I Am a Sample Size of One

For years, I dismissed cold calls and cold email. The logic felt airtight. They don't work on me. I delete them instantly. Therefore, they don't work.

That logic is broken.

There's plenty of evidence that cold outreach works. Entire companies run on it. Sales teams close real deals from emails I would have deleted without reading. Whether it works for my business, I honestly don't know. I'm not running cold campaigns. That's not the point.

The point is what my reasoning revealed. I was evaluating a strategy by asking "would this work on me?" That's not analysis. That's projection. I was assuming the market thinks like me, buys like me, and ignores the same things I ignore.

It doesn't.

Here's the proof. YouTube works on me. I discover products, form opinions, and make decisions because of videos. Someone out there dismisses YouTube marketing the same way I dismissed cold email. Same bias, different channel. We're both reasoning from a sample size of one. Ourselves.

So I'm changing the question. Not "does this work on me?" but "what does the evidence say?" My personal preference is one data point. A biased one.

I still don't like cold emails. I still delete them. But my inbox is not a market research report. The lesson isn't about cold email at all. It's that I caught myself being un-objective—and I have to wonder where else I'm doing it.

"It doesn't work on me' is not evidence. It's projection."