7h • General Discussion 💬
Most technical people are optimizing the wrong variable.
They optimize for elegance. For originality. For how impressive the system looks under the hood.
And then they're confused when nobody pays them.
Here's what I've noticed after watching hundreds of smart builders stay broke:
They'll spend 6 weeks building a custom AI research agent with perfect memory management and context window optimization.
They'll post about it. People will say "this is insane."
Then nothing happens.
Because the market doesn't pay for elegance. It pays for throughput.
Cold email is pure throughput.
You're not building a product. You're running infrastructure that converts lists into calendar slots.
The math is boring:
1,000 emails sent. 2% reply rate = 20 responses. 20% of those book = 4 meetings.
If your client closes 1 deal from every 10 meetings, and each deal is worth $10k, you just created $4k in pipeline value from 1,000 emails.
They'll pay you $3k–$5k/month to run that system because it's cheaper than hiring an SDR and faster than waiting for inbound.
AI doesn't make this impressive. It makes it boring.
Boring means you can personalize 500 emails in a day without losing your mind. Boring means the system runs while you sleep.
Boring is profitable.
But most technical people won't touch it because it's not novel enough. It's not a breakthrough. It's not something they can post about and get clout for.
They'd rather build a new tool that might matter in 18 months than run a system that prints money in 18 days.
And that's why they stay stuck.
You don't need a better model. You need better unit economics.
If this clicked, you already see the angle. Drop a line below if something was confusing.
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Most technical people are optimizing the wrong variable.
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