The relevance premium

This is the idea I keep coming back to, in Ghost and in the newsletter.

AI has made generic outreach free. Anyone can produce a thousand passable cold messages before lunch. When something becomes free and infinite, it stops being worth anything. Inboxes fill up, reply rates fall, and buyers learn to ignore the lot.

What stays scarce is relevance and timing. A message that reaches the right person in the week they have the problem. I call the gap between that message and the generic one the relevance premium.

Shipped

The thinking behind how Ghost sells: warm outbound. Start from a signal that someone is in the market. Then reach out, with a reason.

A signal can be small. Someone engages with a post about the problem you solve. A company starts hiring for the role your product supports. A prospect comes back to your pricing page.

Broke

Volume as a strategy.

The old maths was simple. Send more, book more. It worked while sending was expensive, because cost kept the noise down. Now the cost is zero and everyone can play. Doubling your volume just doubles your share of the noise, and it wears out your domain and your LinkedIn account while it does.

One number

1. One good signal beats a list of a thousand names. If you can answer "why this person, why this week", you have a message worth sending. If you can't, more volume won't save it.

One lesson

Small teams should send fewer messages, better timed.

That's a good thing for a founder doing their own sales. You can't out-send a company with a team of twenty. You don't need to. You need to know who's ready and get there first.

One question to take away: what signal would tell you a prospect is ready to hear from you this week?