The hack
Connect with people in relevant Slack communities.
Why it works
People love niche communities. Reddit has become commercialized and only a few channels are really thriving. Many communities have moved into private spaces, often hosted by influencers like Small Bets by Daniell Vassallo or Lenny’s newsletter Slack. There are hundreds of those, see List of popular Slack communities.
Members of those are not just part of your target audience, they are also early adopters. This is the ultimate preselection for any outreach.
There are two issues with reaching out directly to those communities. First, you can get banned and lose access to the community altogether. The second is that people might not be looking at the community actively, and you might wait ages until someone replies to your DM. In some cases, the DMs can also be limited.
This means the best way to connect with those people is outside of the Slack channel. Ideally on socials or via email.
How to do it
Scraping the data
An easy way to scrape data of everyone in a Slack workspace is using Phantom Buster.
It takes 3 minutes to setup and you’ll get a list like this with first and last names. In some cases, the job title, location, email, and LinkedIn profile will be there as well.
Write to the relevant people
Once you have a cleared list, find those people on LinkedIn using their names and job titles. With this, you can either connect with them on Linkedin or try writing them a cold email directly.
Read this first for cold outreach copy hacks: 101 of cold email (beginner guide)
And this for LinkedIn outreach: Connecting with people on LinkedIn (Beginner version)
