Everything in life is cyclical. Things change all the time, and those who adapt fast normally outperform the others.

A year ago, using AI for outreach or fundraising would have genuinely accelerated you. Today, everyone has access to ChatGPT or Claude, and everyone can create a perfectly structured landing page, a beautifully designed pitch deck, write a LinkedIn post, or draft an award application.

Somehow, everything suddenly started looking the same and sounding the same.

Why Everything Suddenly Looks Identical

We keep forgetting that AI is trained on a lot of data, and as it happens with big data, the overall result gravitates to the medium. In other words, everything created with AI is average - which is amazing if you're horrible with design or communication, but if you have a chance to be in the top 1%, to be an outlier, AI brings you down, closer to the average.

Suddenly, something that stood out a year ago became normal. And we all ignore normal.

Especially today, when AI has supercharged an already noisy existence. I don't know about you, but I feel constantly spammed. Email inbox. LinkedIn messages. WhatsApp. It's too much, and it all looks kind of the same.

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If you're a founder fundraising - or applying for jobs, grants, anything else where you need to win attention - your job is to stand out. To be noticed. But how can you do that if you're doing exactly the same thing as everyone else?

You think it's not obvious that your pitch deck, job application, or grant submission was written by AI? I can tell you, it is. The human brain is great at spotting patterns, especially in tasks that are repeated again and again - like reviewing pitch decks or job applications. After you've seen a dozen, the next one written by ChatGPT is unmistakable.

I'm not saying using AI is bad. I'm saying it doesn't help you stand out.

So what can you do in such a crowded market to get attention? The answer is exactly what you'd expect: you have to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. You have to be more human and less AI.

I'd been thinking about this for months without quite knowing what to do with it, until we hosted James Church at our Open Mic Pitching event last night.

James wrote Investable Entrepreneur and has helped his clients raise close to a quarter of a billion pounds in early-stage funding. Founders using his systems are roughly 40 times more likely to successfully raise than the baseline.

He spent most of the evening walking us through a methodology he calls the Perfectly Predictable Pipeline - a system he originally built for B2B sales and has since adapted for fundraising. It works in the exact opposite direction to where everyone else is currently sprinting, which is why it works at all.

There are four moves to it.

Use LinkedIn's new AI-powered search (or Sales Navigator) to identify 20 target investors a day. Filter by stage, sector, geography, and any keywords that suggest alignment with what you're building. One small but important trick - don't have "Founder of [Company]" as the first thing in your LinkedIn headline. Anyone with "investor" in their bio sees that and knows what's coming next, and won't accept the request. Lead with what you're transforming.

When someone accepts your connection, send them a selfie video through LinkedIn. Mention their name in the first two seconds. Be honest about who you are and what you're building. Ask permission to pitch - don't pitch yet. The whole video is 30 seconds. Look down at your shoes once. Stumble over a word. Don't re-record it five times. The imperfection is the point.

For anyone who responds yes, send a pre-recorded two-minute pitch video. First 45 seconds is just you on camera talking about your background and vision. Cut to a screen-share with traction and validation. Cut back to you with a clear call to action - book a call. Be upfront that it's pre-recorded. That honesty itself is part of what makes it land.

This is the move most founders skip, and James was emphatic that it's the one that matters most. About half of all replies come from follow-ups three, four, and five. Voice notes. A meme. A "was the video that bad?" with a crying emoji. Anything mixed up, light, human, and short. Stop at five - beyond that, you become a pest.

The conversion rate James sees in practice: 30-40% connection acceptance, 30% reply rate on the first video, and 1-2% of those become booked meetings. Run this at 20 a day and you reliably get one to two investor meetings every single week. Indefinitely.

The reason this methodology works isn't because video is some magical new channel. Video has existed forever. It works because everything else has become indistinguishable, and a real human face saying your name has become statistically rare. In a market where every other inbound looks identical, the unmistakably human one wins.

The same principle applies to every interaction in your fundraising process. The follow-up after the first meeting. The way you respond to a "we'll pass." The thank-you note after the partner meeting. The reply to a tough question on a call. Every one of these is a moment where you can be unmistakably you - and most founders are quietly outsourcing those moments to AI to "make them more professional."

The professional version is the average version. And the average version doesn't get funded.

Here's what I'm not going to lie to you about.

What James is teaching is hard. It's genuinely time-consuming. Recording 20 personalised videos a day, sending five follow-ups to each one, staying on top of a pipeline that's constantly moving - this is not a 30-minutes-a-day side project. It's a real commitment. Most founders won't do it. Most founders will read this, nod along, and go back to their templated cold emails because templated cold emails feel productive even when they don't work.

And here's the second uncomfortable truth: what's working today won't work forever. The whole reason video outreach is converting so well right now is that almost nobody is doing it. The moment everyone starts doing it, the moment AI tools start generating fake "personalised videos" at scale, the moment LinkedIn turns it into a feature, this specific tactic loses its edge. The edge is always temporary. The principle behind it - do what everyone else isn't willing to do - is permanent.

Different Results Require Different Actions

If you keep doing what everyone else is doing, you'll keep getting what everyone else is getting. Which, in fundraising, is a 99% rejection rate, no meetings, and no cheques. If you want different results, you have to be willing to do something different - and to do it before everyone else figures out that it works.

Being rare is the whole game now. The market has handed founders the enormous favour of making the bar for standing out lower than it's ever been. The catch is that standing out always costs you something - usually time, usually comfort, usually the feeling of "doing it properly."

That's exactly why so few people are willing to pay the price. And exactly why those who do, win.

✅ Know a founder grinding through a raise right now and getting nowhere? Forward this their way. The sooner they realise the game has shifted from "build the best company" to "be the most unmistakably human person in the inbox," the more meetings they'll land in the next 90 days.

(👉 Vote now — we’ll share the results in next week’s issue. All votes are anonymous.)

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