Hey Reader!

A few weeks ago, I got the funniest cold outreach email of my life:

In case you don't know what's happening here, this is some cold outreach agency using an AI automation tool to scrape LinkedIn posts and spin them into sales pitches (gross). This one had scraped a post of mine about grief... and clearly, no human eyes had checked this before it landed in my inbox.

I couldn't get over the irony of this robot calling its own boss out for lacking empathy 🤖🤣

So I screenshotted it, posted it to Threads and LinkedIn with the caption "show me a better cold outreach email," and went about my day.

That post hit around 60,000 views on each platform, and my phone would not stop buzzing for a week 😳

And underneath the (very real) dopamine rush, one slightly embarrassing thought kept surfacing: I've spent years being scared of exactly this.

You see, going viral is my literal nightmare.

I do content and social media for a living, and I mean that sincerely. This week's podcast episode is all about why.

Here's what all those views got my business: zero clients. Not one. Barely any new followers either, and the few I did gain came for a sassy robot screenshot, not brand strategy.

In the episode, I get into why reach is a vanity metric, what a flood of wrong-fit eyeballs does to your voice, and the thing I'd trade 100,000 views for every single time: the right 200 people.

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Episode 77: The Viral Trap:... Jul 5 · Bold Women In Business P... 39:35   ​

If you've been grading every post against a virality benchmark that just makes you feel like a failure, this one's for you.

See you next week, Reader!

Boldly yours, Rachel Honeyman CEO @ HoneyBeBold

As you probably know by now, I won't ever recommend a product or service unless I've used it and love it myself. So, I'm pretty excited to introduce Morning Brew as a sponsor for this newsletter (it's been one of my favorite daily newsletters for all things business and marketing for a long time). If you're not on their list yet, it's totally worth joining (and it's free, so it's kind of a no-brainer 😉) 👇