1️⃣ Define Your Buyer Persona (Get Laser-Focused)Why it matters:The Old Way vs. The New WayThe Old Way (Why Founders Fail):The New Way (How Winning Brands Think):The 18 Questions You Must AnswerCreate Your ‘One Perfect Prospect’Example Modern Buyer Persona:🎯 Goals⚙️ Current Setup😤 Problems / Frustrations🧪 What They've Tried Before❗ Hidden Objections🧠 Buying Triggers2️⃣ Start Creating Content (Build Your Trust Engine)Why This Matters:📊 Pick 1 Primary Platform + 1 Secondary PlatformYour strategy: Don’t try to be everywhere. Instead, dominate one platform where your audience already lives, and have a secondary platform for repurposing + extra reach.👉 How to choose:For example:👉 Decision checklist:🔎 Spy Like a Pro: Analyze Top PerformersStep-by-step guide:🗓️ Build a 4-Week Content SprintYour 4-Week Sprint Example (for a SaaS Founder):Bonus Tip: Use the “Fast Content Flywheel”3️⃣ Begin Cold Outreach (Get Conversations Started)Why it matters:Build Your Cold Email InfrastructureStep 1: Sign up for an email sending platformStep 2: Purchase Domains and set up email inboxes.Step 3: Begin the warmup processBuild Your Email ListWrite Cold Emails That Don’t SuckFramework for Writing Cold Emails:🔧 The 5-Part Cold Email Framework (R.E.S.U.L.T.)🧠 What Good Emails Actually Look Like🎯 RULES:🔍 Example 1 (SaaS → IT Director)🎯 Example 2 (B2B Agency → Founder)❌ What to Avoid:✅ CTA Examples (Low Friction)Final Thoughts…Connect With Us:Want a Free Audit of Your Company?
For Early Stage Founders
1️⃣ Define Your Buyer Persona (Get Laser-Focused)
Why it matters:
Most founders chase everyone and end up converting no one. The goal here is to narrow your focus to one specific person who perfectly represents your ideal customer. When you know exactly who you’re speaking to, your messaging, offers, and channels become 10x more effective.
The Old Way vs. The New Way
The Old Way (Why Founders Fail):
- Basic demographics:
- "We target 25-45 year old males, living in urban areas, working in tech."
- Generic pain points:
- "They want to grow their business."
- Shallow tactics:
- "Post on Instagram 3x per week and run a webinar."
👉 Why This Fails:
It’s too vague. Everyone is “looking to grow.” Everyone “wants to save time.” When you use copy that feels generic, it gets ignored.
The New Way (How Winning Brands Think):
Psychographics + Deep Emotion:
You focus on mindset, pain, language, and context.
Example:
"We target startup founders at $1M-$5M ARR who are stuck between growth plateaus and fear losing their market edge. They’re exhausted from duct-taping marketing systems and are desperate to break into predictable growth without burning more cash."
Real Triggers:
You know the exact moment they feel the pain (e.g., when their lead gen dries up, when their CAC spikes, when churn hits 15%).
Behavioral Clues:
You see where they’re already spending attention (e.g., reading SaaStr, lurking on Founder’s subreddit, bingeing Alex Hormozi on YouTube).
The 18 Questions You Must Answer
These questions get you out of “guesswork” mode and force you to truly understand your buyer’s psychology. Don’t skip these—your entire acquisition system is built on this foundation.
1. What’s their job title?
2. What’s their role/responsibilities?
3. What industry are they in?
4. What’s the size of their company?
5. What are their short-term goals?
6. What’s their long-term vision?
7. What keeps them up at night (biggest fears)?
8. What’s frustrating them daily (small annoyances)?
9. What motivates them emotionally (status, security, growth)?
10. What outcomes do they really want?
11. What’s stopping them from getting it (roadblocks)?
12. What’s their #1 objection to buying your offer?
13. What other solutions are they using right now?
14. Where do they hang out online?
15. What podcasts, newsletters, blogs do they follow?
16. What kind of language do they use when describing their problem?
17. Who else influences their decisions (boss, board, spouse)?
18. Why would they choose you over someone else?
👉 Pro Tip: Answer these for one single person—not a “broad group.” The sharper the picture, the sharper your messaging.
Create Your ‘One Perfect Prospect’
📝 ChatGPT Prompt:
You are an expert in buyer personas, consumer psychology, and direct response marketing. I am building a customer acquisition system and need a detailed, psychographic-rich mind map of my ideal buyer.
My product/service: [INSERT WHAT YOU SELL].
My industry: [INSERT YOUR INDUSTRY].
I want you to build a single persona that represents my ideal customer. Please include:
1️⃣ Profile: job title, role, industry, company size.
2️⃣ Short-term goals.
3️⃣ Long-term goals.
4️⃣ Daily frustrations.
5️⃣ Deep fears + anxieties.
6️⃣ Emotional drivers (status, growth, safety, etc).
7️⃣ What keeps them up at night.
8️⃣ Exact outcomes they crave.
9️⃣ Objections they have to buying.
🔟 Where they hang out online (platforms, groups, newsletters).
🔄 What solutions they’re using now.
👥 Who influences their decisions.
🔑 Buying triggers (the moment they realize they need help).
Please format the output as a mind map outline, with bullet points under each section. Keep it punchy, specific, and full of real-life language my buyer would actually use.
Example Modern Buyer Persona:
🎯 Goals
- Get to $10K–$30K MRR fast
- Figure out a predictable way to bring in new customers
- Prove product-market fit and show traction to investors
- Build a repeatable sales + marketing system
- Get out of founder-led sales eventually
- Retain and expand existing customers while acquiring new ones
⚙️ Current Setup
- Relying mostly on referrals, personal network, and hustle
- Basic website + maybe a landing page
- Posting sporadically on social (LinkedIn, X) but no real strategy
- No real cold outreach or ad campaigns yet
- Handling sales + marketing themselves (solo or tiny team)
- Juggling product development + growth—no clear process for either
😤 Problems / Frustrations
- Lead flow is unpredictable and too slow
- Feels stuck in a cycle of “do work → scramble for more work”
- Spending too much time figuring out what to do next instead of executing
- Unsure which channels (content, ads, cold email) are worth pursuing
- Tried bits of everything but nothing seems to stick or scale yet
- Overwhelmed by advice + frameworks online—wants clarity
🧪 What They've Tried Before
- Posting content a few times but didn’t see traction
- Reached out to a handful of prospects cold but got no response
- Ran a small ad campaign but it flopped (no clear offer/message)
- Joined founder Slack groups or communities to network
- Built lead lists manually but never followed up consistently
- Tried to copy what bigger competitors are doing—but didn’t work at their scale
❗ Hidden Objections
- “We need more traction before investing in marketing.”
- “We can’t afford to burn cash on ads right now.”
- “I’m not sure if my offer is dialed in yet.”
- “I don’t trust agencies—they just burn budget.”
- “We should keep things scrappy until we raise money.”
- “I should be able to figure this out myself as the founder.”
🧠 Buying Triggers
- A new competitor gains traction and they feel left behind
- An investor or advisor pushes them to build a growth engine
- Realize referrals alone won’t scale
- Hit a revenue plateau and can’t break past it
- See a peer startup win with ads or cold email and want to replicate it
- Feel time-starved and realize growth isn’t happening fast enough
👉 Messaging Angle Example:
“Most early-stage founders hit a wall at 3–5 customers because they’re stuck relying on their network. I help founders like you build a predictable customer acquisition machine so you can break through that wall and scale fast—without gambling on ads or burning out on cold outreach.”
2️⃣ Start Creating Content (Build Your Trust Engine)
Why This Matters:
Cold outreach and ads can win you attention, but content is what builds trust at scale. Your content proves you’re legit, helps close deals faster, and creates inbound momentum over time. This is your long-term moat.
📊 Pick 1 Primary Platform + 1 Secondary Platform
Your strategy: Don’t try to be everywhere. Instead, dominate one platform where your audience already lives, and have a secondary platform for repurposing + extra reach.
👉 How to choose:
Your Audience | Best Primary Platform | Good Secondary Platform |
B2B SaaS Founders / Execs | LinkedIn | X (Twitter) |
Ecom Brands (DTC) | TikTok | Instagram |
Local Service Business Owners | Facebook Groups | Instagram / YouTube |
Creative / Design / Visual Niches | Instagram | Pinterest |
Developers / Tech Founders | X (Twitter) | LinkedIn / Hacker News |
Nonprofit / Community-Led Orgs | Facebook | LinkedIn / Email Newsletter |
Info Products / Coaching | YouTube | Instagram / X |
For example:
- SaaS founder → LinkedIn (primary) + X (secondary)
- Home services → Facebook (primary) + IG (secondary)
👉 Decision checklist:
- Where does your audience already consume content?
- What type of content are you best at (written/video/visual)?
- Where can you get organic reach fastest?
🔎 Spy Like a Pro: Analyze Top Performers
This is the core of the content method: don’t guess what content works—analyze and reverse-engineer it.
Step-by-step guide:
1️⃣ Find 5–10 top creators/companies in your space.
- Use platform search: “Top voices” (LinkedIn), hashtags (IG), subreddits (Reddit), explore pages.
- Look for accounts with strong engagement relative to their follower count (don’t chase just vanity metrics).
2️⃣ Collect top-performing posts.
- Identify their highest-engagement content (likes, comments, shares).
- Aim to find patterns:
- What topics pop?
- What hooks grab attention?
- What formats win (carousels, polls, case studies, videos)?
3️⃣ Track style + structure.
Note things like:
- Tone: casual vs. professional?
- Length: short punchy posts vs. long-form?
- CTA: hard pitch or soft engagement?
4️⃣ Log everything.
- Create a spreadsheet or Notion doc with:
- Post link
- Topic
- Hook
- Format
- Engagement metrics
- Why you think it worked
👉 Chat GPT Prompt:
- Act as a master marketing analyst. I am going to feed you the top 5 posts for a creator that I want to emulate. Then, you’ll analyze the tone, format, length, style, content, and anything else you can think of. We will use this to create more content at scale Here are the posts [now copy/paste in the top posts for the creator you want to emulate].
👉 Example:
You’re a SaaS founder. You find:
- Top posts are personal growth stories + SaaS benchmarks on LinkedIn.
- Hooks: “We just crossed $10K MRR—here’s what actually worked.”
- Format: Clean text posts with bullet points.
🗓️ Build a 4-Week Content Sprint
This is your execution plan—no more random posting. Structure matters.
Formula:
- 4 Pillar Posts (1 per week)
- 8–12 Supporting Posts (2–3 per week)
Types of Posts:
Post Type | Example |
Storytelling (Founder Journey) | “6 months ago, we had 0 customers. Today we have 4 paying clients. Here’s the #1 thing I learned.” |
Tactical How-To | “3 ways early-stage SaaS founders can close more deals without paid ads.” |
Mistakes / Lessons | “We wasted $2K on ads that didn’t work—here’s why.” |
Social Proof / Wins | “Shoutout to our newest client who scaled from 5 to 20 meetings/month after 30 days.” |
Opinion / Contrarian Takes | “Why cold email beats SEO when you’re just starting out.” |
Question / Engagement | “What’s the hardest part of building your SaaS? Genuinely curious 👇” |
Case Study / Mini Audit | “We helped a founder build their lead gen funnel in 7 days—here’s the process (with screenshots).” |
Behind the Scenes | “We just rolled out a new onboarding process to speed up demo bookings—here’s what we changed.” |
Your 4-Week Sprint Example (for a SaaS Founder):
- Week 1 Pillar: “How we landed 4 paying customers in 6 months (and what we’d do differently)”
- Supporting:
- Post 1: Behind the scenes of your sales calls
- Post 2: Ask your audience their biggest challenge
- Post 3: Quick tip for founders doing cold outreach
- Week 2 Pillar: “The cold outreach email that got us a 25% reply rate”
- Supporting:
- Post 1: Screenshot of a win (email response)
- Post 2: Lessons from a failed campaign
- Post 3: How you build your email lists
(Repeat for Weeks 3–4)
Bonus Tip: Use the “Fast Content Flywheel”
Every top post → Break it into 2–3 micro posts (quotes, tips, visuals).
Example: A 500-word story → Pull out 1 punchy quote + 1 checklist from it → repurpose next week.
3️⃣ Begin Cold Outreach (Get Conversations Started)
Why it matters:
Organic growth will take some time. You’ll need to be consistent and your numbers and business inquiries will go up week over week. If you want to see things happen faster, creating a cold outreach strategy will amplify this.
Note: Cold Outreach does not work for every vertical. If you are a B2C founder, it will not work for you.
But if you have a professional service, or high ticket offering where you must perform a discovery/intro sales call process with a prospective client, it will work quite well.
Build Your Cold Email Infrastructure
If you’re sending cold emails to less than 10 people per month, on a hyper personalized scale, then you can disregard this section.
But if you want to send 1,000’s of emails per month, and book several sales meetings every month, and really build a pipeline built for scale, then you’ll need to build a cold email infrastructure.
Do not use your main company email to send emails en masse. You’ll end up in spam, kill your email reputation, and you’ll need to start over in 3 weeks. Just trust me.
Building out a cold email infrastructure will be your path to scaling big, without spending a lot of money.
Your total monthly expenses will be about $161 and you’ll be able to send emails to 2000 prospects per month, with an estimated 2-5 sales meetings booked monthly.
This is infinitely scalable, if you want more meetings booked, just purchase more domains and more inboxes and send more emails.
These are just conservative numbers.
Step 1: Sign up for an email sending platform
There are many tools available, you can do your research, or you can just use Smartlead.AI.
The basic plan is $39 per month.
Smartlead makes it very easy to set up your entire infrastructure in about 10 minutes.
Step 2: Purchase Domains and set up email inboxes.
Use your email sending tool to purchase a handful of secondary domains that are similar to your primary domain.
Let’s say your company name is Modern Operators. Your primary website is modernoperators.com
You’ll now use Smartlead to purchase 5 domains that are similar to Modern Operators.
Examples:
These are called secondary domains. They’ll point to your main website, and they’ll be responsible for sending emails en masse to prospective clients.
That way, if anything happens to them, your primary website/domain is unaffected
Now, you’ll set up email inboxes.
For every domain, you will purchase 2 inboxes.
For example:
mark@trymodernoperators & mark.malian@trymodernoperators.com
Follow the prompts and make your purchase. It’s pretty easy to set up.
The price of the domains are $15 per domain per year.
Mailboxes are about $3 per mailbox per month.
Step 3: Begin the warmup process
Before you can start sending emails, you need to warm up your mailboxes for 14 days.
If you just create an account and start emailing immediately, you’ll get sent to spam and no one will see your emails.
But if you start slow and begin the warmup process, you can start emailing prospects in 14 days. Follow the prompts in your email sending tool, it’ll show you how it works.
Build Your Email List
Now that we’ve got the cold email system working, we can begin building our leads list.
There are so many tools you can use:
- Listkit
- Apollo
- Phantombuster
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Hunter
The list goes on.
Myself, I use Listkit (starter price is $97 per month), but pick whatever floats your boat.
With whatever tool you use, you’ll be able to build lists of leads that you’ll email.
You’ll filter your prospects by:
- Job title
- Industry
- Keywords
- Country
- There are many ways you can narrow down, each platform has dozens of filters to create a laser focus
Remember to refer back to your Buyer Persona from step 1.
You’ll build your list, export as a .CSV, and plug it into your email sending tool.
Write Cold Emails That Don’t Suck
You have your email infrastructure, you have your list, now it’s time to write some email copy. This is the hardest part.
You could have a hyper targeted list, and an amazing service, but if your copy sucks, it’s not going to work.
This is the make-or-break part of cold outreach. Most founders blow it right here by writing emails that are too long, too self-centered, or too boring. We want to break down exactly how to write cold emails that don’t suck and keep it tactical + sharp.
Framework for Writing Cold Emails:
Most cold emails go straight to trash because they’re:
- Too long
- Too vague
- All about the sender
- Full of corporate-speak or fake personalization
Your job is to cut the fluff, get to the point, and say something worth reading.
🔧 The 5-Part Cold Email Framework (R.E.S.U.L.T.)
This structure works across industries and ICPs:
Section | What It Does | Best Practice |
R – Relevant Targeting | Make sure you’re talking to the right person | Use a clean list with accurate job titles + roles |
E – Email Subject Line | Get the open | Keep it 2–4 words. No caps. Curiosity-based |
S – Sharp Opener | Earn 3 more seconds | Lead with a pain point, insight, or relevance. No “Hope you’re well” garbage |
U – Unignorable Offer | Make them care | Solve a specific problem, fast. Bonus if it's quantifiable |
L – Low-Friction CTA | Make it easy to say yes | Ask one small thing, framed as helpful |
T – Test + Follow Up | Improve over time | Track opens, responses, and A/B test religiously |
🧠 What Good Emails Actually Look Like
🎯 RULES:
- Keep it under 100 words
- Focus on them, not you (2:1 “you” to “I”)
- Be conversational, not pitchy
- Say one thing clearly, not ten things vaguely
- End with a clear, easy question
🔍 Example 1 (SaaS → IT Director)
Subject: visibility into app usage
Hey {{first_name}},
Are you still relying on spreadsheets or guesswork to track software usage across teams?
We helped a mid-size org cut $130K in waste by showing them which apps were actually being used—no integrations required.
Worth a quick look?
🎯 Example 2 (B2B Agency → Founder)
Subject: outbound not working?
Hey {{first_name}},
Noticed your team’s posting great content—curious if cold email is working too?
We’ve been helping founders book 10–20 meetings/mo with a simple outbound system (no ads, no spam).
Want me to show you how it works?
❌ What to Avoid:
- “I wanted to reach out and introduce myself…” (wasted opener)
- “We’re a full-service digital marketing agency…” (too broad)
- Long paragraphs. You’re not writing a novel.
- Asking for time without context: “Do you have 30 minutes this week?”
- Hyperbole: “Game-changing,” “revolutionary,” etc. People tune it out.
✅ CTA Examples (Low Friction)
Bad CTA | Why It Fails | Better Alternative |
“Let me know if you’d like to set up a 30-minute call.” | Too much commitment | “Want me to send over a quick video that shows how it works?” |
“Would love to get your thoughts.” | Vague | “Is this a priority for you right now?” |
“Let’s hop on a call!” | Pushy | “Would it be crazy to send a short Loom walkthrough?” |
Final Thoughts…
Are you wanting to scale your company with more clarity, intent, and purpose?
We help founders:
- Build frameworks that scale, for operations, marketing, and more
- Automate mundane processes to step back and look at the bigger picture
- Scale to millions of dollars, helping them live the life they actually want?
Connect With Us:
Damon Flowers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/damonflowers
Mark Malian: www.linkedin.com/in/mark-malian
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