DISCOVER
Eraj Alisherov
The Cost of a Cold Open
14,573 of My Own Messages
September 2026
— I have sent messages to strangers for years the way most people in relationship-driven finance do — instinctively, generously, and without much interest in checking whether the instinct was correct. I knew I was fast. I knew I was persistent. What I didn't know, until I actually pulled the export and looked at it row by row, was how much of that activity was landing, and how much of it was simply motion. The numbers were not flattering in the way I expected them to be flattering.
SERVICES
Analyst, Strategic Forecaster
Origins
There's a well-documented bias in how people judge their own performance: we tend to credit our successes to skill and our failures to circumstance. It's called self-serving bias, and it is very hard to notice in yourself precisely because it doesn't feel like bias — it feels like a reasonable read of a messy situation.
"That one didn't reply because they're just not active on the platform." "That one didn't reply because the timing was off."
Each individual excuse is plausible. Across thousands of messages, they stop being individually plausible and start being a pattern I was refusing to look at. So I stopped narrating and started counting.
Reality
From the Archive of Eraj Alisherov’s LinkedIn Behavior and Statistics
The first number that mattered was the ratio: I sent 5,433 connection invitations and received 131, a 41.5-to-1 outbound-to-inbound ratio. Of 2,443 conversation threads, only 789 (32.3%) became two-way. Among 2,061 genuinely cold, self-initiated messages, just 446 (21.6%) received a reply within seven days. In other words, most of my LinkedIn activity was driven by me, not by people coming to me. But once someone replied, the picture changed. My median response time was 1.39 minutes, compared with 6.83 minutes for the other person. I was highly responsive once a conversation started, but that did not translate into getting attention in the first place. The data showed that initiating conversations and sustaining them are two different skills, and at that stage, I was much stronger at the second.
The data makes the first-reply pattern clear: shorter messages perform much better. Openings under 25 words received replies 42.6% of the time, compared with 20.5% for 26–75 words and 16.4% for longer messages. Asking for a call or meeting immediately also cut replies from 37.2% to 16.3%. My own templates were heavily repeated, with one currency-and-capability message appearing across 764 threads. Specificity performed better than vague “shared interests and synergies” language, but the bigger lesson was that the right recipient mattered more than the quality of the pitch. The delivery pattern revealed another issue: 54.8% of my messages were sent in bursts of three or more within two minutes without a reply in between, including one 44-message burst. I also found that clearly stating a limitation could lead to better conversations than listing every capability. Overall, the data suggests that effective outreach was less about saying more and more about being brief, specific, relevant to the recipient, and deliberate about when to follow up.
Question
The comfortable version of this reflection is about discipline: write shorter, ask for less up front, stop bursting messages. All of that is true and all of it is in the data. The harder question is whether the core activity — reaching out to a very large number of strangers, cold, at volume — was ever going to convert much better than one in five, no matter how well-crafted each message was.
Some of this gap may not be a communication problem at all. It may just be what cold outreach costs, structurally, before relationship or reputation exists to do any of the work for you.
I don't think the data settles that question. I think it settles the smaller one: whatever the ceiling on cold outreach is, I wasn't yet writing messages that reached it.
Communication
Reading through the anonymized threads, one line from the analysis stayed with me longer than any single statistic: fast responding does not guarantee initial attention.
It's a small sentence, almost clinical, but it named something I'd been quietly avoiding for a long time — that being good in the room, once you're in it, says nothing about whether you're any good at getting the door open. I'd built an entire self-image around the first half of that sentence. The data only had evidence for the second.
The Land of Ajam
“People hate talkative people. If given the chance, they would eliminate them without hesitation.” — Eraj Alisherov, The Patriot
The End
''Risk and portfolio work draw a hard line between activity and effectiveness — a desk that trades constantly is not, by that fact alone, a desk that's making money. Outreach volume works the same way. Sending more does not compound into replying more; past a point, it just compounds into more unread messages.''
— Eraj Alisherov, The Patriot
Somewhere in the 1,991 threads that end on my side, at least two weeks before anyone else's last word, is probably a real opportunity I talked myself out of by sending one message too many, or one message too vague, or one message with a broken link I didn't check. I'll never know which ones. That's the honest, slightly uncomfortable cost of finding this out from data instead of instinct: instinct lets you believe every closed thread was someone else's decision.
Across the full retained period, I sent invitations to strangers at a rate of 41.5 for every one that came to me — and of the cold conversations I opened myself, only 21.6 percent earned a reply within a week. Those two numbers, read together, say the same thing from two directions: I have been very good at starting conversations, and only moderately good, so far, at giving strangers a reason to finish them.
Seven-Day Reply Rate, Cold Openings
My Reply Speed vs. Counterpart
