The Room Said Zero
When I taught this on a call last week, I asked the room a simple question.
"How confident are you that cold DMs work? Scale of 0 to 10. Just put it in the chat."
Heather Brown -- a government consultant based in Wellington who works with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education -- said zero.
Zero.
That's where most people are. And I get it. I genuinely get it.
You've sent DMs that got ignored. You've received DMs that made you cringe. You've had some random dude slide into your inbox with a paragraph about his "done-for-you system" and you thought, mate, I don't even know who you are. You've read some blog post that told you cold outreach is dead and you thought, yeah, that tracks.
So you stopped sending them. Or you never started.
Here's the thing, though.
You're not wrong that most cold DMs don't work. You're wrong about why.
Your Family House Beats MrBeast
Let me ask you something.
Do any of you guys watch MrBeast? You know how he's got the craziest videos where he's like, I just went on a $1 billion yacht? So imagine you've got two photos side by side. The first one is MrBeast reviewing a $10 billion house on Mars. You probably can't get a better hook than that, right? I can't think of a more attention-grabbing hook than MrBeast reviews $10 billion house on Mars.
Impossible.
But the other photo is just your family house. The one where you grew up.
Two photos next to each other. Which one would your eyes go to?
Your family house. Every single time.
This is the difference between tribal recognition and using really good hooks. Your brain fires off things that are memorable to you and have a lot of meaning to you. It doesn't matter how crazy the hook is -- you'd still look at your family house. You'd still look at your family house.
And so that's why recognition beats everything else.
That's literally how cold DMs work. Not by being clever. Not by having the best subject line. By making someone's brain go, "Holy shit, that's me."
The Worst Advice on LinkedIn
Now, here's something that's gonna sound kind of contrarian.
Everyone says don't pitch in the first DM. You've read that, right? I asked the room, and pretty much everyone had read that same advice somewhere.
The reason most people say don't pitch in the first DM is because it's quite difficult to construct a first DM that is a good pitch. That's it. That's the only reason. They've just never learned how to do it well.
So instead of teaching people how to write a great first message, the industry just said, "Don't bother." And everyone accepted it as gospel.
I reckon that's one of the most damaging pieces of advice floating around LinkedIn right now. Because it stops people from ever learning the skill. You just avoid it entirely, tell yourself DMs are spammy, and then wonder why all your leads come from posting content 5 days a week and hoping someone books a call.
That's a load of shit.
100% Reply Rate
I one-shot booked a call with 5 people. Collectively, they're worth $500 million. Combined, they've got over 10 million followers. And every single one of them replied.
100% reply rate.
One replied in 2 minutes. Another gave me his personal phone number. Another came back and said "fuck yeah, let's do it" within 3 hours.
These are real messages I sent. Not templates. Not hypotheticals. Not some screenshot from 2019 that I'm still dining out on. These are DMs I sent recently, to real people, who actually responded. You'll see every single one of them in this book -- the full screenshots, every line, with the exact psychology behind why each one worked.
Tacos, Tuesday Night, $68K
Oh, and one of them? I didn't even send it myself.
I wrote it for a mate over tacos on a Tuesday night at SoCal in Neutral Bay. He had 4 weeks free between gigs and needed to close some deals. So I sat down with him, pulled up the 10 people he wanted to message, wrote his first 2 messages, and said, "Just send it."
Week and a half later, he'd used the same approach, closed 4 clients. $68,000.
And the ironic thing? He's a content coach. A guy who literally teaches people how to make content -- and he booked all of it through cold DMs, not content. Which is kind of hilarious if you think about it.
Pretty much every single large podcast or large deal I've ever done in my life has come through a cold DM or a reach out. It's never through content.
Genuinely.
The biggest podcasts I've been on. The partnerships that actually changed everything. The deals that changed the trajectory of my business. All of it started in someone's inbox with a message they weren't expecting. Not a funnel. Not a webinar. Not a 47-step email sequence. A DM.
And I reckon that's super counterintuitive to what most people think works. But it's been true for me over and over and over.
The Shift
Remember Heather? The one who said zero?
By the time we got to the end of that call, she was building her own DMs live. Pulling in tribal language from her world -- the All of Government panel, the Wellington public library that was closed for 7 years from an earthquake and just reopened. She was getting it.
But here's the moment that really stuck with me.
On the afternoon session, Brooke Flint -- a buyer's agent in Sydney -- told me straight up: "I feel dirty in DMs, I can't even do them. It's like I'm annoying people or something."
I hear this all the time. And I reckon most of you reading this feel the same way.
By the end of that same call, Brooke said: "Matt, that was freaking awesome. I realized that there was so much to it, no wonder I didn't like it."
That's the shift.
She didn't suddenly become a different person. She didn't flip a confidence switch. She just realized that the reason DMs felt gross was because no one had ever shown her how to do them properly. There's actual structure to it. Layers. Psychology. A real process. And once she saw it, it stopped feeling dirty and started making sense.
That's what this book is. The thing no one ever showed you.
Your Brain Already Decided
Here's a quick science drop for you.
In 2006, researchers at Princeton -- Willis and Todorov -- proved that people decide whether to trust you in 100 milliseconds. One-tenth of a second. They published it in Psychological Science: "First Impressions: Making Up Your Mind After a 100-Ms Exposure to a Face."
One hundred milliseconds.
Your prospect's brain made the call before they finished reading your first line. Before they got to your offer. Before they saw your credentials. Before any of that. Their brain already decided.
That means every single word in your DM is either building trust or burning it. There is no neutral. There is no "it was fine." It either landed or it didn't.
And right now, yours aren't landing. Not because cold DMs are broken. Because yours are.
Cold DMs aren't dead.
Yours are.
Next: Chapter 2 -- The Psychology