I think the biggest benefit of cold emails is making friends. Not sales, investment or any immediate material benefit, but the ability to initiate and develop long-term, fruitful relationships with people all over the world. If you do this a lot, you will inevitably find yourself benefitting materially from it: a job, investment, internship, sales, referrals. But you should almost always start with the mentality that cold emails are for unexpected and far-reaching benefits rather than something more short-term. Great opportunities most often come from high-trust relationships.
Discriminate
You should not try to reach everybody. There are billions of people on the internet. There are millions of people working in tech. You don’t need to talk to all of them.
A small number of prominent people get lots of emails: successful founders, investors, people with active internet presences. As Pavit suggests, there are millions of interesting people who don’t get any cold emails, perhaps any emails at all: professors, engineers, retired experts, politicians. You are more likely to hear back from these people!
Google aggressively to find people working in areas related to your interests. Find people who write about it, post demos of their work, have light-hearted projects. Email those people.
Theo emphasizes: Don’t just email CEOs and founders. CEOs are unusually busy and probably at a different life stage to you, which makes it hard to develop a friendship. Sometimes, they might not even be a domain expert - they often have more vision and bias to action than expertise! Non-founders that are deeply passionate about their work are more often 'available' as a learning buddy or mentor of some sort. If you're looking for friends on the internet, look for people who can invest as much as you in the relationship.
Founders and CEOs are hard to replace in at least two roles: 1) Getting a job - they don't need to ask anybody else for permission to hire you and 2) getting a shot of inspiration - founders are often bubbling over with ideas and unsolved problems, and they'll sometimes share them with you + encourage you to solve them.
Be politely persistent
Expect to send many cold emails and get no responses. Expect to send brief follow-up emails and get an occasional response from this: “Hey Tom, just checking if you had a chance to respond here. Thanks, Tim.”
People who don’t respond don’t hate you. They just didn’t have time to prioritize it. Think about it from a successful CEO’s point of view: you have your own demanding job, family, kids, people to manage, investors to pitch, and now you get an email from an earnest kid asking for your advice. You probably really want to give them some advice but haven’t made time to do it.
Why are you emailing people?
Specify for yourself why you’re reaching out to people. For me, I most often wrote cold emails because I was earnestly interested in someone's work and wanted to learn more. It seemed like they'd be interesting to talk to. I have sent many other cold emails motivated by more commercial or transactional ends! You might be reaching out in order to:
- Expand your horizons.
- Find a cofounder, collaborators, a job or an internship.
- Get help with a specific aspect of a project.
- Sales for your product.
- Investment, whether VC or angel.
One, two and five are actually all the same thing: you are trying to build trust with somebody and get them to agree that you are interesting and worth supporting / working with somehow. Even investors! Investors are much more evaluating “Is this person unusual and ambitious and talented?” rather than “If I put $1 into the business, do I get $10 out?”
To get people to engage, you need them to find something interesting or unusual about you. Some combination of what you’re working on, what you want to do, what you have done. Most often, it is actually about how you relate to your work. What are the reasons you work on the products and projects you work on? It's easy not to realize this, especially if you're young. Just being deeply earnest, curious and passionate about a topic is reason enough for somebody to talk to you - but you have to demonstrate that somehow.
Most people can’t articulate this, so they sound like a generic striver working on generic striver projects, and thus they don’t stand out. Try to articulate what you find specifically interesting about your projects, and about the things done by the people you’re reaching out to.
Bad emails look thoughtless and generic. They don’t say anything specific about you, anything specific to the recipient, or have a specific ask.
Include something specific about yourself
Bad: “I’m a CS student in Dublin interested in startups.” Replace Dublin with another city and it could be hundreds of thousands of people.
Good: “I’m a hardware engineer with a specific interest in mechanical gadgets for consumers. I’ve designed and built from scratch a suite of automatic systems [link to demo / pics] for taking care of my pets.”
Include something specific about the recipient
Bad: “I came across your work on <Company name> and thought it was fascinating. The design is really neat.” ... This could be about any hardware company.
Good: “The gizmo you built is awesome. I tried it out and it worked well on my own fidget spinners. Do you think it works with heavy fidget spinners? The bearings seem a little light.”
Make a specific ask
Bad: “Would love to hear more about your work.” ... “would love to” + generic request is slop-coded and low-effort.
Good: “I’m trying to learn more about taking a prototype into production and turning it into a company / product. I’d love to ask you about the DFM process, managing costs and your supply chain, and just see it in action. If you have 20 mins I’d be grateful for the chance to ask about all this!”
Write in your own voice
Good cold emails are conversational and in your own voice. You can be whimsical, niche and unusual. That is actually better than polished / pro / neutral text. I realize there is a fine line here for people who speak English as a second language.
Good emails look like many things, but they are often:
- Short: one to six lines, usually two or three paragraphs of one or two sentences.
- To the point: don’t explain or excuse yourself.
- Use links.
- Have a specific ask. It can be to meet up, to talk online, or just some questions over email that you’re interested in. Don’t include too many! One to three is enough.
Will Donnelly suggests:
"A trick I’ve found useful is to think about the busiest I've been in recent memory & how I would react if someone sent me the email. I know for a fact that something overly formal & formatted would likely get a very very light skim and an archive, but something more informal (and therefore novel) would be more likely to net my attention. It’s difficult to think about how someone with 100 staff & 3 kids is going to be able to have the time for you, it’s much easier to think about how you'd have time for someone else when you are at your busiest. We've all got the same 24hrs in the day."
We Irish people try to avoid saying straight out what we want, who we are and why we’re good. Don’t do that. Don’t beat around the bush. Tell them you are an engineer, won a big competition, built something impressive.
Your copy does not need to be elegant or graceful. Better to be earnest and yourself than fake professional and slick. This applies to everything on the internet, for what it’s worth.
Do not use AI for writing cold outreach. It makes your emails sound the same as everyone else. It also removes the opportunity for you to articulate for yourself what is interesting about you and what is interesting about your recipient.
An example
From John Denny, who notes: “I'd reword the opening paragraph, if something I'd worked on was explicitly up the alley of the person I'm trying to chat to. The closing sentence was almost always unique to each recipient”.
Hi Ben,
I’m John, a 19-year-old engineering student from Ireland. I’ve built AI tools for anti-phishing, a robot dog, a car park management robot, and written software that ran on the ISS.I’ll be in SF from May 8th to 18th, and I’d love to grab 15 minutes of your time if you're available. It would be great to hear more about what you're working on. Your designs are sick, especially the AR & Robotics ones. Let me know if it'd suit!
Many Thanks,
John Denny
A counterexample
The cold emails in this collection appear to be optimized for cold sales. Note the generic language, overly salesy attitude, and the low-effort compliment and template / structure.