episode 36 w/mustafa khundmiri & navigating twitter

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Thank y'all for tuning. I appreciate it. I have a guest this morning. I like having guests because it's not me running my mouth for 15 minutes. So for those of you who are tuning in now, I have my new friend who stuff on. It's not that they should join me and I appreciate it. But I appreciate you for for having me. Absolutely. So again, add us. Comment us where you're tuning from. I'm on the screen. Brandon Harvey. What's up, buddy? Thank you for tuning. I appreciate it. Very excited to bring this specific live show to y'all because we stop. I follow him on Twitter. I have admired what he's done from afar and the power of the DMs.

I slid into my stuff as DMs. And he got back to me and I said, Hey, listen, I love what you're doing. Please come on my live show. And he agreed to have a complete stranger. So again, the power of DMs, I, for those of you are watching, I take my own advice. I ate my own dog food. I preach sliding to DMs and hear it works. It works. So a few more people tune in Brian. What's going on, buddy? It's good to see you as always. John tuning in consistently. I love it. I love it. We got some guests rolling. So I'm going to kick this thing off.

I don't want to wait any longer because I want to get to the good part of this. So to stop, uh, introduce yourself to the people that are watching, tell them what you do, who you are and that will go from there. Okay, cool. So thanks for having me, Tyler. Um, so first off, like, I'm just going to keep this intro super sharp. So don't bore your people or your audience, right? So, um, so I'm an entrepreneur slash writer. Like, I've been freelance writing for, for more than 10 years now. And I'm an entrepreneur. I founded my first startup in 2005 after dropping out of college.

Um, yeah. So I'm currently working on my fourth startup. It's a collaborative blogging platform called where do you dot com? Um, it's going to be a few months before we go life is that. Um, yeah. So for now, I'm more focused on building an audience and Twitter. And I've not been, uh, doing freelancing work for about a year now because they can set a lot of my focuses on consulting and selling my own products. So I love it. Yeah. I love it. So, um, if you more, who are going on, buddy, it's good to see you. Um, so I want to go and dive in.

So one of the reasons why the main reason why I wanted to stop on is because it, it, and also I want to, um, make sure that he gets to recognize if you want to follow him, um, I'm going to do this. I did this with a buddy. I had another guy on the chat. Let me see if I can do this real quick. Create banner. Nope. That's Austin. MK. Let's see here. MKHUND M I R I. All right. Add banner. Bo. Follow. We're stuff. Uh, that's just Twitter right there. So it was stuff. Let's go ahead and dive in to, to the art of DM's right?

The art of cold emailing. That is something that, that is one of your ebooks that you have for sale right now. Um, hold email that works. And so talk to me about your experience cold emailing because again, the people that are watching are either on the job search or going to be having a job search. And one of the biggest things that you have to overcome when it comes to the job search is having to get over the fear of cold DMing people, cold emailing people. Right. So, so, so talk, talk to the talk to the viewers about your experience of cold emailing. What motivated you to write this ebook, um, and then we can go from there.

Yeah. Also, um, um, so cold emailing has been and a really important skill for me, uh, in the past, uh, for the past five years, more than five years. So like I said, I've been freelance, uh, writing for 10 years now. So for the first three to four years, I was focused on getting jobs from job boards and, uh, was also initially even I started with my freelance writing gigs. I was, uh, taking work that was not really paying me really well, uh, because I did not know how to get my own clients. And so I, the problem with that approach is that you take whatever comes your way.

You don't really, uh, focus on getting paid what you're worth. And that is only because you, have this kind of an insecure, pretty you have the sphere of reaching out to new people and asking for work. So it just looks like something that should be avoided. I always felt that, you know, it's, it's better if somebody else kind of takes care of that part. And I just do, uh, my writing work and get done with it. The problem with that approach is that whenever you have a middleman, it's really difficult to kind of have really have good margins. And you have this person taking a huge pick out of your hard work and that initially feels good because you don't want to, you know, you, you don't, you don't spend time looking for clients and doing all that one work.

But then slowly as you move, you know, go on and you start, uh, what do you say? You start working with more and more such middlemen. You come to realize that you're doing a lot of work and you're not getting paid much. So that kind of, it's, it's, it's kind of affected me in a negative way because I knew I could, you know, these people were getting work from somewhere. Right. I mean, they, they probably had relationships with other prospective clients or they had their own database of, of people who are interested in work. So where are they getting their clients? So there's some way they're doing it.

Right. So I had to quit the whole, uh, because I also wrote for those, uh, really bad content mills, which pay you, I don't even want to talk about the kind of money they pay. Right. So, so yeah. So that, uh, kind of pushed me to, uh, you know, sending, uh, trying cold emailing, uh, you know, back in 2013 or 14, that's when I started experimenting with it. Yeah. But, but then, uh, that was, that was, I realized that cold emailing, it, it, a lot of, for a lot of people, it's like a numbers game. It's like, send an X number of emails and you're going to get a, you know, a percentage of those people are going to give you a job.

Right. So, uh, according to me, you know, over the years, I've learned that cold emailing is not a numbers game. It's more of, uh, prospect game. It's, it's more of a prospect in game, where you kind of have to understand who you're reaching out. And if you, if you can focus on reaching out to the right people by doing your due diligence, then, uh, you were going to have a higher conversion rate. You're going to have a higher response rate. And then you're going to end up working with really, really, uh, good clients who, you know, pay your work. So let me, yeah, let me ask you this.

So, so, so the individuals who are watching, yeah, they're like, all right. Mustafa. That sounds great. Like, I'm all about it. Let's go prospecting. Like, what are like fewer three things that you would suggest a cold email or cold DM to have, to have better response rates? Okay. So my approach to cold emailing is really different than what you would find, uh, on the internet. So this, this, this game about through a lot of trial and error, because initially I was, uh, like I said, I was in the assumption that cold emailing is a numbers game. So I, I mean, I'm not really ashamed to say this, but I've done it.

So yeah, so it's, it's like, it's like a part of my backstory. So, uh, me and my technical co-founder, we made our internal, uh, emailing system where we, you know, got thousands of emails and then we blasted out the same, uh, email message to thousands and thousands of people. We did not even care if they were targeted. We did not even care if there's those emails were active, we're working or not. All we were, all we were caring about is, you know, how many emails can we send? Right. Uh, so we were using Amazon, uh, Amazon services app. So the email setting part was really cheap.

But the problem with that is like when you, when you're doing, when you're taking that spray and spray approach, um, you are not in control of anything. Right. 1000 emails and, and you get like 20 people replying back to your, to your email and out of those, like five of them can come on a call, talk to you and then nobody gives you a job. So, so I mean, that was not working for me. And then we were getting spam complaints, obviously, because we were spamming people. We were just not good. So I, you know, I wanted to take a better, more realistic and more human approach to co-dwelling instead of just focusing on the numbers.

I wanted to take the quantity approach instead of focusing on the quantity. And that's that's when I started looking as these prospects as human beings, because that's what that's what they are. And, uh, you know, I was like, you know, on the other side of, uh, you know, on the other side is a person, uh, who has really motions, your aspirations, they have their own fears and they, they are ready to talk to you. If you can approach them the right way. And if you can, create them with respect, instead of just looking at them as a way to milk money or, you know, I mean, whatever, whatever way you want to, uh, profit of them.

I mean, if you can just stop looking at them as a mere number and see them as a real human being with really motions and fears, then, uh, then you certainly realize that, uh, the best way to call the email is not to sell in your, in your, in your first email. It is too of that. It is to build their, it's, it's, it's, it's not even building. It's, it's a start, uh, new relationship with this new person. And, uh, yeah. So I stopped selling in my first email. I mean, I still see a lot of, uh, sales people working for big startups, uh, you know, taking the same sales approach, uh, with cold emailing and, uh, the same spray and spray approach, they write good emails.

I mean, they don't write bad emails. They don't spam, uh, but then even then, the first email is like, uh, what do you say? It's kind of a turn off because, yeah, yeah, the other person, the other person knows what you like the reason you're, you're getting in touch with them is because, uh, it's, it's, it's something that they want, like you want from them and instead of you giving something to them, you're looking to get something out of from them. So I love that. So I, uh, I change my approach. I change my approach from, uh, selling to, you know, starting new relationships and, yeah.

So that, that, that's exactly what I teach in my, my ebook. That's awesome. That's awesome. And again, for those of you tuning in, we had some more people talk, show good morning, Thomas. Good morning. It's good to see you guys as always. Um, so, uh, if you want to check out, uh, most of us, this is his, uh, ebook. I would highly check it out. Um, I also, these follow him on Twitter. He gives such good advice. So, so as, as we close out our time here and again, very short to the point, let me, let, let's talk about Twitter real fast. Okay. All right.

You have, I, I've seen you scale. You popped on my radar. I think we were under a thousand and then now you're over 3000 and you've scaled incredibly fast. So talk to me about the power of Twitter and why people should be looking at Twitter right now as a way to network. Okay. So, uh, in a really short way, let me tell you, uh, what I, what I really think, uh, people might not agree, but I think Twitter is the only real social network out there. Other, you know, other networks, whether it's Facebook or, or any other LinkedIn or anything, I just see them as networks, people networking over there.

Like, but if you talk about a real social, true social network that that is open, uh, and that is helping people build, uh, new relationships, uh, then I feel it is Twitter. Obviously email is the biggest social network, but right after email, you have, you know, the next thing that you need to focus on if you are, if you are doing like, if you are building a career or if you're building a business, uh, it doesn't matter what you're building, uh, a work-wise. You need to be on Twitter because that is where you meet the right people because I have noticed, uh, youtubers like who are really big, right?

They have like thousands and thousands of subscribers on YouTube, but they're just starting out on Twitter. So that gives you an advantage, uh, to kind of reach out to them and talk to them on Twitter because if you email them, they're not going to respond back to you because you're big. But on Twitter, they're not. So, so that's good. That's something that I'm going to work in your favor when you want to, so that's just an example. If you like of like, if you talk about, uh, looking for a job, right? And if someone's, somebody's looking for a job, I mean, the traditional way of, uh, searching for a job is like the job boards and the, you know, the, uh, uh, you know, people putting up these job postings and you scan them and you're competing with so many people.

But that's not, that's not how you get a job on Twitter. I mean, on Twitter, there are two ways, uh, which makes it a really powerful platform. Um, a number one, a number one, it shows you, um, sorry, it gives you a platform where you can showcase your skills or showcase what you can do. Like you can build in public, you can create content and show your expertise in public. Uh, but you can do on a blog, but then nobody's reading a blog for two years. Right. So, but in Twitter, you can have people reading your work from day one. And that, that can help you get a job that you may not have, uh, you know, gotten through a typical job board or a job posting.

Yeah. I love it. Yeah. Number two, the number two, why I love Twitter. And like I said, uh, it, it allows you to connect with new people, uh, better than email because there are no subject lines. Right. People are, people are not looking at your subject lines. They're looking at your profile. They're looking at your bio, they're looking at your tweets. So if you you have something interesting going on and you are giving consistent value, then they are going to reply back. They are going to follow you. They're going to build a relationship with you. And then, you know, the serum, certain deputee, uh, a word that's hard for me to pronounce.

So, you know, that's pretty big on Twitter. Yeah. I love that. I love that. And again, Julio, I know Julio is really big on Twitter. Um, and he agrees. Yeah, absolutely. Twitter is where it's at. And so, as we wrap up here, if anybody has any questions from Mustafa on how he's grown, um, his network, obviously comment at us. Please let us know. Um, if you want, I'd highly recommend to follow him. I have learned a lot from him just on from a marketing perspective, right? Cause I think too, and a bit just your thoughts, Mustafa again, as we wrap up here about how you kind of are your own brand.

And in regards to either finding a job as a job seeker or finding work, both are kind of the same, and so you kind of need to be mindful of how you put out content. So, uh, we'll wrap up on this. I'm curious here your thoughts on that. Um, on, on, on what you just said. Yeah, just posting content not only as somebody who's like a business person who's an entrepreneur trying to get business, but also as a job seeker in the importance of that. Right. So I have seen a couple of my friends, who started, uh, talking to an Twitter last year. And like two or three of them, they, they got jobs just because of what they were doing a Twitter.

So it's, it's, but it's not just a content Tyler, it's not just the content you're putting out, but you want to make sure that the content is being seen by the right people. So for example, if you're looking for a job as a, as a, uh, you know, programmer or, or, or like a, like a quarter. And you want to get hired by these startups, which are, you know, really hot. So what you could do is you could, you could start, uh, building a relationship with these, uh, key people who are, uh, you know, who are responsible for hiring you, it could be the CEO of the company.

And, uh, I've noticed that a lot of CEOs have really, a really low profile on Twitter. Like they don't have any phone. Yeah. And the response, there's fun back to DMs and stuff. So you could follow them. You can have them follow you back and then when they follow you, you have this opportunity to fill their timeline with really great content and show them that you are capable of doing this job. So if you can do that for like a few months and then you, you DM them saying, uh, you know, uh, so I'm looking for a job. And you suddenly, the top, uh, person in, in their mind because they already know that you are better than any other candidate that they don't know.

Right. So I love that. That was so good. That was so good. Awesome. Well, what end will end on that note? Mustafa, thank you again for coming on. I appreciate it. Um, again, uh, go check out his, uh, gumrow and cole emails that work. Um, go follow him on Twitter. Um, he, he's fantastic. So Mustafa, thank you again for joining me. I appreciate it, man. And, uh, I'll continue to stay in touch with you on Twitter. Okay. See you. See you. I'm in. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye.