Sending Cold Emails to Founders
Tips, tricks, and what has worked best for me.
A big part of being a junior investor is prospecting for new opportunities. You likely have multiple sources of deal flow coming into your pipeline, but cold-outbound is one of those tried & true methods that you should certainly invest time into.
Cold outbound has been the source of several deals I’ve put forward, and it’s probably my favorite sourcing strategy. But entrepreneurs (especially the best ones) get a ton of horrible cold emails. From VCs, salespeople, etc. It takes a lot to stand out, especially when capital is often seen as a commodity. So let’s dive in.
I believe a great cold email requires three things:
The introduction
Relevance to the founder
Easy next steps
The Introduction
I do my best to keep it simple. The only thing I want to communicate is who I am + who I work for. Yes, people can figure that out via your email signature but it feels more natural to open with an introduction. Let’s look at an example email introduction below:
Hi Founder,
I hope all is well. I'm Kory, an Associate with Concrete Ventures here in Halifax.
That’s it. In one line, the entrepreneur knows who I am, the fund I’m with, and where I rank within the fund (associate). We ended up leading the seed round for this company about a year later - simple works.
Relevance To the Founder
You only get 3-5 sentences to really stand out so it’s important to be thoughtful about what you say here.
The more research you do up-front, the less “cold” your email will sound. Founders appreciate it when someone takes an interest in their business, rather than just asking for time or a deck right away. Below are a few things I’ll do before reaching out:
Review the founder’s LinkedIn/Twitter profile.
Go through their website. Read the “about” page, and check out the product page.
Watch their product video or download the app.
Read any PR or news that came out about the company.
Read their app store reviews & comments on company social profiles.
While most of what you find during this research phase won’t make it into the email itself, it helps give you context with respect to the founder(s), the company, and how they might be doing. All of which is helpful when drafting an email.
Let’s take a look at a different example and the founder’s response:
My email (in part):
Hi Founder,
I'm with Concrete Ventures, a pre-seed venture capital fund based in Halifax. I was looking into startups based in the New Brunswick ecosystem and came across Startup.
It looks like you have had some great success! High ratings in the Apple App store, over 10k members in the community Facebook group and the launch of the android app since Publication wrote their article about the business back in 2018.
The response (in part):
Hi Kory,
Nice to meet you. You’ve done your research 😉. I normally skim over these sort of emails but you got my attention.
Although this founder went on to say that they weren’t raising money - it was a valuable exchange nonetheless. I got the opportunity to ask some questions and learn more about their success.
Easy Next Steps
Lastly, you want to include some sort of CTA (call to action) in your email. What are you asking for here? Whenever I send a cold email, my goal is to get a meeting. Not a deck, or answers to some questions that come across as “I’m just seeing if this is worth my time”. My job is to answer that question before even reaching out.
Here is how I usually ask for a meeting:
“If you are open to it, I’d welcome the opportunity to learn more about you & what you are working to build. Let me know what might work best for you, or alternatively, anytime here works for me: Calendly Link.”
Now, we can argue about Calendly etiquette over on Twitter - but in my experience, most founders have no problem using a calendar link. Especially when the alternative is listing out a bunch of times.
Closing Thoughts
Cold emails should be short, simple, and to the point. As long as you make sure the email is relevant to a founder, you should have no problem getting a response. However, if I don’t get a response, I’ll typically follow up once after two days and leave it at that.
Before you send an email, use a tool like hunter.io to try and validate the address. I’ll usually message founders on LinkedIn unless I’m 100% confident my email will land. Thoughtful InMails (LinkedIn Premium feature) are a great substitute to email.
Lastly, remember that for venture-backed entrepreneurship, we operate in a market. Startup founders are looking for investors, and investors are looking for founders. Your email is already relevant based on that assumption alone. So make it shine and hit send.
Before we wrap up, I saw this tweet the other day that got me thinking:
While I agree with Harry, prospecting is an important part of the role for a junior investor. We just went through a whole newsletter on cold-outbound, after all!
So next time, we are going to discuss prospecting as a whole. We will go through the process, metrics to track, and desired outcomes.