How do I get in front of busy, influential people without a cold pitch?

Do things without asking for permission. If you want to get into somebody's world, don't ask them to coffee. Go do something for them and show them what you did.

"don't send a cold DM that says, hey, I want your time. Hey, you know, can you chat with me? Make them something. Make them something so cool that they want to do it."

What does "build something for them" look like?

A few things I've actually done:

• A newsletter they don't have. Some of the biggest creators I looked up had millions of followers and no newsletter. My move was to make one of their newsletters in advance, ready to send with a "look what I did." The first version took me three minutes.
• A custom website. I've been building websites for influencers I want to reach, and the success rate has been very high.
• A website as a pitch deck. A friend could get me in front of the leaders at a big real estate brokerage, but he needed something to show them. I built a one-page site just for that company: here's what you're looking for, here's who I am, here's how this helps you.

I've only done the build-it-first move four times. All four paid attention, and every one of them makes over $50 million.

Say "I did this for you," and the reaction is "how did you do that?"

Why does custom beat generic?

If someone gets a hundred generic messages and then one that clearly somebody built for them, of course they dig into that one. People respect the time you took. Video is especially hard to fake right now. They know you made it for them and you're talking to them. That may change soon with AI.

Should I help them for free?

Yes, with no strings. I cold messaged one of the biggest business influencers in the world, millions of followers, and offered to fix his business newsletter. I'd met him once, so I had a slight in, but we're not friends. He took my advice. Only at the end did I mention that if he ever wanted to partner on a local newsletter in his town, I'd help for free. His answer was "tell me more."

I didn't trade anything. That's the reciprocity principle from the book Influence: when you give someone something, they instinctively want to give something back. The same works locally. Free ads or a feature cost you almost nothing, and people want to pay you back. More on that in starting relationships with local businesses.

What about pointing out what's wrong?

It can work if it's genuine. I subscribe to newsletters from creators I actually follow, see how they work, and write a personal note about what's missing. One creator with hundreds of thousands of followers had sent one email in two months.

How do I reach someone who's hard to reach?

Go around them. Find somebody in their world and message that person directly. That's the path to most of these introductions.

For companies, I pick ones whose problem overlaps with mine and search LinkedIn for their employees. At one big company that solves the same problem we do in a different way, one of the first people I found was the head of partnerships, and he agreed to talk. The ask that's tiny for them, maybe a quarter of a million dollars to push our software, could be huge for us. To them it's a rounding error.