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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 c
by siruva07 5y ago
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 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.