Putting aside all the sleazy parts for a moment, there is some good advice on actually writing a cold outreach email. But this part seems mistaken, or at least would be if I were your outreach target:
> My best rule for writing good subject lines is that they feel like they could be the subject lines of an internal email—this helps them feel natural in the inbox. For example, “Quick question”, or “Idea for better outbound” are two casual, natural-feeling subject lines.
I immediately delete any email with a subject line like “quick question”. It does not give me any reason to think I will get any value from it, and what are the chances I will care about answering whatever the question turns out to be? I’m not sitting around waiting to answer questions from strangers, so an email subject line has to tell me what I’m being offered for me to invest that time. In fact “quick question” is already asking me for something (“answer my question”) which just seems unreasonable from an unsolicited email.
I somehow ended up on the spam list for the last election (funny, having never set my feet in the US) and it was painfully obvious that the goal of those headlines were to make people click them, thinking that it was a work e-mail.
This is for startups who are looking for that one in a hundred person hungry for their solution. Enterprises who have already scaled use an entirely different cook book to get the attention of a VP like yourself. A well-targeted and personalized email has a much better response rate for enterprises with a proven solution and well known brand.
I'm in the position of needing to do a lot of outreach to find our first customers. If this is actually what I have to do, I refuse. I'm sure there's some good advice in here, but most of it seems gross. I don't want to send "Personalized Outbound at Scale".
You're just communicating your offering directly to people that may be interested. I don't see why that's gross. It's not deceptive or manipulative. There's a cost to search and sometimes targeted offerings that come directly can be very helpful.
Direct outreach is pretty much the only way to get your initial customers. If you have warm connections, use those, sure. But those can be a false signal as warm connections tend to talk to you or feign interest just to be nice. A cold contact owes you nothing, so if they do take the meeting or engage in your product, that's a lot stronger signal.
Anyone have a business they built without using direct cold outreach? Would love to hear alternatives
> You're just communicating your offering directly to people that may be interested.
I have a brimming spam folder full of people who are “just communicating their offering directly to people who may be interested.”
Sometimes these people are apparently elderly or alzheimers sufferers who don't have the cognitive ability to distinguish spam from official sources, and are easily exploitable.
I imagine the worthless specimens sending these emails have intricately woven strands of faecal material in their cell nuclei instead of DNA.
I'm not opposed to cold outreach, we've done that plenty, though without much success. I'm opposed at the scale where I need to have "warming tools" for my email address. It's very possible that it makes me a bad founder, though.
Someone (a mark?) getting through the filtering (sales?) funnel's first stage is a strong signal for what? That someone period is interested in your product/service you're offering? Or that this particular person, the one who reaches the second stage of the funnel, is a possible lead (or exactly a lead)? Likely the latter.
Because you can skip the scientific/investigative validation of the hypothesis that there is someone that wants what you offer/sell/provide. That is, you should assume that there is someone out there (a small number of people at least, really) that wants to pay you for what you provide. I know this goes against common startup wisdom. But there's a massive cold outreach campaign type that needs to function and it needs to function with some confident assumptions within its technological engineering implementation. I guess.
I'm just speculating on some theoretical startup founding that doesn't suck.
Cold emailing isn't very popular here, and in general I don't know anyone who likes receiving cold email. I don't think the problem is cold emailing, but the way it's done. Most cold email is irrelevant and not helpful.
Here's an example taken from this handbook:
> Hey Matt —-
> Friend of mine told me about Za-zu last week. Congrats on the recent raise.
> Random, but noticed you've got a few jobs open for SDRs.
> Reason I'm reaching out is I run a cold outbound agency. We can send at 17x the volume of a typical SDR, and our emails are usually twice as effective. Have generated $1B in pipeline for companies like Angellist.
> Worth a chat this week?
> - Person Who Writes Better Emails
I actually get emails like these all the time and I mark them as spam. Because they're spam.
Instead of sending me this email, imagine instead I received some actual leads from this agency in the first email. Like just 3 companies that are a very qualified match:
> Hey Matt —-
> Friend of mine told me about Za-zu last week. Congrats on the recent raise.
> Random, but noticed you've got a few jobs open for SDRs.
> Here's 3 qualified leads you might be interested in:
> Company 1 and why it's qualified
> Company 2 and why it's qualified
> Company 3 and why it's qualified
> Those leads have expressed interest in your service. I run a cold outbound agency. Have generated $1B in pipeline for companies like Angellist. Worth a chat this week?
Now that's helpful. I actually know this company could provide some value. Maybe I'll actually respond because I want some more.
Being relevant and very helpful is really hard to do at scale. You have to actually do some work to learn about the company, the person, and provide something tangible that's valuable. For some products/services, it might be possible to do at scale. Until then, it's really just spam by a different name.
out of curiosity, how do you feel about cold emails asking for a conversation?
I am currently looking for a new job (potentially in a new industry), so I'm doing cold outreach to people whose experience seems relevant and/or interesting, asking for advice, and usually a phone call in which I can pick their brain
would you also view my emails as spam? if not, would you bother replying?
The example email presumes the recipient who's getting it actually needs the service. I'd be happy if someone did free work for me. If you don't need the service, then yes it's irrelevant either way and effectively spam.
But maybe there's some other reason you think the free work or email is spam?
There was a startup about a decade ago when crypto was just kind of becoming a mainstream-ish thing, where if someone emailed you, it would intercept it if it wasn’t on your contact list, and the app would automatically ask them for a bitcoin bribe to have you actually get the email to land in your inbox.
I wonder weekly whatever happened to that company. I wish it took off.
I get 100+ emails like this “handbook” a day and discard all of them. Want my attention? Spend your ad dollars on it, literally.
Proof of work as a way of making spam expensive was literally one of the suggested applications of hashcash, the first proof-of-work scheme (no ledger yet), at the time of its announcement in 1997[1].
Next year: Hashcash consumes a fifth of the energy in the world. Wonder if malware in that timeline would steal computing from victims to spam other victims.
You're referring to Balaji Srinivasan's startup, Earn, right? It was acquired by Coinbase and became Coinbase Earn, at which point Balaji became Coinbase's CTO, around 2018. I believe it's since been shut down.
> In September 2024, Srinivasan started The Network School, a school for people interested in developing "network nations" and "decentralized countries." Located in Forest City, Johor, Malaysia, the school had an initial enrollment of 150. Students are required to have an admiration of “Western values,” to believe Bitcoin is the successor to the US Federal Reserve, and to trust AI over human courts and judges.[21]
From Wikipedia. Quite interesting. Will make sure to visit next time am in Malaysia.
I'm so sad that this post is illustrated with stardew valley screenshots. I imagine this could be exactly the type of pain the protagonist lives everyday in the intro...
Line between cold calling vs telemarking, or cold email vs SPAM.
As far as what the line is, it's any unwanted unsolicited contact, as defined by the recipient, not by the party initiating the call or sending the email.
IE, there's no universal set of checkboxes that a marketer can follow that magically make unwanted unsolicited email / phone calls not SPAM.
> But it's good to know: Hopefully SPAM filters start looking for 3xx redirects and blocking all email that comes from a domain with a 3xx redirect.
I believe some already do. As a consequence, instead of doing redirects, the recommendation is now to use a landing page on the domains. I assume next the spam filters will start checking the quality of content of the domains, if they don't already. It's a never ending game of cat and mouse.
CFO's perspective: wanna sell me something, anything? you're out.
However well crafted your email is, you're an unacceptable distraction from the priorities that the company has set, the achievement of which is materialized by projects of varying size and scope. Upon starting any project of any size, people do due diligence: they assess what exactly it is they are looking for, and then research the market for it. For macro-projects, consultants may be hired to help with the process, which may lead to a proper tender.
Either way, the company contacts you, not the other way round.
I don't know what makes you say that. Requiring a bit of market research from project proponents does not mean excluding anything lightweight or just new. What you don't want is some company being contracted because it talked to you first by whatever channel rather than as a result of some reasoned assessment.
Its a law in human network communications theory [1] that any channel will degrade to the point of being usable if there are no penalties to pay when abusing it.
There are downsides to indiscriminately mailing, posting etc. peoples inboxes (e.g. reputational damage), but this applies to entities that already have a reputation to worry about.
For entities operating in "do or die mode" or are very short-termist / opportunistic even very low success rates may be rational.
Readit News
> My best rule for writing good subject lines is that they feel like they could be the subject lines of an internal email—this helps them feel natural in the inbox. For example, “Quick question”, or “Idea for better outbound” are two casual, natural-feeling subject lines.
I immediately delete any email with a subject line like “quick question”. It does not give me any reason to think I will get any value from it, and what are the chances I will care about answering whatever the question turns out to be? I’m not sitting around waiting to answer questions from strangers, so an email subject line has to tell me what I’m being offered for me to invest that time. In fact “quick question” is already asking me for something (“answer my question”) which just seems unreasonable from an unsolicited email.
And the only people using my first initial as my first name are people who scraped Linked-In.
> Hi John!
> Can you send me X for the Y project?
In particular when the people in the cc (or bcc :) ) don't have the info about X but is interested in Y.
(I use also "Hi everyone!" when I want to make it super clear that the email has been sent to a lot of persons.)
Deleted Comment
So you’re not a subject matter expert for important business procedures or technologies?
Direct outreach is pretty much the only way to get your initial customers. If you have warm connections, use those, sure. But those can be a false signal as warm connections tend to talk to you or feign interest just to be nice. A cold contact owes you nothing, so if they do take the meeting or engage in your product, that's a lot stronger signal.
Anyone have a business they built without using direct cold outreach? Would love to hear alternatives
I have a brimming spam folder full of people who are “just communicating their offering directly to people who may be interested.”
Sometimes these people are apparently elderly or alzheimers sufferers who don't have the cognitive ability to distinguish spam from official sources, and are easily exploitable.
I imagine the worthless specimens sending these emails have intricately woven strands of faecal material in their cell nuclei instead of DNA.
Deleted Comment
Because you can skip the scientific/investigative validation of the hypothesis that there is someone that wants what you offer/sell/provide. That is, you should assume that there is someone out there (a small number of people at least, really) that wants to pay you for what you provide. I know this goes against common startup wisdom. But there's a massive cold outreach campaign type that needs to function and it needs to function with some confident assumptions within its technological engineering implementation. I guess.
I'm just speculating on some theoretical startup founding that doesn't suck.
Deleted Comment
Here's an example taken from this handbook:
> Hey Matt —-
> Friend of mine told me about Za-zu last week. Congrats on the recent raise.
> Random, but noticed you've got a few jobs open for SDRs.
> Reason I'm reaching out is I run a cold outbound agency. We can send at 17x the volume of a typical SDR, and our emails are usually twice as effective. Have generated $1B in pipeline for companies like Angellist.
> Worth a chat this week?
> - Person Who Writes Better Emails
I actually get emails like these all the time and I mark them as spam. Because they're spam.
Instead of sending me this email, imagine instead I received some actual leads from this agency in the first email. Like just 3 companies that are a very qualified match:
> Hey Matt —-
> Friend of mine told me about Za-zu last week. Congrats on the recent raise.
> Random, but noticed you've got a few jobs open for SDRs.
> Here's 3 qualified leads you might be interested in:
> Company 1 and why it's qualified
> Company 2 and why it's qualified
> Company 3 and why it's qualified
> Those leads have expressed interest in your service. I run a cold outbound agency. Have generated $1B in pipeline for companies like Angellist. Worth a chat this week?
Now that's helpful. I actually know this company could provide some value. Maybe I'll actually respond because I want some more.
Being relevant and very helpful is really hard to do at scale. You have to actually do some work to learn about the company, the person, and provide something tangible that's valuable. For some products/services, it might be possible to do at scale. Until then, it's really just spam by a different name.
I am currently looking for a new job (potentially in a new industry), so I'm doing cold outreach to people whose experience seems relevant and/or interesting, asking for advice, and usually a phone call in which I can pick their brain
would you also view my emails as spam? if not, would you bother replying?
Dead Comment
I enjoy submitting cold eMail to SpamCop.
But beyond that, no.
But maybe there's some other reason you think the free work or email is spam?
I wonder weekly whatever happened to that company. I wish it took off.
I get 100+ emails like this “handbook” a day and discard all of them. Want my attention? Spend your ad dollars on it, literally.
[1] http://www.hashcash.org/papers/announce.txt
From Wikipedia. Quite interesting. Will make sure to visit next time am in Malaysia.
They never sent anything at all.
In this case, the multi-domain & multi email address technique puts this clearly on the SPAM side of the line.
But it's good to know: Hopefully SPAM filters start looking for 3xx redirects and blocking all email that comes from a domain with a 3xx redirect.
To me those terms are synonymous and both mean unsolicited targeted advertising.
If you are blasting out emails knowing most will be ignored, in the hopes that one lands in the right inbox, that’s bad.
If everyone did the same, no one would ever find the useful opportunities among the sea of irrelevant trash.
If you are sending cold emails to people you know will be interested, that’s fine.
There is no upper bound on how many actually useful opportunities people are willing to receive.
As far as what the line is, it's any unwanted unsolicited contact, as defined by the recipient, not by the party initiating the call or sending the email.
IE, there's no universal set of checkboxes that a marketer can follow that magically make unwanted unsolicited email / phone calls not SPAM.
I believe some already do. As a consequence, instead of doing redirects, the recommendation is now to use a landing page on the domains. I assume next the spam filters will start checking the quality of content of the domains, if they don't already. It's a never ending game of cat and mouse.
However well crafted your email is, you're an unacceptable distraction from the priorities that the company has set, the achievement of which is materialized by projects of varying size and scope. Upon starting any project of any size, people do due diligence: they assess what exactly it is they are looking for, and then research the market for it. For macro-projects, consultants may be hired to help with the process, which may lead to a proper tender.
Either way, the company contacts you, not the other way round.
There are downsides to indiscriminately mailing, posting etc. peoples inboxes (e.g. reputational damage), but this applies to entities that already have a reputation to worry about.
For entities operating in "do or die mode" or are very short-termist / opportunistic even very low success rates may be rational.
[1] just made this up