Chasing Stardom: My Quest to Star in a Movie

My entire life, I have had two main objectives that I've set out to achieve. Bucket list items, if you will, things I want to get done before they put me in the dirt. The first one is to be the head of social media at a B2B SaaS prospecting company, and the second one is to be a movie star. As you can probably tell, I've already achieved one of these goals. I'm at the top of the mountain. I've made it. However, the other goal has remained very evasive. I have not been able to make it to the big screen. But today, that is going to change.

Now, I know what you're thinking: “Patrick, it's impossible. You've gone to corporate. You've gone to white collar. There's no way you're gonna be able to flip the script and end up on the big screen in the starry flashing lights.” And to that, I say have faith and have no fear because Clay is here! I’ve given myself quite the challenge today, and that challenge is using Clay to find customized outreach to and eventually contact hundreds of movie producers asking them if I can be a small part in their next film. I’m not expecting them to cast me as the lead, but I’m thinking that if my offer is enticing enough, they'll at least put me in there as an extra position and kickstart my inevitably successful acting career.

I haven't started a single part of this challenge yet, so I have to preface it by saying I have absolutely no idea if it's going to work. But I think the best chance of it working is by using Clay to do mass outreach at scale, and so that is what I'm going to try to do today. Hopefully, one of these producers sees something in me, demonstrates some charity, and I can end up in their movie. So I'll wait about a week or so and see if anybody ends up responding to me, hopefully with a yes.

The Plan

Regardless of whether this challenge or experiment is successful or not, I hope you learn something about Clay from this video because that is, in fact, my job. Please drop me a like and subscribe so my boss doesn't get mad at me for making ridiculous videos like this. And without further ado, let's get into it.

Finding Film Production Companies

So I wanted to make sure that all the film production companies that I was reaching out to were somewhat notable and actually made movies. Luckily, I found a Wikipedia page with a list of film production companies. You might be wondering how I’m going to put this into a spreadsheet easily. Very simple! All you have to do is use the Clay Chrome extension, and you'll see in a second how I could programmatically scrape this list and import it into a Clay table.

First step is to click "add data for page" and select "list." I’m going to select two distinct items from that list, and you'll see that they've been identified. Next, I just clicked on the company name, and it showed up. I'm going to call this “Name.” Finally, we have four hundred fifty-six rows of names. So I'm import this into a Clay table.

Filtering for Relevant Companies

So I've scraped everything in the list now, and all I have to do is add it to the workspace. And it will populate right here in this table in just a second. Boom! There we go. The next step is an important one. Unfortunately, Clay will not fly me out to another country to feature in a movie, so what I'm gonna have to do is filter out for companies that are located in the United States. All I gotta do is click filter, country, and I'll put equal to “United States.” And that should give me a list. Let’s see how many we still have—one hundred sixty rows. Perfect! We still got a lot of film production companies to work with here. Awesome.

Next, I noticed that some of the companies in this list are defunct. Obviously, defunct film companies are not gonna feature me in their movies because they're not making any movies. So I've got to filter out for that. I'm gonna add another filter right here, and all I'm gonna do is put notes, and I'm going to say contains and default. Oh, we're gonna do it. Does not contain the font. Boom! Okay. Now we've got a hundred forty-five rows, knocked out fifteen of them that were not existing anymore. Alright, on to the next step.

Enriching the Data

Now that we have this list of movie production companies, we need to create another table that will map out the employees of each of these companies so we can reach out to them. So what we're gonna do next is go to new table, “People from LinkedIn,” and then continue. You’ll see this little companies tab up here. What I'm going to do is select the Clay table that I’d like to scrape from, which is the film production companies table that we just created. We’re going to take this link column, which is just the company's LinkedIn URL, and then keep this the same.

Next, we're gonna go to job title. Since we want to find producers in the space, we're just gonna type in “producer” right here. This should find every producer that works for all these companies as long as it doesn't exceed twenty-five hundred people. I’ll wait for these to load and get back to you. Oh my gosh, there are twenty-five hundred people with the job title producer that work for these companies! I guess they are big companies. I shouldn't be that surprised, but nonetheless, wow. So we're gonna import them and get started on enriching them.

Finding Work Emails

Now that we have this list of two thousand three hundred eighty-two producers from these studios that we scraped, we had twenty-five hundred, but I added two filters on here just to exclude the words “game” and “music” to make sure we were looking for people who are actually creating films of some kind or at least a TV show. I’m not picky at this point. And because of the beautiful data imported through Clay, I have enough to find their work emails. So what I'm gonna do next is click plus here, add enrichment, and navigate to the little waterfall tab right here for Clay. I’ll go to work email.

The waterfall feature allows you to use several different data providers at once to try to find their emails. If this one doesn't find their email, it'll go to this one, etc. It has a higher data accuracy than using just one. I’m gonna pick the four that I generally go with, which is these four. Prospero seems to be the highest accuracy data provider, so I put that first. We will throw their full name, company domain, and LinkedIn profile in these respective boxes. It already provided for us right here. I’ll make sure to validate it and run these first ten rows, and I’ll get back to you from there.

Alright, so I've run the first twenty rows, and as you can see, we have quite a few emails here. Now I'm going to spend a lot of Clay credits and run it for all twenty-five hundred rows. I’m going to do that and get back to you when it is finished.

Crafting the Outreach

Alrighty. The integration has finished running a lot quicker than I thought it would, honestly. Now we’re going to see just how many work emails we have. All we have to do is put this filter on right here, and we have six hundred thirty validated emails. Wow! So now that we have the emails of all these producers, we're going to write out a few different outreach prompts, test them out, and start emailing these producers that hopefully will get me in a movie.

Okay, so I have written a quick email copy here. If you read through, which I will do in a second, it's really not complicated. You can do a lot with Instantly. You can add AB testing, have different steps, and do a lot of crazy stuff. And especially in Clay with the personalization tools that they have, you can do a lot of personalization stuff there too. But sometimes simplicity is the best solution, and that's what I decided to do here.

So this is what I said:

Hey, [first name]. My name is Patrick. You don't know me. I'd like to be an extra on one of your projects. I can literally just be standing as a blurred figure in the background for all I care. I don't need to be paid or have my travel covered. Just wanna do it for the vibes. Any chance I can hop in a scene of whatever you're working on? Patrick by Chelsea.

All I have is their email and their first name. I kept it pretty simple there. Other than that, I’m just gonna plug in my sending email domains and start running the campaign. Ideally, in about a week or two, I will be back here recording the final part of this video and letting you know if anybody responded.

The Results

What is going on, ladies and gentlemen? It has been a week. I am back to share the results with you, and unfortunately, they are not good. I was not able to convince anybody to put me in their movie. A couple reasons I think this happened. The first one being that a lot of the studios I reached out to have highly sensitive spam filters, so most of my emails went to spam immediately just because anything that doesn't look like it's from another major studio likely goes straight to trash.

The second reason is that my emails were not very personalized whatsoever. In reality, I could have probably tried harder. Clay has so many personalization possibilities, and I kind of just ignored them and decided to go for it. But you know what? Sometimes you gotta take chances like that. Not everything is going to work out, and if anything, it kind of shows the power of personalization in emails because people just don't like to respond to things that don't seem directed specifically toward them. So it's a lesson for me and hopefully you guys as well: please personalize your emails. Put effort into them. It likely won't work out if you don't do so.