A cold DM is like messaging someone you didn’t know back in school or college. No intro. No connection. Just reaching out.

The difference here is, you’re messaging founders, engineers, marketers, builders. People you admire, want to work with, or learn from. Sometimes you’re asking for a job, sometimes for advice, sometimes just starting a conversation.

These people get a lot of messages. Most of your DMs won’t be read. That’s normal. Cold outreach is partly a numbers game. Sending one follow-up after 2–3 days is okay.

By “mass,” I don’t mean sending the same message to everyone. Each DM should still be personal. You scale by trying more, not by caring less.

You don’t need to explain your entire life story.
If you’re messaging someone for SaaS advice, just say you’re building one yourself. One line of context is enough.

You also don’t need to sell hard. Unless you’re clearly asking for a job or funding, don’t pitch. Most of the time, just be clear about why you’re reaching out.

Keep the ask in the first message. Don’t stretch it across two or three DMs. One clean message beats a slow buildup.

Compliments are optional. Don’t force them. Only mention something if you genuinely liked it. I connected with Gil (a founder doing $30k+/month) because I watched an interview and noticed the poster behind him. That made the message real, not flattering.

And never send the same message to multiple people. People can smell copy-paste instantly. One message, one person.

Most cold DMs fail because they try too hard, not because they’re too simple.

Only DM people you’re genuinely interested in. If you don’t even want to follow them, there’s no reason to message them.

Most of the time, reach out to people more experienced than you. There’s no reason to be scared of messaging someone less experienced, either, but the learning usually flows upward.

People with very large followings might never see your DM. That’s normal. One thing that helped me was interacting with their posts on X — but only when I actually had something to say. Never interact just for visibility.

Message people where they’re active. Twitter works well. Email works even better if it’s easy to find. I’ve never spent a lot of time hunting for emails.

DM founders directly. They have the most context and decision power. If the company is large, reach out to the person who owns the specific area you care about.

Personalised doesn’t mean deep research. If you’re DM’ing someone, you probably already know a few things about them — that’s enough.

You don’t always need a strong reason. Sometimes, simple appreciation works. I connected with Robby just by sending a genuine message about one of his posts.

Treat the other person as a normal human, and remember 9/10 times they are busy and respect their time and boundaries 😀

I now have a pretty high success rate of these, and a simple thing is to do interesting things, most people want to connect with people doing exciting things, they don’t suppose to be successful, I failed a saas and every time it comes up in chat, the other person gets interested in my story a bit :)