How to find freelance developer gigs using cold email

btw, if you are in the US, Canada or UK you can comfortably double those numbers

And the best part is, you can get these kinds of clients, basically on autopilot and it would cost you less than $100 a month

Some of you aren’t fans of cold email, i get it, who wants irrelevant messages popping up in their inbox

NO ONE

That’s why, we are going be relevant,

That’s why are are going to be targeted,

That’s why you are still reading this post.

So here is a 3 Step Process to being relevant, targeted and personalised

1. Get Leads - The Who

Leads/Prospects are the people we will be reaching out to - in software development, we have a few different lead types we can reach out to:

C-Level: CEO, CTO, COO, CPO

Senior: Tech Lead, Team Lead, Head of Engineering, Engineering Manager

Team: Developer, Business Analyst, Product Manager, Scrum Master, Project Manager

• Apollo - you dont need a paid account, just register, you can use ExportApollo to get the leads for cheap

• Instantly - they have less leads data than apollo, but its a good start 

In my youtube video, the leads we will be targeting are developers

• we are after developers because they are your kind, they are at your level

• we are after developers because they are incentivised to bring in talent

  • their company will usually pay them a finders fee for bringing in great talent

• we are after developers because we want to grow our network and relationships

Btw, after targetting developers, you can start climbing up the pyramid, I made a LinkedIn Post detailing this pyramid and how to start climbing it.

2. Buy Email Accounts - The What

Once we know WHO we are going to speak to, we need to know WHAT we are going to use to speak to them

This is the slightly less fun part - because we cannot just use our personal email accounts - cold email can get marked as spam, and you don’t want to burn your personal email account

You gotta buy NEW email accounts, business accounts

• because Business email accounts have far better deliverability

• are far easier to replace if - when - they get burned

• and they will get burned - par for the course i guess

Anyway, now that i’ve convinced you that you need to buy email accounts, lets see how we are going to do that - basically you need to buy a domain and buy 1 to 3 email addresses to link to it

Thankfully this can be done for you and its one of the reasons i recommended Instantly, cause they make it so easy.

• Instantly - They will do everything for you, all the setup and loading emails into your instantly (5$ per month per account)

• Mailforge - cheaper than instantly, but you gotta load the accounts yourself (3$ per month per account)

• If you wanna save money, i’d use Mailforge to buy domains and email accounts instead of Instantly - but you only really need 5-6 email accounts so saving 6-10$ per month really isnt worth it

You can buy email accounts directly from Google or Microsoft, but you gotta do the technical setup that the above 2 solutions do for you

• DKIM, DMARC, SPF, Custom Domain Tracking - its a pain

• Google Workspace - 7$ per month

• Office 365 - 7$per month

• its the most expensive

3. Email Outreach Software - The How

We looked at Who we will reach out to, we looked at Where we will reach out to them from now we gotta look at the most important part THE HOW

• Instantly - i like this cause it does everything in one place, buying emails, leads and sending emails 

• Smartlead - i personally use this, a little more setup time, but it has the infrastructure to make sure you don’t land in spam

• Salesforge - probably the easiest way to send cold email, AI writes them for you, but i’m giving you a script so you dont need it 

• All the above have account starting around the 40$ per month range 

3.1 Write Copy - 3 step email sequence

3.2 Monitor replies and start conversations - convert them to clients later

3.3 See below example of email copy

Subject:     React dev at

Body: 

Hiya  

I'm guessing you're also a react developer at @ ? 

You guys still working remotely?

EMAIL 2 Body

Reached out cause i'm working for

and they're going back to the office - I wanna stay remote and just networking with some devs to find out who is still remote and hiring 

You guys planning on going back to the office?

P.S im not a recruiter or agency, just a guy who wants to meet with other remote devs 

Email 3 Body

Last one, promise  

Should i reach out to someone at instead? 

Cheers

P.S thanks for your time man, hope i wasnt a bother 

That’s all folks

You find the people, you reach out to the people, you talk to them

Yes it takes time

Yes it takes money

But this is your career, this is your life

• nothing is more important than you

• nothing is more valuable than you

Take this seriously, and you will find remote gigs

Take this seriously, and you will find freelancing gigs

Take this seriously, and you will become antifragile