A lot of advice surrounding LinkedIn outreach is either outdated, or guaranteed to get you kicked off the platform, or at the very least: ruin your reputation. But, LinkedIn is still one of the best channels out there when it comes to warm and cold messaging because it converts like an absolute charm. For it to do wonders for you, however, there's a bunch of things I keep telling people to keep in mind. I've summarized them in this video, so take a look and let me know if you've been making any of these common mistakes with your campaigns. If you've got a question, shoot!

Cold email is not dead. Bad cold email is dead. Average reply rates fell from 8.5% in 2019 to 3.4% in 2026, and the senders still winning changed one thing (it was not the subject line). This video covers the full breakdown: what actually died, what quietly works better than ever, and what the standard outreach stack really costs once you read the fine print. The numbers: reply rates went 8.5% in 2019, 7% in 2023, 5% last year, 3.4% this year. In 2024 Google and Yahoo introduced bulk sender rules. Authenticate your domain (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), one-click unsubscribe, and spam complaints under 0.3%. That is three annoyed humans per thousand emails. Spray and pray does not survive that math. Top senders still clear 10%+ replies on the same channel, because they stopped emailing strangers and started emailing raised hands. The receipt: Apollo $99. Instantly $97. Lead credits $97. HeyReach $79. Warmup, inboxes, and domains $6 to $144. That is $500+ per month, per seat, before anyone books a call. Credits are consumed per action. Caps apply. Every tool prices per seat. But...there's a better way to go about ALL of this.

So this is the first post, and I've rewritten it four times, which is a bit embarrassing considering what I do for a living. Short version of me: I'm Marsad, I live in Paris, I build a company called BrandJet with my co-founder. Before that I spent years running outreach and go-to-market for people trying to get noticed. Some of them were Fortune 500s with real budgets and legal teams and eleven people on the approval chain. A lot more of them were startups with eight employees and a runway problem. I learned more from the second group, obviously. When you can't buy attention you have to actually earn it, and earning it teaches you things that spending never does. I also write poetry, which sounds like a non sequitur, but stay with me a second. A poem doesn't get a subject line. It doesn't get a sender name or a logo or a domain reputation. Nobody has any reason at all to read the second line except that the first one gave them one. I was doing that for years before I ever wrote a cold email, and when I finally did write cold emails, it was mildly annoying to discover it was the same job. And I think that's the part people miss about this work. Outreach has a grim reputation and mostly deserves it, because most of it is done badly by people who've stopped picturing a human on the other end. But the actual skill underneath it, getting a stranger to care about something for ten seconds when they owe you nothing, is one of the most useful things a person can learn. It's as creative as it can be technical, and I'm going to go over both of those in this skool because you just can't grow a business without it. It's how most good things start. Nearly every job I've had, every collaborator I love working with, the company I run now, all of it traces back to somebody deciding to write to somebody else who had no reason to write back. That's not a growth hack. That's just how the world opens up for people who ask. Now obviously, I run my own outreach and brand intelligence company and I like to be honest about this from the get go. Do I want to pitch you my product? Absolutely. Am I going to? Likely. But, I want to earn the right to do that, and that's why we've built this community.