there? But then the problem is most people, they They come to them with an offer that stinks.

The ad points to a form, which feeds an email. The conference gets you a badge scan, which becomes an email. The warm intro arrives as an email. Every road ends in the same inbox, and what you put in that inbox is the message. If the message is "give me money", the road you took to get there doesn't change a thing:

So, it's Google or conferences or cold email. It's irrelevant. It just falls on deaf ears.

The filters know your speech

There's a second reason the speech fails now, and it's getting worse every month.

Everyone is sending it. So everyone on the receiving end has built defenses against it. Spam filters, AI sorting, and the oldest filter of all, a junior person whose job is to keep you away from the person you want. On a call I put the layers this way:

even if you do make it through the AI filters and spam filters, it'll get blocked by ... the associate because he's designed to keep people at bay.

Think about what that associate sees in a day. A hundred versions of the same speech. They're good at their job, so they've learned to spot it in the first line. And even when a sales email slips through, think about what that associate does with it. On a call in August I said it this way:

even someone low level if they saw the email they're not going to go and take a sales you know email and give it to the CEO

Nobody gets promoted for forwarding a pitch to the boss. The gate stays shut, and the speech dies one desk short of the person it was written for. Hold on to that picture, because in a few chapters we'll see what makes the same associate walk an email upstairs. AI tools are learning the same thing, faster:

We think that falls on deaf ears because because everyone's heard it. AI's Trained to filter it out.

You can fight that with better tricks. Cleverer subject lines, more personalization tokens, a fake "re:" in the subject. People try all of it. The filters catch up, because the thing they're trained on hasn't changed. Underneath the tricks, it's still an ask.

Cold email alone

It would be easy to read this book as a pitch for my own channel, so I want to be straight about its limits.

Cold email, used to ask for sales or investment, is hard. I've seen it across a lot of businesses, and I said so plainly to a guest on my own show:

what we found is that just cold email by itself, when you use it to solicit sales or investment, It's like an uphill battle. It doesn't work very well. And I've seen the numbers across hundreds of customers. Churn is high. You get marked as spam. Even if you show up at the meeting, you're like, Subservient, kind of like, hi sir, can I have some money please? It's just a weird feeling, right?

That last part matters more than the conversion rate. Even when the ask works and you get the meeting, look at where you're standing when you walk in. You're the one who wants something. They're the one deciding. The whole call tilts before you say hello.

On another call I reached for a word an electrical engineer would use:

Because the frequency of the call was off. It was our founder entering, and it's like a junior associate. It's like subservient. It's like begging. It's like pleading, and it's like the energy's off, like just from the get-go.

Wrong frequency. Everything after that is noise.

I didn't learn this from watching other founders. I learned it in my own meetings, pitching investors who were half listening, and I hated how it felt:

I'm like begging. I'm asking. I don't fucking do that shit anymore. I hate begging. I hate asking.

The bar

When founders push back on this, I use an analogy that's a little crude but lands every time:

it's like going to a girl at a bar being like, hey, I need you like right now or something. It's like, okay, buddy, you should run for the hills. Same thing with investors, right?

Nobody would do that at a bar. Everyone does it in an inbox. The need comes first, before any trust, any shared story, any reason for the other person to care. And we're surprised when they run.

So here's the diagnosis in one sentence. The problem isn't your channel, your list, or your copywriting. The problem is that your message is about you, and it ends in an ask. Fix that and almost any channel starts to work. Leave it alone and no channel will save you.

What do you send instead? On a call in August I gave a founder the short version:

our suggestion is instead of doing that which kind of doesn't work go give something and the best thing you can give is a spotlight

We'll get to the spotlight. First you have to see your own speech clearly, and that's this week's job.

Try this week

Pull up the last outreach email you sent to someone who doesn't know you. A buyer, an investor, a partner. If you have a template, use the template. If you've been sending a deck with a note, use the note.

Print it, or paste it into a blank document where you can mark it up.

Now go sentence by sentence. Underline every sentence that is about you: your company, your product, your traction, your team, your raise, your ask. Then circle every sentence that is about them: their business, their work, something they said or built or care about.

Count both.

If you're like most founders I talk to, the underlines win by a mile. Five to one is common. Ten to zero is not rare. Write the two numbers at the top of the page.

Next, find the ask. Every outreach email has one, even the soft ones. Write it in the margin in plain words, the way the reader hears it. "Give me fifteen minutes." "Look at my deck." "Invest." Then write which currency it's in: time or money.

Last, read the whole email out loud in the voice I use on calls. I'm awesome, my widget is awesome, my company is awesome, give me money. If it fits, you've found the problem. Don't fix it yet. Sit with it for a day.

Keep the page with the chapter 1 notes on the email that got through to you. Put them side by side. One was about the reader. The other is about you.

When the person you most want to reach opens your email tomorrow, whose story will they be reading?