How to deal with your dreaded dms

Written By: Jennifer Strout

Being a founder is all about doing things you don’t enjoy doing, and some tasks that you even hate doing - EVERY day! Instead of trying to avoid these tasks, and spend your time stressing out about them, you should seek to find ways to do these tasks in a faster, less painful way. For example, direct messages (DMs) used to overwhelm me because I could never catch up, let alone keep up!  

Important DMs would fall through the cracks, either because of no time to open them in the first place, or because I’d open a DM, go to find a link or information that I needed for the reply, and instead get pulled into something else once I’d leave the app I was reading the original DM in. Unfortunately, this results in the DM appearing as “read”, but unanswered. And it often remains unanswered as the DM no longer shows up bold and so it gets buried in my inbox.

It's not a meaningless frustration, I wish I could say that I didn't lose any business deals because of this but I have...more than one. Responsive is everything, and in a world where the average attention span is 8 seconds, every second counts. This is especially true in the world of business, where response time is often the difference between a successful transaction and a missed opportunity. The truth is that ROI of time-saving and efficiency tools in business cannot be understated. 

So how, as a founder, have I grown past this? I developed a solution to address it head on: KeyLink. Now I’m able to send nearly 2,000 DMs every week and I have 70% more time, and a ton less stress, even with the increased output. Beyond the time it takes to actually send the messages, I’m also saving time that gets built into endless followups- what invariably happens when you don't respond to someone while their interest and attention is peaked. Because catching someone when they are interested is priceless, and statistically gold.

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