[HN Gopher] How to write cold emails to investors
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How to write cold emails to investors
Author : timosarkka
Score : 122 points
Date : 2021-04-29 15:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.flowrite.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.flowrite.com)
| joshu wrote:
| 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.
| ecesena wrote:
| > funds raised so far
|
| Can it be $0, or do you expect cold reaching only after raising
| initial funds?
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Have you ever invested after receiving a cold pitch?
| joshu wrote:
| yes. also, a bunch of times cold pitches i've ignored went on
| to do huge things.
| carpedimebagjoe wrote:
| Spaghetti: wall / money: bonfire; occasionally: winning
| lotto ticket makes the IRR for the fund/angel.
|
| Don't throw out the winning lotto ticket. Oh well. ;-)
| aerosmile wrote:
| 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.
| d_silin wrote:
| 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.
| oncethere wrote:
| 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.
| carpedimebagjoe wrote:
| It's like getting a HBS MBA. Sure, once you have it, it's
| easy social proof.
|
| YC gives up equity. If you don't have any prior experience,
| it's good, but not for experienced enterprise founders in b2b
| saas startups. The latter should make demo videos and blog
| about their progress once they've exited stealth. While in
| stealth, they need to approach alpha/beta users, who may well
| invest and/or m&a.
| siruva07 wrote:
| 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.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| 150MM? That's a trillion, yes?
| [deleted]
| fnord77 wrote:
| so how do you get the word out? And how do you make your
| product enticing enough to be chased?
| newstandard wrote:
| To the second question: build something that a specific set
| of people love
| d_silin wrote:
| To answer the second question: get revenue with a good
| growth.
| aaro wrote:
| Choose your channel - whether that's Twitter, LinkedIn, Indie
| Hackers, etc - and double down on that
| tnolet wrote:
| Customers / users and sales.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| There are plenty of startup pitch/demo events in the major
| markets. I imagine they've all gone virtual now, so no need
| to hop a flight to SF (or wherever) to get your few minutes
| on stage during open mike night.
| Cilvic wrote:
| 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==
| aerosmile wrote:
| The TLD without the www works fine: https://makespace.com.
| Obviously something they should fix.
| adventured wrote:
| Gotta drop the www off of it.
| brk wrote:
| 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.
| carpedimebagjoe wrote:
| _Sales cure all._
| eprusako wrote:
| Proofread is a true skill. xD
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-04-29 23:02 UTC)