...it is free? It costs me nothing to send out an email.
So is “how much could I earn in the same amount of time if I did something else?”
It may not be strictly direct but it sets bounds around the value of your time.
You could do cold outreach, or you could put yourself out on Uber or task rabbit and then put that money towards an ad campaign.
...it also presumes that any of that is actually realistic; I wonder what TaskRabbit's ToS is like re: confidentiality, for example.
"Hey TaskRabbit, pls develop my marketing strategy for my stealth startup, thanks!"
I wasn’t suggesting to use taskrabbit for marketing strategy. I was suggesting you look at the taskrabbit rate for a handyman and consider that something like the price floor for your hourly rate. That or Uber driving. Can you net $20/hr driving Uber? Ok, then you can drive Uber for 7 hours and then spend 2hr allocating that money to google ads. That’s the lower bound alternative to doing cold outreach.
You don’t need high accuracy to set bounds, and I don’t see how managing people is a factor.
It seems to me like the reasons you gave were based on your misunderstanding of the idea.
Maybe it is an abjectly terrible way to estimate the value of your time. Estimating the cost to send an email to be zero is worse.
What you'll find is that the "cost" reference is to a payment made, not to an estimation of time value. In this sense, "sending an email" does cost $0.00, as you can do it without paying, for example, Google.
Of course the calculations if someone's throwing enough money at you that you can throw away 1.5m on marketing without results.
If you want someone else to do it, it costs you money.
Managing ad campaign takes time too.