I wonder how you word your cold emails so that people bother to respond. Do you offer an hourly rate upfront in the first email? Thing is as someone who’s quite frequently on the receiving end of cold emails, I respond to companies looking for contracting/consulting because I know they probably have an at least passable rate in mind, whereas the few times I responded to individuals offering to pay for mentoring or feature development in my open source projects, after a few back and forth I realized they expected to pay one to two orders of magnitudes less than what I normally charge (e.g. $50 for about a week’s work, true story), it’s frankly embarrassing, so now I no longer respond to this sort of individual requests.