SPECIAL GUEST!! 🔥 The 30-Second Habit That Got Avni Barman a $40K Raise | Ep. 554
August 21, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readThe 30-Second Habit That Got Avni Barman a $40K Raise
Avni Barman wakes up every morning and sends a few cold messages before she even brushes her teeth. It's not strategic. It's not calculated. She just messages anyone whose career she admires—or anyone doing something interesting adjacent to her field, or even another woman pursuing a similar path who might become a friend. Most of these messages lead nowhere. But six months or six years later, one of them will open the door she's been trying to walk through. That's the law of large numbers at work: most cold messages get no response, so sending a handful per year is basically zero. Sending thirty in a single Saturday shifts the probabilities.
The Three Networking Practices That Actually Work
Barman's networking philosophy is built on three concrete behaviors, each designed to be low-effort and high-leverage. The first is the cold-messaging practice described above. The key insight is that you don't need a specific ask. The connection itself is the value, and the opportunity will reveal itself later—if at all. Most people don't respond, so consistency and volume matter more than the quality of any single message.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:16) **Introduction of Avni Barman** - Jay introduces Avni Barman as a career expert, community builder, and founder of Gen She, a media company and investing platform for Gen Z women.
- 2 (04:34) **The Daily Cold Messaging Practice** - Avni reveals her core habit: sending cold messages every morning before brushing her teeth to build a massive network over time.
- 3 (06:08) **How to Work Conferences for Maximum Impact** - Avni shares her counterintuitive conference strategy: skip networking with attendees and go straight to the speakers.
- 4 (07:32) **The Low-Effort Happy Hour Strategy** - Avni explains how she built her early network by hosting tiny, informal happy hours with almost no effort.
- 5 (09:33) **The "Two Lost Girlies" Icebreaker** - Avni describes her go-to tactic for overcoming networking anxiety in any room.
- 6 (10:57) **The 30-Second Screenshot Strategy for a $40K Raise** - Avni reveals the lazy, accidental tactic that got her a massive raise at a corporate job.
- 7 (13:25) **Dealing with Family and Friends Who Doubt Your Path** - Avni explains how she ignored external voices telling her to stay on a conventional career track.
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Show Notes
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Most networking advice stops at "put yourself out there." Avni Barman has an actual system: cold messages fired off before she's brushed her teeth, and a Thursday wine bar reservation that turns two contacts into ten. She walks Jay Schwedelson through the daily habits that built a community of hundreds of thousands of women, plus the lazy thirty-second thing she started doing at a job she was trying to get fired from.
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Follow Avni on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok, where she shares free networking guides and conference bibles at beacons.ai/avni_barman. Lis
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