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How to write cold emails to investors
- eprusako 5y agoProofread is a true skill. xD
- siruva07 5y agoHow 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 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.
- fnord77 5y agoso how do you get the word out? And how do you make your product enticing enough to be chased?
- aerostable_slug 5y agoThere 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.
- d_silin 5y agoTo answer the second question: get revenue with a good growth.
- newstandard 5y agoTo the second question: build something that a specific set of people love
- tnolet 5y agoCustomers / users and sales.
- aaro 5y agoChoose your channel – whether that's Twitter, LinkedIn, Indie Hackers, etc – and double down on that
- Cilvic 5y agounrelated but https://www.makespace.com/ 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 5y agoThe TLD without the www works fine: https://makespace.com https://makespace.com. Obviously something they should fix.
- adventured 5y agoGotta drop the www off of it.
- brk 5y agoThis 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.
- gumby 5y agoWe are doing an enterprise startup and as we call people in our network to see if they could use it, a few have called VC buddies and said, "Hey we're seriously looking at this product, it's really cool and we know these guys too. They haven't raised any money yet so you should look at them". This has cause us to accelerate our pitch-deck-writing. Lest you think this is some kind of humblebrag, this hasn't turned into any investment yet. Just giving a scenario under which it could work. It's in these enterprise folks' interest for us to have investment as it reduces their risk in adopting our product.
- carpedimebagjoe 5y agoSales cure all.
- unnouinceput 5y ago150MM? That's a trillion, yes?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mark-wagner 5y agoIn this case "M" is a Roman numeral meaning 1000. So "MM"is one thousand thousands, or one million.
- joshu 5y agoi 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 5y agoHave you ever invested after receiving a cold pitch?
- joshu 5y agoyes. also, a bunch of times cold pitches i've ignored went on to do huge things.
- carpedimebagjoe 5y agoSpaghetti: wall / money: bonfire; occasionally: winning lotto ticket makes the IRR for the fund/angel. Don't throw out the winning lotto ticket. Oh well. ;-)
- ecesena 5y ago> funds raised so far Can it be $0, or do you expect cold reaching only after raising initial funds?
- joshu 5y agoyes, i just mean “current state of fundraising, if any”
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aerosmile 5y agoI 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 5y agoYC 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 5y agoIt'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.
- d_silin 5y agoThe 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.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoBoth 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”.