I've been doing a lot of founder outreach lately.
And honestly, getting someone's attention is hard.
Can't really blame them.
If you're a founder, your inbox is probably 90% cold emails trying to sell you something.
So I started treating my own outreach like a series of experiments.
The first subject line I tried looked like this.
Your order has shipped — #GML-4027
(GML was replaced with the company's ticker.)
It looked like an automated notification instead of another sales email.
It felt familiar.
That alone got me to around a 22% reply rate.
Then I thought I could do better.
I added more personalization.
Mentioned something specific about the company before getting into why I was reaching out.
The response rate dropped to around 9%.
That surprised me.
We've all been told personalization is the answer.
Apparently not.
So I tried one more thing.
I kept the original subject line almost exactly the same.
But instead of a random number, I used the postal code of their office.
Most people would never consciously notice it.
It just looked... plausible.
The response rate jumped to 34%.
Now, this isn't a scientific experiment.
The sample size isn't huge.
There are plenty of variables I can't control.
But it made me think about something.
Maybe effective outreach isn't about making people think:
"This email was written specifically for me."
Maybe it's about making people think:
"This looks like something I would normally receive."
Those are very different things.
We spend so much time optimizing copy.
Maybe we should spend more time understanding how people decide what's worth opening in the first place.
Curious if anyone else has stumbled into similar patterns.