Attention Idea: Brute force

Brute force

Personal Network (DMs/Email)

General

Pat Walls

•

Updated: April 26th, 2025

The Post

Title/Hook: Brute force
Format: Manual email
Impressions:
How many followers they had at the time:

Check out the post -> link

Why it works

Codie Sanchez (founder of Contrarian thinking) got her first 1,000 subscribers by doing something that literally anyone can do: she manually emailed friends and old contacts from her Gmail.

I love this approach because it’s such a great way to leverage your personal network - especially when you don’t have a big audience or follower base on social media.

This is the easiest thing you can do right now.

How you can do it:

Go through your connections on Linkedin. Go through your contacts on your phone. Scroll through your recent text messages. Go through your email DM a few people who follow you on Instagram.

Send them something personal and ask them to share it, or see if they know anyone that might like it.

meet the author

Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

See full profile