Week 11: Automation and Scale
What automated sequences trade away for scale.
3 May 2027
Week 4 argued for specificity that would be false for a different reader. This lecture asks what happens to that argument at the scale automation makes possible.
Before the lecture
This is just to get a quick understanding before the lecture. The examples and the rest are in the lecture, so it’s advisable you attend.
In brief#
This week’s failure is automation flattening: a sequence can send a thousand emails in the time a one-to-one version takes to write. It can’t hold the kind of specificity week 4 asked for, because that specificity has to be true of one reader and false of the rest. It matters because a template merging in a name and a company isn’t the same as knowing anything about the person receiving it, and a writer who treats volume and reply rate as the same thing will optimise the wrong one.
Outline#
- what a template can and can’t know about one reader
- reply rate per email vs. volume of emails sent
- the tell: language a template falls back on when it has nothing specific left to merge
- turning a one-to-one email into a template, and seeing what breaks