The first book I read in English — English not being my native language — was The Neverending Story by Michael Ende.
Maybe you know the 1984 Hollywood movie? The original book is much bigger, and much more profound.
At the core of it is a boy named Bastian Balthasar Bux, who leads a gray and dreary life.
But then one day Bastian is transported to a fantastical land called Fantastica.
He’s brought there to save Fantastica from an existential threat known only as The Nothing.
The Nothing is not a hole. It’s not black. It’s not white. It just makes people and places in Fantastica disappear. Where these people and places were, nothing is left, or more precisely, The Nothing is left.
But let me get to The Something of this email:
Last year, I went on a kick of cold emailing random business owners in a quest for JV partners.
I did this in part because I was following Travis Sago’s BEAMER training, and also because I was working as a coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind, where most people were doing similar cold outreach. I wanted to see if I could do it myself.
My quest for JV partners came to exactly nothing in the end. And that’s even though I had a good offer, and I did my research on people, and though my copy was on point.
What happened? Nobody knows, and nobody ever will.
One minute, my cold outreach messages were in my gmail composer, and after I clicked send, they disappeared. The JV Nothing swallowed them up.
No information ever came back about where I went wrong — whether it was the list, or the offer, or the copy.
I’m sure somebody has good experiences to counter my bad experience with cold outreach.
But from what I’ve seen, it takes huge numbers of cold outreach messages to get any kind of a serious prospect, and even when you get somebody, they rarely turn out to be a good partner, and the relationship tends to be very flimsy.
So what to do?
In The Neverending Story, Bastian eventually saves Fantastica (and himself) via an act of total self-abnegation. He has to give up his own identity, down to every desire, every memory. It turns out to be transformative.
I’d like to propose the same if you’re trying to get JV partners, whether for a list swap, or an affiliate deal, or some sort of long-term collaboration.
Many things go into making that happen and turn out well.
But in terms of getting it at least started, I can recommend the following:
Start with people you know, and who know you.
Once you’ve worked through those, go to people you know, who don’t know you — people you’re a fan of, follower of, genuinely can say feel you know them, even though the feeling is not mutual. (Trust me, if you communicate this, it somehow comes through clearly in a message.)
And once you’ve worked through those people, go to people you make an effort to get to know, over time, either via an introduction, or by following them, reading their stuff, buying their products, writing them, helping them — without your desires or your memories of your planned JV deal in mind.
Anything to avoid the genuinely cold outreach message.
That’s my fantastical tip for you today.
My fantastical offer today has nothing to do with today’s fantastical email. Well, it does, but in a way that I’m not willing to reveal just yet.
For now, if you’d like my help in starting and sticking with a consistent daily email habit, so you can gradually expand the universe of people who know you, and who can connect you, and who you can partner with: