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One of the most common questions we receive looks something like this:
I have applied to many startups but am not getting a lot of responses. I feel like I am qualified. What am I doing wrong?
The short answer is that you are probably not doing anything “wrong.” The market is just competitive. Lots of people are applying for the same roles. And AI tools are spamming recruiter inboxes with resumes and cover letters. That means that when a hot startup posts a new role, they often receive hundreds of applicants (sometimes even thousands!).
So yes, it’s hard to stand out.
But that does not mean it’s impossible.
Below I wrote a few strategies you can use (and I’ve personally seen used successfully many times) to get more responses. Hope it helps!
The best way to set yourself up for success is to take a few minutes practicing empathy: think about the person receiving your application. For the sake of this example, let’s imagine the person on the other end is a hiring manager at a Series B startup. Let’s call them Alex.
What is Alex doing? Alex is sifting through a load of applicants trying to figure out who could be a great fit for the company. Because their roles were recently featured on Next Play (yes email us hi@nextplay.so if you’re hiring), there are 100s of applications to sift through. Most applicants look the same. There’s the occasional 3000 word cover letter, but Alex does not really have time to read that. And he also doesn’t have time to respond to the few dozen cold emails that all sound generic and look like AI-slop. He clicks on LinkedIn profiles. Reads quickly. And so on. Alex sifts through the applications 1x1 trying to pull out people with relevant experiences to see if they…potentially…could bring value to the company.
Now that you’ve thought about Alex a bit, hopefully you’re starting to get the picture. Alex wants to see who in his pile of candidates will add value to the company…but it’s hard! It’s hard to decipher a LinkedIn profile to see if this person will actually be useful. It’s hard to know if a resume will translate into results.
At the same time, it’s not hard to know if the candidate is just generically applying and does not really care about this specific position. It’s not hard to know if someone is just copying and pasting the same outreach over and over.
From the above quick analysis, I think two useful lessons emerge:
Make it a lot easier for hiring managers to understand that you can add value to a company
Show that you care about this specific company and why, instead of just sharing a generic template
Make it a lot easier for hiring managers to understand that you can add value to a company
I have mentioned it before but if you want to help hiring managers understand that you can add value, simply SHOW not tell. Start adding value. You don’t need to be hired to add value. This will make it a lot easier for them to say yes:
Here are some quick practical examples (all of which can likely be executed in 15-30 minutes):
Daniel from Blackbird Labs is hiring for 20+ roles including business development representatives. They are building a rewards platform for restaurants.
What you could do: Go to three restaurants over the course of the week—ask if you can conduct a 5 user interview with their manager where you learn about how they think about rewards platforms. Take notes and send to the hiring manager.
Steve from Noto is hiring a founding biz ops and implementations lead. They are building software for lesson based businesses. Apply here. (NYC)
What you could do: Take a lesson based course and take notes on what felt good or bad about the experience.
Max from Gumloop just raised a $50m round to scale their AI agent development platform. They are hiring across sales and marketing.
What you could do: Go on LinkedIn to find 10 people who could be great candidates for the company. Write out why you think they’d be a great fit and send them to the hiring manager.
Arash from Puzzle is hiring a customer success lead. They are building an ai-native accounting platform, and have thousands of startups as customers.
What you could do: Go to the latest YC batch website and find 3 startups and see if you can learn about their current accounting stack. Hop on a call and take notes. Share your learnings with the Puzzle team.
Max from Legora just raised a $550m round to scale their AI platform for the legal industry. They are hiring across every department: customer success, sales, engineering, and more.
What you could do: The legal tech space is heating up. Write an essay discussing the different strategies that different startups are employing and then share this with the hiring manager.
Tara from Strange VC is hiring a fractional chief of staff.
What you could do: Find 5 interesting founders and startups on Twitter and share this alongside reasons you think they are interesting.
Hopefully you are starting to get the idea.
There’s a lot more you can do:
Give feedback on their careers page
Build a mini-site advertising one of their features
Analyze their competition
Etc.
The general message is this: instead of saying you could add value…just go add value! You’ll of course want to limit how much time you spend on each application (because you’ll probably need to do 10+ of these) but, especially in the beginning, don’t feel bad if it takes you a bit of time. Learning to add value quickly, with limited context, is a skill you can develop (and it can also be fun!).
Show that you care about this specific company and why, instead of just sharing a generic template
Another counter-intuitive thing you can do to stand out is to send a very human email. Words are easier than ever to mass produce. What’s hard is being concise and clear in your communication, and that can come through in a cold e-mail.
Here’s some more thoughts we wrote on cold emails.
A key ingredient we’d add is making the email personal.
Show you’ve done your work. Look up the hiring manager. Do they have a personal blog? Do they post on LinkedIn? Find something interesting and real and include it in the email. That’s “proof” that you’re not a bot or some AI—you’re actually taking the time to write and send your email.
If you follow the above ideas, I can all-but-guarantee you’ll get more responses from startups.
Here are some startups I recommend you try it with:
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions (hi@nextplay.so).
Really good ideas here.