- I put up this tweet a few weeks ago.
"You don't need a six-month internship
"working for your hero.
"Start a podcast and interview them for 30 minutes.
"I get as much information out of these podcast interviews
"as I have from years of working alongside mentors.
"You can do this with no connections."
In this tweet, I was sharing an insight that I had
because as the podcast has grown,
and as we've been able to pick more high-value,
high-quality guests, I've been learning more and more
about whatever industry I wanted.
This last batch of guests are high-quality producers
from movie companies like The Duplass Brothers Productions,
Disney, Marvel, like all of these super high-quality people.
And I've been learning an intense amount from them
so I wanted to tweet this out.
The problem came, and the reason why
I wanted to make this video,
is because of the responses to this tweet.
Somebody on Instagram got back and said,
"That sounds great, reaching out to your heroes
"when you've been doing this for years,
"but how would you do this with no connections?"
And rather than tell you how to do this with no connections,
I thought it would be better to show you.
So I'm gonna take you back in time.
Let's go back to 2011.
I've got no connections, alright,
I'm sitting there in Naples, Florida.
I know nobody, I'm not even in New York.
And yet, I was able to meet with a lot of high-value people.
So in this video, I'm gonna run through
four specific email scripts I used back then
to meet with high-value people,
and hopefully, you can learn something from that.
Let's jump into it.
The first one is an email to musician, Rachel Platten,
who you might know from her hit song, Fight Song.
But back when I emailed her in 2011,
she had only had some indie hits.
And back then I was hosting a podcast called Music Process,
where the goal was to sit down with musicians
and ask them about all the specific parts
of writing their songs.
So here's the email I sent to
Rachel Platten's publicity person.
"Hi, I'm Alex Berman,
"host of a podcast called Music Process.
"The show tells stories."
I don't know why I'm counting on my fingers right now.
"Hi, I'm Alex Berman,
"host of a podcast called Music Process.
"The show tells stories of how musicians progress
"in order to help budding indie artists
"help build up the confidence to get their songs heard."
So this is not the type of email I would send today.
As you can see, there's some issues with it,
but this did work back in 2011 and that's the main thing.
These aren't gonna be polished, Alex Berman quality emails.
This is when I was first starting out,
and hopefully that's inspirational to you.
I would do this so much better now
as you'll see in the Billboard Hot 100 video
that's coming out soon.
"Guests call in from wherever they are.
"I heard 1,000 Ships in an indie playlist
"and love the sound of the vocals.
"It would be great to
"interview Rachel Platten for the show."
So it is customized still,
but the customization's down here.
And then, "My listeners would benefit a whole lot
"from Rachel's story and songwriting process.
"Some example questions are, how did you get
"to where you are today in the music business?
"When you sit down to write a song,
"do you start with the lyrics or the melody?
"At what point in the process
"does the accompaniment get written?"
Specific questions, keeping it very customized.
Although I think I messed up the word accompaniment.
Is this how you spell accompaniment?
"The interview's an hour long and would be
"Tuesday, the 14th of June.
"Let me know."
And then I've got my phone number, or respond to this email.
Then there's a PS,
"If you want more clarification on the subject matter."
And then I have episode two,
featuring Eric Michener of Fishboy here.
I was sending this email out before to artists.
The way I got Eric was the same email without the PS.
So that's message one, it's long but it is specific,
and it has a direct ask.
The second email I wanna show is
a meeting that I had with Neil Patel.
We were doing a college project and our teacher said,
"Hey, interview a sales guy that you look up to."
So I thought of master marketer, Neil Patel,
and wanted to send him an email.
So here's the email I sent to Neil
that landed an hour-long interview.
"Hey Neil, my name's Alex Berman
"and I love all the insight at Quicksprout.
"I would love to do a Skype interview with you
"for a professional selling class I'm taking.
"The project is to interview
"three professional sales people,
"find out their motivations
"and some important aspects of selling.
"Also, it would be so cool to interview you."
I love that passion.
"How is September seventh at 10 AM Pacific?
"Have a great day, Alex Berman."
Short, punchy, and here is Neil Patel getting back.
"Works for me, my Skype username is,"
and then it's whatever it is.
I'm so good at email, like I don't know.
Do you guys see that?
My ego has been expanding recently,
I've been watching Picasso on the NatGeo channel,
and I can tell my ego's getting huge because I'm like,
I'm just like Picasso.
This is me, this is me, I'm just like Picasso.
Instead of paints, it's emails.
Let's jump to the third email.
This is an email I was sending out when I first moved
to New York City, and I had no connections
and wanted to get a job.
So I looked up startup founders that I liked.
This was following a lot of advice from Ramit Sethi
from I Will Teach You To Be Rich,
and one of the people that I reached out to
was Joe Ziemer from Betterment.
Betterment now has raised hundreds of millions of dollars
through a huge, I would call him a unicorn startup
if I used language like that.
And here's the email that I used to meet with him.
"Hi Joe, thanks for replying to that tweet the other day."
I don't remember what the tweet was,
but it was probably something stupid like
I asked him a question
about his favorite books or something.
"I was doing some research on content manager positions
"at New York startups,
"and I noticed you're a manager at Betterment.
"I also noticed we both like that song, You Can Call Me Al."
That came from a tweet that he wrote.
It's customized, he said something about liking that song.
So I called it out in the email.
And then this line came from Ramith Sethi.
"I'm on a quest for my dream job
"and would love to ask you three to five questions
"about your experience working at Betterment.
"Would you be available for a quick chat over coffee
"this Thursday at 10 AM?
"I'm also free any time Friday, sincerely, Alex Burman.
"PS, I'm sure you're busy, so if it's easier for you,
"I'd be happy to send my questions via email, thanks again."
Simple, we met, he had a ton of advice.
He didn't have a job for me right then,
but he did hook me up with a few awesome people in New York,
and those connections directly led to me
getting a job in New York City.
Let's do email number four.
This is how I met Alexander Heyne.
He's now the best selling author
of a book called Master The Day.
He also wrote a book called Milk The Pigeon.
But back when I emailed him here,
he was just the guy who ranked number one
for I hate my job on Google.
And when I was cold-calling at Vimbly,
that was the type of the stuff I was Googling.
So here's the email I sent out to him.
"Hey Alex, just stumbled upon Milk The Pigeon
"and just downloaded your E-book and read a bunch of posts.
"My favorite so far has been 2011 in review,
"but it got me thinking.
"Did you ever get to start the company for yourself,
"or have your priorities changed,
"are you still living at home?
"Lots of questions, I know."
This turned into a little back and forth
which led to Alex Hyne coming out to New York
to meet me at a coffee shop, he was in Connecticut,
and we brainstormed, and actually became
pretty good friends, we still talk once a week
at our Mastermind.
This led to a really good meeting, a really good friendship.
So the lesson for this one is,
you can build your circle of friends
with high-value people without knowing anyone.
This email turned into a full chapter in Alex's book,
Milk The Pigeon, by the way.
I was blown away, I was on a drive
and just listening to his book on audio,
and there was this whole section on cold email
and this meeting between me and him.
I'm glad that insight affected him the same way.
If you want the exact contract we use to close new business,
it cost us about a thousand bucks to put together,
you can have that for free down below.
And if you want to help the YouTube channel,
I would love if you could think of somebody
who would get value from this video and email it to them.
If you run any sort of agency and you want more clients,
especially enterprise level, multi-million dollar clients,
check out experiment27.com.
And if you have a business book
and want to turn it into a documentary,
check out loreliapictures.com.
I'm Alex Berman, thanks.