Lesson 3: Find the starving crowd and win with your cold email
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In this lesson, you’ll learn how to identify whether your niche is truly a “starving crowd” – a market actively looking for a solution right now.
You’ll discover how to recognize urgency signals, analyze public pain points, and spot patterns in customer conversations that indicate strong buying intent. We’ll also cover how urgency impacts cold email performance, engagement, and deliverability, helping you prioritize the niches most likely to respond to your outreach.
Welcome to Lesson 3.
You scored your niches on six factors.
Now we ask, which niche is truly starving for your help.
Copywriter Gary Halbert once asked,
“If you owned a hamburger stand, what single advantage would you want?”
His answer: “A starving crowd.”
Need beats clever copy every time.
To spot a starving crowd, look for three signals.They talk about the pain in public.
They try fixes, but results are poor.They show urgency.
Look out for phrases like “need now”, “losing sleep”, “feel hopeless”.
Remember the quick note from Lesson 2?
Pain measures depth inside ONE company.
That means, if they ignore the problem; how big are the consequences for that ONE firm.
Urgency measures breadth and timing across the niche.
How many firms show the pain right now, and how loudly or frequently.
Here is a simple rule of thumb about timing.
Only about three to five percent of a market is in a buying window at any given time.
Most people are not ready to buy today.
That is one reason why pure cold outreach can be hard.
You typically end up with 1 or 2 positive replies for each 10 replies.
Don’t get discouraged as this is the normal average.
However, urgency raises the odds for a positive response.
If you identify a starving crowd your buying window may have bigger odds than 3 to 5%.
Simply speaking, a starving niche gives you more people in the buying window.
It also gives you many quotes and phrases to reuse in your copy.
And it forgives imperfect emails while you learn.
Raising your chances of positive engagement is crucial.
The better your natural engagement the better your deliverability and vice-versa.
Those two are highly intertwined.
Okay, now let’s go to your research inbox from Lesson 2.
Here you can see the column that says Urgency.
The drop down will have your statuses like Content, Pressured, and Starving.
Content, mild interest only; no public cries; low urgency.
Pressured, pain is real; impact is felt and talked about frequently but it’s not existential yet.
Starving, public complaints; clear losses or risk if unsolved; strong “need now” language.
Let us walk through our three example niches for Woodpecker.
Seed to Series A SaaS.
In my saved posts I see many founders worry about pipeline.
They report low reply rates and ask for help often.
I found quotes like:
“why are my email landing in spam”
“I sent 1000 emails and got 0 replies”
Or “I got 0 positive responses, not sure my business makes sense”.
Given the frequency of these and similar quotes, I tag this niche as Starving.
Digital marketing agencies.
Many talk about ad costs rising and SEO instability, especially around AI.
Nevertheless, they still have other channels to use.
Also, some agencies are already starting to focus on AI SEO and are adapting.
I tag this niche as Pressured.
Local plumbers.
Very little public chatter about outbound or cold email.
Since I can’t find or know anything extra here I tag this niche Content.
One important note, though.
Some markets feel urgent but stay quiet in public.
If you have direct access, interviews may reveal a strong need.
As a beginner, pick niches where you can see enough urgency with the sources you have today.
You can revisit highly scored, but quiet niches later when you gain more access.
Here is a simple rule for priority.
Starving plus reachable, consider launching this first.
Pressured plus reachable, keep as your backup niche.
Content or hard to reach, save for later, or skip altogether.
Let’s get into some homework.
Go through your research inbox and unpack conversations you tagged with a pain.
Read the threads as well as the comments.
Consider pulling each comment out that talks about the same pain.
Count how often a pain shows up across different threads and comments.
Take into account if the language that was used sounds urgent.
Then go through your niches and tag them as Content, Pressured, or Starving.
And lastly, pick your primary niche, ideally starving and reachable.
If you are unsure about reachability watch the next lesson first before making your final decision.
You can also pick one or two extra backup niches as well.
That’s it for this lesson.
See you in Lesson 4 where we test for reachability in more detail.