Nobody remembers your cold message

👋 Hi, it’s Alexis, and I’m here with a 🔥 edition of The Midnight Text, Forum Ventures’ bi-weekly newsletter that provides honest answers to the unspoken questions that keep founders awake at night.

Before I jump in, a quick note. We’re still looking for a few more HealthTech founders for The Buyers Table on July 28, where you’ll present directly to health system and retail health operators for honest commercial feedback (super rare opportunity!). Our HealthTech Council is currently most focused on administrative AI, workforce and workflow tools, value-based care, patient experience, and EHR integration. If you’re building in one of those lanes, apply to present.

A founder in one of our cohorts got a reply to her cold Linkedin outreach a few weeks back that just said: don’t ever contact me again.

She came to her 1:1 with her Forum Managing Director rattled. This person had a whole network, and her industry is small. What if word got around that she was pushy? What if the one no became five no’s overnight?

She wanted to apologize her way out of it and try to save her reputation. Here is what her MD told her.

The person who said don’t contact me again is not going to remember you by the end of the day. People are buried in their own inboxes, their own fires they are putting out, their own Tuesdays. A cold message that didn’t land isn’t a mark against your name. It’s nothing.

Respect the no. Take them off the list. And then let it go completely, because it is already gone for them.

I love this reframe. Most founders are not actually afraid of rejection but of being remembered for it. They feel embarrassed, and worried that it might lead to negative word of mouth. But the truth is almost nobody is thinking about you enough to make that a reality.

When a founder can reframe rejection from being personal to being information, the doors to more yeses will open.

One “no” tells you nothing.

A rejection isn’t information about you. It’s information about that one message, to that one person, at that one moment. It could be timing, mood, a bad week, a full inbox. Unfortunately, you don’t get to know which.

Multiple no’s are where there is possibility for learning. Now you have multiple data points that you can start to test against. However, it often takes hundreds of messages to get a few actual responses - even rejections - that you can start to use as intel.

If one “no” can’t tell you anything on its own, one “yes” can’t either. A single “we’d love to talk” can be a fluke, a misunderstanding, a warm intro that goes nowhere, or someone being too nice. It’s a sample size of one.

So just as you shouldn’t take a no and build a strategy around it, a yes is not proof of something real.

The discipline is the same in both directions. Don’t let a single no convince you the idea is dead. Don’t let a single yes convince you it’s working. Wait for a pattern to actually learn something useful.

Every message you send has four variables: the channel you use, the company you target, the person you target within that company, and the message itself. When you get a no, or silence, don’t guess at what went wrong. Change one variable at a time and send again. If you change all four at once, you’ll never know which one moved the number.

You don’t need a big list to start, and you don’t need to wait for a statistically significant sample to glean insight. Two responses out of a thousand sends is enough to build your next hypothesis. Look at the one thing those two people had in common, and test that instead of testing broadly again.

You need somewhere to actually track this, or it’s just vibes. A spreadsheet works fine. For each batch, log what you changed, what you sent, how many people responded, and what they said. Tools like Apollo or Clay will help you build and segment lists by company size, industry, and title so your “company” and “person” variables are actually precise instead of a guess. A tool like Duck Soup can run your LinkedIn outreach at volume and let you swap in different message variants without manually sending each one. None of this replaces the thinking. It just means you can test faster.

The pattern only shows up after you’ve made it easy to see: same tracked variables, batch after batch, watching what shifts when you change one thing at a time.

Spend most of your energy refining your current best bet: the specific combination of channel, company profile, person profile, and message that’s already producing your best results. That’s 80% of your time. If cold LinkedIn messages to VPs of Finance at 50 to 200 person startups are working, keep tightening that.

The other 20% goes to ideas that don’t fit that pattern at all. Not variations on the winning message, but actual left-field bets. Try cold email instead of LinkedIn. Reach out to a completely different title. Test a bigger company size just to see. Most of these will go nowhere. But every so often, the long shot outperforms the thing you were sure was your best bet, and that becomes your new 80%.

Then, on every call that transpires from your outreach, ask “what made you want to talk to me?”. There might be some piece of gold in there that will tell you exactly what to say to the next hundred people.

Here are a few pieces of cold outreach advice that we’ve tested and know work so you’re not starting from zero.

1. Your first message’s only job is to get a reply. Not to explain who you are or sell the product. Just get them to engage. Letting go of the instinct to introduce yourself and your company up front makes outreach dramatically easier, and it’s often the thing that’s quietly killing your response rate.

2. Before you write to anyone, map out what they’re responsible for, what they’re motivated by, and what they’re afraid of. People move for one of those two reasons, motivation or fear, and a message that doesn’t tap into either will get ignored no matter how well written it is.

3. The person who responds isn’t always the person who buys, and that’s fine. Someone without budget authority can still tell you who the real decision maker is, what that person prioritizes, and where they go to stay current in the industry. That’s free intelligence for your next hundred messages, even if this particular conversation never closes.

4. And never say a number in your outreach. Get the prospect on the phone first to agree on the size of their problem, in hours lost, dollars spent, or revenue leaking out the side, before you ever talk price. People rarely argue with a number they helped you build.

We hope this has been helpful and gets you out of rejection mode and into execution mode.

You got this,

Alexis

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