Introduced first on my private email list.
I really believe that creativity can solve anything. I think part of this hopefulness grew from a childhood love of James Bond movies. I mean after all, he always escapes the trickiest situations by coming up with one genius idea. That’s why I founded Creatives Without Borders in 2015, and that’s why I mainly work with startups.
But let’s go back to what happened several months ago. I was just finishing a 13 month-long world backpacking trip. I was broke as hell. My American visa had expired. I was lost. I’d used my last pennies to fly to Montréal and crash on a friend’s couch, because I knew I had to be close to NY and the States to reconnect with my network. But what I really had to do was find an idea, one great idea to get me back in the game.
When you contact clients, connections, and networks, there are two variables that you can have an effect on: quantity and relevancy. First, I needed to define my audience: startups. My skills, knowledge and background are good there. I needed these startups to be not too small, because they wouldn’t have enough money, and not too big or they’d already have in-house team.
I spend a few hours reading articles about startups in North America and Europe when I found this amazing website listing the top 100 startups in France. The sizes of the startups were perfect, because mostly due to the fact that they usually migrate to the US once they get bigger. I finally had a relevant and sufficiently long list. I extracted the 100 email addresses one by one. And then I did what I always tell my clients not to do; I sent an group email:
Hello!
I’m an award-winning, French, creative designer with a strong dev background.
Among other things, I help startups to win Leweb, Alchemist or Techstars. You can discover on my Linkedin various awards and press. I’m also an UX teacher and mentor for several institutions.
I would love to schedule a Skype / call with you to talk further about it,
Adrien Colombié
adriencolombie.com
linkedin.com/in/adriencolombie
100 emails. Sent at 6am France time so I’d be at top of their inboxes. I got 15 answers within 12 hours. Some positive, some negative, some automatic. But before the end of the day, I had 3 meetings planned for the following day. But wait!! I said 5 clients in the title, right? Well… when you have a good idea, don’t forget to scale it. Before the end of the day, I’d sent the same email to the same type of list (same potential startup sizes) but this time for Canada and Switzerland.
Bim, bam, boom! Before the end of the week, I’d signed 5 contracts and 3 more followed the week after. I was back in the game, ready to finance my new visa and move on. 8 contracts from 300 emails; that’s a bit less than 3% success. Not bad.
Again the most important things to remember are relevancy and quantity.
Today I’m back in the States, I’ve obtained my American visa, have 2 employees including a PA working daily on applying 7 different prospect strategies/ideas just like this one. It is all about having that one catalyst of an idea. It’s all about creative problem-solving.
And how about you? When was the last time you used some James Bond style creativity to get yourself out of a tricky situation?