[reply worthy | day 20] why the lead stopped opening your DMs
(the friend who only calls when she needs something)
You know the friend. The one you haven’t seen in 8 months.
The one whose name shows up on your phone at 10:47 PM on a Tuesday.
You already know what the conversation is going to be. You feel it in your chest before you even slide the bar over.
You answer anyway, because you’re the kind of person who answers.
“Hey girl! It’s been forever. How are you?”
The “how are you” lands flat because you both know it’s a setup.
Sixty seconds of small talk. The kids. The job. The weather.
Then the pivot. “So, I had a question to ask you...”
It’s never been “I was just thinking about you.” It’s never been “I wanted to share something with you.” It’s never been “remember that thing we used to laugh about?”
There’s always an ‘ask’ from this one.
You haven’t blocked her. You haven’t deleted her number. You just stopped picking up.
And you don’t regret it one bit. Well, most times.
Sometimes you think you’re being too harsh. It’s why you picked up this time.
But every single time time you re-engage with her, you’re smacked in the face with exactly why you stopped engaging in the first place.
This happens soooooo many times in the DM funnels I autopsy.
My friend Reid’s DM sequence... the one he paid an agency $2k for... had asks of some sort in every single message.
Not a question to gain clarity or to forward the conversation… but a sincere ask for the prospect to do something, think about something, offer something, without having gotten anything in return.
1️⃣ The first was for attention.
2️⃣ The second was for a reply.
3️⃣ The third was for a “quick chat.”
4️⃣ The fourth was for 15 minutes Thursday.
5️⃣ The fifth was a “circling back” disguised as a check-in.
6️⃣ The sixth was a calendar link.
7️⃣ The seventh was a “should I close the loop?” breakup.
Not one of those messages handed the prospect something they could use.
Not a tip. Not a teardown. Not a tactic. Not a single thing they could run before deciding whether Reid was worth a call.
The whole sequence was the askhole friend at 10:47 PM on a Tuesday.
Today, I’m diagnosing the sequence where every message is an ask and not one of them delivers something the prospect can use without buying.
→ Why “7 messages, 0 gives” is the most common reply-rate killer I see
→ The Give-to-Take ratio that determines whether your prospect reads message 4
→ How to convert any Take message into a Give without losing the call seed
Let’s start with the friend who only calls when she needs something...
🎁 Mistake 20: Every message in your sequence is a Take. None of them are a Give.
Every DM message you send is one of two things.
→ Take: A message that asks the prospect for something. Attention, time, a reply, a click, a call, a yes.
→ Give: A message that hands the prospect something they can use today, without buying anything, without committing to a call, without owing you anything.
Most sequences I score are 7 Takes and 0 Gives. Some are 6 Takes and 1 weak Give… that’s actually a setup more than a give.
I.E. ”Here’s a free framework... want to hop on a call to walk through it?”
That’s a Take wearing a Give costume.
Your prospect catalogs your sequence the same way you catalog that friend’s phone calls.
By message 3, they already know what message 4 is going to ask for. By message 5, they’re not opening it.
Reid’s sequence had 7 asks in a row. By message 2, his prospects had already started ignoring him. By message 4, they’d started ignoring the thread altogether.
Usually, the founder thinks the problem is the offer. Or the first sentence. Or the day and time they sent the message.
When the actual problem is that nobody on your team delivered anything, before asking for everything.
Your sequence has 7 messages. Your prospect gets 7 asks.
Not one thing they can use without buying. Not one insight they didn’t already know.
And you’re wondering why they ghost after message 2.
🤖 I built a free DM Sequence Grader that scores your sequence (or existing conversations) across 7 dimensions in under 3 minutes.
You get a true score, your weakest dimension, and exactly where to start fixing first:
→ Score your DM sequence or last DM conversation for free here
Stop asking 7 times without giving once.
P.S. If your DMs aren’t converting, it might not be the conversations at all. It might be what happens with the rest of your systems, after they book. I built a free diagnostic that shows agency founders where their ops are leaking founder time.
Results in 24 hours: Founder Leverage OS
Before & After
Here’s how to fix it in your own DMs:
1️⃣ Audit your sequence Give-to-Take ratio before you change a single word.
Count every message. Tag each one Give or Take.
A sequence/conversation with fewer than 2 Gives in 7 messages is dead on arrival.
Run this on your last 3 sent sequences and you’ll see exactly where the silence started.
2️⃣ Convert at least 2 Takes into Gives that still carry the call seed.
A Give isn’t charity. It’s the cheapest way to prove you’re worth the call.
A 3-question audit, a 90-second teardown, a single-page checklist. Useful by itself.
The call seed is the upgrade path, not the gate.
3️⃣ Train your setter (or whoever runs your DM funnel) to deliver before they ask.
Your setter or VA or head of growth shouldn’t be sending Takes back-to-back.
Build them a Give library: 5 short value drops your team can paste, customized to the prospect, that prove the relationship before the proposal.
One of the main thing’s I did when working with Reid was help him build a ‘Give Library’ from content he’d already produced across LinkedIn and 𝕏.
That’s it.
Here’s what you learned today:
→ Every message in your sequence is either a Give (delivers standalone value) or a Take (asks for time, attention, reply, or call).
→ Most sequences are 7 Takes and 0 Gives. The prospect stops opening by message 3.
→ The fix is converting at least 2 Takes into Gives that carry the call seed without gating the value.
Start with just one:
Pull up your last sent sequence or conversation where you were suddenly ghosted.
Tag every message as Give or Take.
If your ratio is worse than 5-to-2, you found the leak. Pick one Take to convert this afternoon.
Over the next 31 days, I’m walking you through:
→ How to diagnose the silent objection killing your threads after message 1
→ The map that shows you which of the 7 actual conversation steps your sequence skips
→ How to build the opener, the discovery layer, and the close from scratch
→ How to write a message that creates the “I hadn’t considered that” moment
→ How to write a Value Drop that earns the call without asking for it
→ How to build a recovery system calibrated to WHERE in the sequence they went silent
→ The full sequence assembly, every piece, scored against every diagnostic from the series
Today’s mega-prompt doesn’t just count your Gives and Takes.
It classifies every message in your sequence, calculates your Give-to-Take ratio, and rewrites the two highest-leverage Takes into Gives without losing the call seed.
Paid members get:
✔ The Give/Take Sequence Audit
→ Paste your full sequence, get every message tagged Give or Take
→ See your Give-to-Take ratio and where you fall in the leak tier
→ Get paste-ready Give rewrites for the 2 Takes most likely to be killing reply rates
✔ A Give library: 5 paste-ready value drops your setter can customize in under 60 seconds
✔ A one-page diagnostic for your head of growth to score every new sequence before send
Your prospect already knows what message 4 is going to ask for. Give her a reason to open it anyway.
