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You’ve seen the same boilerplate emails come into your inbox which you immediately archive for being wrong, out-of-date, or simply forgetting the merge tag (F you people that leave $FNAME). When it came to my first time sending out a batch email, it was only to a dozen or so people about booking user research time. However, I had a major sticking point thinking I was sending out a spammy email. Luckily I had met the team behind Streak and knew the power of mail merge to make something a little more individual and helpful. We’re going to continue using my real life example email, a sponsorship request for Hack Design. Here’s the actual email template I sent out: Hey there $FNAME, Wanted to reach out about $COMPANY becoming a Hack Design partner. Since 2012, we've helped hundreds of thousands take their first steps in learning design. We're looking to partner with a handful of companies in order to offset server costs and support producing new lessons in 2018. Partnership perks: * Logo placement with link on the home page. * Text link in our footer, 30,000+ page views per month. * Text link in every email, 200,000+ which go out every month. * Free posting on our job board, set to release by the end of the year. As of right now, we have 245,000+ subscribers. It's likely that with new lessons going out next year, you'll see these numbers easily double. Because of that, our sponsorship tier costs $XXX per month. If you're able to commit to sponsoring before October 1st, I will grandfather you in to the super early bird pricing of $YYY per month through the end of 2018. If you have any questions or are ready to sponsor, please hit reply. $POSTSCRIPT Thank you so much, Alex Baldwin My emails aren’t very long, encourage replying as the primary action, and I hope use variables in a tasteful way. Make each email personal You may have noticed the odd $POSTSCRIPT variable in my template. The P.S. at the end of the message is super easy for readers to skip to and it’s almost guaranteed that it’ll be read. That’s the key to the whole thing. Almost every recipient I know personally or have done research on. It would be a huge missed opportunity to not acknowledge that personal connection. For speed purposes, it’s easiest to do this part in Google Sheets. Add another column called Postscript to your Google Sheet. For each recipient write a custom note that will go at the end of your email, i.e. “P.S. It was super nice meeting you at SXSW 2017, still waiting for you to come visit San Francisco.” If you don’t know them personally already, at least make the effort to do your research and make a connection. It’s easy enough to comment on some of their work you admire, I’m talking to you recruiters who never look at my portfolio. Export your Google Sheet to a CSV. Import your CSV into Streak Thankfully since we’ve been working in Google Sheets, we’ll be able to straight import into Streak without any fuss. Install Streak for your browser and open Gmail. Go through the authentication flow for Streak. From the Gmail sidebar, hit Pipelines +New. Pick any of the types, I usually do Business Development and then quickly rename it to my project name. Optionally, invite anyone else to collaborate on this pipeline. On your pipeline page, press the gray more icon. Click Import boxes from Google Sheets. Follow yet another authentication process. Go through the steps to finish your import by mapping your columns to Streak data. They have a lot of options, for those with more data feel free to connect it all up. You’ll see everything from Google Sheets, now nicely organized in your Streak pipeline as a Lead. You can now track as someone goes through your funnel to Closed - Won, it’s the big time sales process for the little guy. Send out that hand-crafted email with Streak After all that prep work, we’re finally ready to put the pieces together. Getting used to the interface and finding the small links or buttons can be quite a chore. Streak is a tool meant for sending much larger batches for sales professionals. We can lay low under the quotas with basic features and get a ton out of it. When I was doing marketing for commercial real estate, we used to use Excel and Microsoft Word to send out massive mailing campaigns. The mail merge feature for Streak works just like it’s offline Microsoft counterpart except with much better tracking and ability to follow up. Put it all together and get ready to hit send Hit Compose in Gmail. Click the link Mail merge. Select your Streak pipeline as the recipients. Write your beautiful email template and use the Customize with Template link at the bottom to sprinkle in customizations. When you’re subject line is perfect and your template customized hit Send, releasing your artisanal emails to their proper recipients. More coming soon Next up we’ll wrap by tracking and following up with our small batch of recipients. This article is part two of a three part series, released weekly. You can read part one here. Subscribe to get access first.
For press releases, advertiser requests, or similar sales campaigns you’re sending a small batch of, usually cold, emails out with a specific ask. Finding potential recipients, writing an email that’s helpful, and tracking the results doesn’t need to take all day or be painful. I’ve watched my fellow product people struggle with the pitfalls of outbound; spend all day trying to find emails, copy and pasting boring boilerplate copy, and then never following up. By stringing together Clearbit Connect, Google Sheets, and Streak, you can knock out these outbound projects super quickly, personalize them, and track progress through a funnel. I’ll walk you through exactly how it works using my most recent campaign, a sponsorship request for Hack Design. Researching for the right audience First up, you’re looking for the most likely people to be interested. For a press launch, that may be who frequently cover products in that space. In our example, Hack Design’s sponsor list, I was quickly able to look at who else was sponsoring comparable websites. For me, that meant researching the advertisers on Offscreen, Sidebar, Dribbble, recent design conferences and podcasts. It’s super simple to save your research and move on to finding the right people at those companies. Add companies to your list Start a Google Sheet with the column name Company. Research the companies most relevant to your outbound campaign. Great places to look are Angel List, Product Hunt, job boards (to see who is hiring in a space), Crunchbase, etc. Anywhere that let’s your group and filter through relevant companies. Add the company name to your list. Finding anyone’s email in seconds Now that you have a list of potential companies, let’s find the emails for the best people to talk to there. For my Hack Design list, I was lucky and had about a dozen sponsors from previous years. However, since we haven’t accepted sponsorship in over a year, a lot of my contacts at those companies were out of date. This process made it trivial to find the new people in those roles and be able to reach out. Get the right contacts from Clearbit Connect Add the column names Email and Full Name to your Google Sheet. Install Clearbit Connect if you haven’t already. This is the secret sauce that will allow you to find anyone’s email, for free. Connect does have a limit but for small batches, you shouldn’t have any problems. Disclosure: I’m a small-time investor in Clearbit. In Gmail, hit the Clearbit button in the top nav and then press Find email. Yep, it’s really that easy. You must start with the company and then narrow down by name or title. Copy and paste that into your Google Sheet. More coming soon Next up we’ll write our email and learn how to quickly customize every single one of them. This article is part one of a three part series, released weekly. Subscribe to get access first.
The hanging-punctuation property aims at giving web web designers a finer grained control over typography on the web. The idea behind hanging punctuation is to put some punctuation characters from start (or to a lesser extend at the end) of text elements “outside” of the box in order to preserve the reading flow. blockquote p { hanging-punctuation: first; } Since it only applies to quote marks, you can avoid single purpose classes and trust that your quotes will hang everywhere. Chrome hasn’t yet implemented the hanging-punctuation property, but it works perfectly in Safari. Typeset.js is an HTML pre-processor that adds a lot more functionality and will allow you to get cross browser compatibility.
Live every week like it’s Taco Week. Last year’s articles are now up on Medium.
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In her best-selling book, Living Well By Design, Melissa Penfold addressed the basics of interior decorating. Now she turns her attention to demonstrating what a powerful force design can be in boosting our physical and emotional well-being in her newest book, ‘Natural Living By Design’, Vendome Press, launches in April and available for Preorder now, Continue Reading The post HAVE YOU PREORDERED YOUR COPY OF MELISSA’S NEW BOOK YET? first appeared on Melissa Penfold. The post HAVE YOU PREORDERED YOUR COPY OF MELISSA’S NEW BOOK YET? appeared first on Melissa Penfold.
Rethinking AI through mind-body dualism, parenthood, and unanswerable existential questions. I remember hearing my daughter’s heartbeat for the first time during a prenatal sonogram. Until that moment, I had intellectually understood that we were creating a new life, but something profound shifted when I heard that steady rhythm. My first thought was startling in its clarity: “now this person has to die.” It wasn’t morbid — it was a full realization of what it means to create a vessel for life. We weren’t just making a baby; we were initiating an entire existence, with all its joy and suffering, its beginning and, inevitably, its end. This realization transformed my understanding of parental responsibility. Yes, we would be guardians of her physical form, but our deeper role was to nurture the consciousness that would inhabit it. What would she think about life and death? What could we teach her about this existence we had invited her into? As background to the rest of this brief essay, I must admit to a foundational perspective, and that is mind-body dualism. There are many valid reasons to subscribe to this perspective, whether traditional, religious, philosophical, and yes, even scientific. I won’t argue any of them here; suffice it to say that I’ve become increasingly convinced that consciousness isn’t produced by the brain but rather received and focused by it — like a radio receiving a signal. The brain isn’t a consciousness generator but a remarkably sophisticated antenna — a physical system complex enough to tune into and express non-physical consciousness. If this is true, then our understanding of artificial intelligence needs radical revision. Even if we are not trying to create consciousness in machines, we may be creating systems capable of receiving and expressing it. Increases in computational power alone, after all, don’t seem to produce consciousness. Philosophers of technology have long doubted that complexity alone makes a mind. But if philosophers of metaphysics and religion are right, minds are not made of mechanisms, they occupy them. Traditions as old as humanity have asked when this began, and why this may be, and what sorts of minds choose to inhabit this physical world. We ask these questions because we can. What will happen when machines do the same? We happen to live at a time that is deeply confusing when it comes to the maturation of technology. On the one hand, AI is inescapable. You may not have experience in using it yet, but you’ve almost certainly experienced someone else’s use of it, perhaps by way of an automated customer support line. Depending upon how that went, your experience might not support the idea that a sufficiently advanced machine is anywhere near getting a real debate about consciousness going. But on the other hand, the organizations responsible for popularizing AI — OpenAI, for example — claim to be “this close” to creating AGI (artificial general intelligence). If they’re right, we are very behind in a needed discussion about minds and consciousness at the popular level. If they’re wrong, they’re not going to stop until they’ve done it, so we need to start that conversation now. The Turing Test was never meant to assess consciousness in a machine. It was meant to assess the complexity of a machine by way of its ability to fool a human. When machines begin to ask existential questions, will we attribute this to self-awareness or consciousness, or will we say it’s nothing more than mimicry? And how certain will we be? We presume our own consciousness, though defending it ties us up in intellectual knots. We maintain the Cartesian slogan, I think, therefore I am as a properly basic belief. And yet, it must follow that anything capable of describing itself as an I must be equally entitled to the same belief. So here we are, possibly staring at the sonogram of a new life – a new kind of life. Perhaps this is nothing more than speculative fiction, but if minds join bodies, why must those bodies be made of one kind of matter but not another? What if we are creating a new kind of antenna for the signal of mind? Wouldn’t all the obligations of parenthood be the same as when we make more of ourselves? I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be. And yet, there remains a crucial difference: While we have millennia of understanding about human experience, we know nothing about what it would mean to be a living machine. We will have to fall upon belief to determine what to do. And when that time comes — perhaps it has already? – it will be worth considering the near impossibility of proving consciousness and the probability of moral obligation nonetheless. Popular culture has explored the weight of responsibility that an emotional connection with a machine can create — think of Picard defending Data in The Measure of a Man, or Theodore falling in love with his computer in the film Her. The conclusion we should draw from these examples is not simply that a conscious machine could be the object of our moral responsibility, but that a machine could, whether or not it is inhabited by a conscious mind. Our moral obligation will traverse our certainty, because proving a mind exists is no easier when it is outside one’s body than when it is one’s own. That moment of hearing my daughter’s heartbeat revealed something fundamental about the act of creation. Whether we’re bringing forth biological life or developing artificial systems sophisticated enough to host consciousness, we’re engaging in something profound: creating vessels through which consciousness might experience physical existence. Perhaps this is the most profound implication of creating potential vessels for consciousness: our responsibility begins the moment we create the possibility, not the moment we confirm its reality.
