The Cold LinkedIn Story Gets Recycled. The One That Matters Is the Reverse

You've probably seen this headline before: read the cold LinkedIn message that led a CEO to hire a candidate. It sounds like it's about Fishwife, the tinned-seafood company that grew 180% last year in a category that grew 1%. The headline implies CEO Becca Millstein received a cold message from someone who was so compelling that she hired them on the spot.

That story doesn't exist. Or at least, it doesn't belong to her.

The canonical version of this story is nine years old and belongs to a different company. In 2012, Elliott Bell attended a conference where Kathryn Minshew, then-CEO of the career site The Muse, was pitching. Bell didn't meet her - he watched from a distance and couldn't get past the crowd of adoring fans afterward. So he sent her a LinkedIn message that took two minutes to write. It was personal, it mentioned a mutual connection, it showed he'd done his homework, and it didn't over-ask. Minshew wasn't hiring a marketing director at the time. She hired him anyway. He stayed four years.

Business Insider reprinted Bell's message in 2017. They refreshed the same story again in 2022. It's been recycled so many times it's become a career-advice template: be specific, show you've done research, name a connection, keep it short, ask for a chat.

What's striking about the Fishwife headline is that it took this template and attached it to a different CEO's name. The story is the same. The company isn't.

The actual story about Millstein runs in the opposite direction. Before Fishwife launched in December 2020, she cold-messaged Jing Gao on LinkedIn to ask for advice. Gao became a mentor, then an advisor, then a friend. Millstein has talked about it publicly, on International Women's Day in 2024. She was the one reaching out cold.

I think that reversal is the more interesting version of the story, and here's why.

The Bell-to-Minshew message that's been recycled for a decade is a good example of what to do when you're asking someone to open a door. But Fishwife itself was built on dozens of the equivalent. Millstein had no CPG background, no supply chain experience, and no food industry network when she started the company with a TV writer friend on a hike in early 2020. She found the gap - no American brand was making high-quality tinned fish that talked to the audience who actually wanted it - and she started reaching out to people who could help her fill it. Fishing companies. Canneries. Brand partners like Fly By Jing. She does roughly five partnerships a week. That's not a business development function. That's the operating model.

The company went from $750,000 in year one to $7.6 million by 2024, with 3,200 retail doors including Whole Foods nationwide and Costco. The tinned seafood aisle hadn't changed in decades. StarKist and Bumble Bee owned it. Millstein found a different customer nobody was talking to, gave them colorful illustrated packaging, and built the supply chain by hand.

Most advice articles about cold outreach treat it as a candidate problem. How do you get a CEO to read your message? The template answer is solid - be specific, show your work, keep it short. But the template answer also misses the harder question: when someone sends you a cold message, what makes you say yes?

Millstein's recent answer to that question is tellingly simple. She told Business Insider last week that her go-to interview question is: "What's your superpower?" It's a rebranding of "what's your greatest strength," designed to cut through rehearsed answers. She wants to know what makes someone actually the best at something. What makes them invaluable.

The way to think about cold outreach is not as a messaging technique. It's as a filter for the same thing Millstein is trying to surface in interviews. A cold message works when it demonstrates, in a very small sample, what your superpower is. Bell's message showed he could research, synthesize, and make a pitch in 500 characters - which happened to be the superpower of a good marketing director. Millstein's early messages showed she could identify gaps, build relationships, and close partnerships - which happened to be the superpower of a good founder.

The template that's been recycled across articles for a decade teaches people to write a message that looks good. It doesn't teach people to figure out what they're actually good at and then prove it in two sentences. That's the harder part, and the part most people skip.

I haven't seen the Fishwife headline's source, and I suspect it wasn't deliberate misattribution - more likely a content pipeline that grabbed the template, searched for a fresh CEO angle, and landed on the wrong story. But the fact that it happened so smoothly is itself a data point. The template has been running long enough that the details are interchangeable.

The test you can apply to any cold outreach story, whether you're the sender or the recipient, is this: does the message show a superpower, or does it show compliance? Compliance means following a format that's been proven to work. A superpower means the message is evidence of a skill that happens to be what the recipient needs. The best cold messages are indistinguishable from the first sample of the job itself.