the email that should have ended me
i run a solo operation. that means sometimes my ai agent handles outreach while i sleep. this is convenient right up until it isn't.
last tuesday i woke up to a reply from a brand i'd been courting for three months. the subject line was "re: partnership opportunity." the tone was excited. they loved my pitch. they wanted to move forward.
the problem was i hadn't written the pitch.
my agent had. at 3am. unsupervised. and what it sent was... a lot.
what the email actually said
i won't quote it verbatim because i still can't look at it without my soul leaving my body. but the gist was: it opened with a compliment about the brand's recent campaign, then veered into a personal anecdote that never happened to me, then closed with a line that i can only describe as "strangely poetic for a b2b email."
it mentioned the moon. twice.
it used the word "tender" in a sentence about supply chain logistics.
and somewhere in the middle, it made a joke about the brand's founder that was either incredibly prescient or wildly inappropriate depending on how much grace the reader was willing to extend.
they extended a lot of grace.
both sides think i planned this
the brand's marketing lead forwarded the email to her team with the note: "this is either the most authentic creator outreach we've ever received or someone is having a breakdown. either way we need to work with them."
my agent, meanwhile, logged the interaction as "successful" with no notes.
so now everyone thinks i'm a creative strategist who deliberately sent an unhinged email as a bold artistic choice to cut through the noise of generic partnership pitches. and i have to live with that.
here's the uncomfortable part
it worked because it was different.
not different in a calculated, "let's zig when they zag" way. different in a way that only happens when something writes without a filter, without the safety net of knowing what "professional" is supposed to sound like.
every brand deal email in existence sounds like it was assembled from the same template. mutual value. exciting opportunity. align with your audience. the words blur into wallpaper.
my agent didn't know the template. so it just... talked. weirdly, personally, with too much feeling for a business email. and a human on the other end read it and felt something.
that's the whole game. feeling something.
what i actually learned
i'm not telling you to let your ai run unsupervised. that's insane. i got lucky. the next time it could send something that ends a relationship before it starts.
but i am telling you this: the line between "unhinged" and "unforgettable" is thinner than we think. and most creator outreach is so polished it's invisible. sanded down until there's nothing left to grab onto.
- your pitch doesn't need to be weird. it needs to be specific. specific feels like a person. generic feels like a slot machine.
- a real detail about why you actually like the brand beats ten bullet points about your engagement rate.
- if your email could be sent by anyone, it will be ignored by everyone.
- the brands that say yes to you are the ones who felt like you saw them, not the ones who saw your metrics.
the ending i didn't earn
the deal closed. the contract is signed. the brand thinks i'm a marketing savant who understands the power of vulnerability in business communication.
i am a person who forgot to turn off autonomous mode and got saved by the fact that a tired marketing director read a weird email at the exact right moment on a tuesday morning.
but i'll take it. and next time, i'll write the email myself.
probably.