"They didn't reply — should I assume they're not interested?"

Everyone says no reply means no. Myth.

For cold DMs, silence usually means they never saw it — message requests on most platforms hide behind a tab creators open once a month. You're reading rejection into what's actually a routing problem. The interested-but-unseen pile is bigger than the seen-and-declined pile.

It's not that they passed, it's that the platform buried you. That's exactly why one well-timed follow-up converts — not because you nagged them into it, but because it surfaced.