How to write cold emails to investors

[siruva07]

How not to write cold emails to investors -- lessons from a serial founder whose companies have raised $150MM+.

TL;DR Don't chase. Be chased.

1. Don't write cold emails to investors. You automatically give the investor the upper hand by chasing them. It's counter intuitive, but it comes off as desperate. VCs write checks into companies that they have a fear of missing out, or that other VCs are backing, not those that end up in their inbox (e.g. Sacca & Pinterest: https://twitter.com/sacca/status/620344394189647872?lang=en)

2. Take the time that you would have spent emailing investors and build product. Get traction.

3. Get investors to email you.

[brk]

This works when your product is something that is B2C or a very B2B direct-sale/SaaS kind of thing. It does not work as well, IME, when you are selling something more enterprise-y or selling through a channel, where the social media and viral marketing approaches basically do not work.

[Cilvic]

unrelated but https://www.makespace.com/ returns 502 for me

502 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. The Lambda function returned an invalid entry in the headers object: The header must have a value field. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation.

Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront) Request ID: DFzajQj3Qn2NiP4mPERWYWVljBFZz7W3GtFt8maH2FaBgpyaDjY-YA==

[fnord77]

so how do you get the word out? And how do you make your product enticing enough to be chased?

[unnouinceput]

150MM? That's a trillion, yes?

[carpedimebagjoe]

Sales cure all.

[joshu]

i get a lot of cold pitches.

1. don’t play coy. lots of people don’t actually say what they are doing.

2. guess the next questions and reply to them. “can i see your deck?” often comes next, so attach the deck. explain your current state of traction. funds raised so far. link to demo. screenshots.

3. if you cut and paste, make sure you aren’t changing fonts etc.

4. don’t use bulk emailer or anything that adds clicktracking. if you are mass emailing, i can tell.

5. don’t use whatever investor database that everyone else does. about 1/3rd of the stuff i guess lists “because of your investments in X, Y and Z...” where x,y,z are always the same three obscure companies that happened to be at the top of my crunchbase profile at one point.

[1cvmask]

Have you ever invested after receiving a cold pitch?

[ecesena]

> funds raised so far

Can it be $0, or do you expect cold reaching only after raising initial funds?

[aerosmile]

I like the "don't chase, be chased" recommendation below. But when it comes to how to achieve that, the "get traction" recommendation could have been expanded on just a bit more. So let me try to offer a very similar but slightly modified recommendation: get into YC.

How is "get traction" different from "get into YC"? Instacart and Airbnb will give you a clue. Neither had material traction when they applied to YC, and what worked for them is that their business models and founders made up for that. Once you're in, you still have to execute, but you won't be writing any cold emails to investors anymore.

[oncethere]

YC is probably the easiest way to get VCs to notice you. But given how selective it is, that could be tougher than traction.

Maybe throwing out a third then -- get people in your network to introduce you to VCs. Also hard, but startups just aren't easy I guess.

[halfmatthalfcat]

Both of these recommendations are completely useless to the average entrepreneur.

“Don’t chase, be chased” assumes you have the capital or team to execute. Many startups don’t have both and most successful startups require both. Investment alleviates the former to then help solve the latter.

“Get into YC” is hysterical advice because the % of companies who are accepted into YC is around ~2%. One does not simply “get into YC”.

[d_silin]

The problem with YC is they get so many applications that they can't accept even all of the really good ones.

So my advice, get accepted into any startup accelerator/business incubator. That alone helps with traction with VCs.