The guide to getting a job with cold email

How to get interviews with startups

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When I sat down to write this post, my goal was simple: What could I write that would actually change people’s lives if they took what I wrote seriously? I am convinced that you may be able to change your life for the better within an hour of reading this. Normally, I glaze over when I read stuff that makes this sort of promise—but I personally have tried this, and so have many friends and strangers, and I really believe it works. My hope is that you find it helpful, too.

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Entertain a hypothetical with me: Imagine that one day, on your way home from work, you meet a guy dressed in wizard robes. Kind of like Gandalf. He tells you that he can sell you a magic spell that can get you a job interview at any company you want. For some reason, you feel like you can trust him.

So you say: Sure, but what’s the catch? (There is always a catch.)

He says: You have to read for 10 minutes, then practice the spell, and then use it.

I bet you’d say yes, right? That’s a relatively little amount of work for an unbelievably powerful skill. You would spend 10 minutes reading, and you would learn the spell, and you would get your dream job. Okay, okay, you probably see where this is all going—the magic spell is cold email. And the goal of this essay is to help you write effective cold emails that get you in touch with startups you’d like to work for.

If you are searching or may soon be searching for a job, you probably fall into one of two camps:

(i) You have not sent any cold emails yet.

(ii) You have sent some cold emails, but with little success.

If you are in the first camp, you should be sending cold emails. Short of a warm intro, they are likely the best way to get in touch with a great company you’d like to work for. If you are in the second camp, then my guess is that you may not be sending particularly effective emails.

To be extremely clear about the scope, this is not a guide for B2B sales cold emails. This is us writing to you (someone who wants to work in tech or get a new job in tech) about how to email a CEO or hiring manager at a tech startup. You may find the advice below useful for writing emails in general, but this is quite specifically a cold email guide for job seekers who want to work at startups.

This is a three-part essay. First, what to avoid. Second, an email format you can use. Third, who to email.

Once more: if you met a wizard who told you that in the next 10 minutes you could learn how to do something that may make you $100,000s and change the direction of your life…Would you say yes?

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A useful mindset

To begin, I want to quickly make sure that we are all operating from the same starting place. Here are some things I believe to be true about emailing startups.

One, you can email any company you would like to work for, no matter what. This is true even if they don’t have a job posted on their website. Even if they say they are only hiring in one specific city. Even if they say you need a specific college degree. You can email (because every company, especially startups, make exceptions).

Two, cold email works for real people to land real jobs—it’s not just a thing people like me write about.

Three, cold email is much more likely to be effective if you are competent at something valuable and have demonstrated that competency in the past.

And, finally: there is a huge chasm between an effective cold email and an ineffective cold email, and this essay is designed to help you stay on the right side of that divide.

Making your email 99 percent less bad

Perhaps more important than what you should do in a cold email is what you shouldn’t do. I think a lot of the existing cold email advice out there, like ‘send an email people want to read!’ falls flat because everyone has different definitions of what ‘an email people want to read’ is. My goal with this section is to establish some consistency; some ground rules.

Thankfully, the list of things you (generally) shouldn’t do in a cold email is pretty simple. If you can follow the list below, you can eliminate many of the reasons a founder may not reply to you. Feel free to use this list in the future, after you’ve written a cold email, to double-check you haven’t made any mistakes.

• Do not write an email more than ~200 words long. Less is more. You do not need to explain your entire life story or career history to the person you are emailing. This isn’t just a good rule because founders are busy, it’s a good rule because almost nobody wants to read an unsolicited sales letter in their email inbox from someone who they have never heard of.

• Do not use fancy words. Think you’ve removed all the buzzwords from your email? Do it again. There are layers to this. “Executed on key initiatives” might be reduced down to “drove impact”, but “drove impact” might be reduced further to “helped increase ARR by $1M in 3 months”. A good rule of thumb is to read your email out loud before you send. Ideally you’d read it to a person, but to yourself is okay too. Does it sound like you? Do you sound like a human? (It’s true that there are founders who themselves use too many fancy words, but in my experience, plain language works better even on these people. It’s just a better way to write emails.)

• Do not send an email without an ask. If you send a vague email with no specific next step, you put the burden on the reader to figure out what they are supposed to reply with. To avoid that uncomfortable situation, you should ask something. Maybe you have a specific question. Maybe you want to ask them for a meeting. I don’t know. What I do know is that there should be one specific, clear thing that you are asking the reader of your email to do.

• Do not be vague. The more layers of abstraction there are in your email, the more confusing it is for the reader. One way to add specificity is to remove buzzwords. Instead of “drove results”, say what results you helped drive. Another way is to add examples. Maybe your line that says “I work with early-stage startups” could instead say “I work with early-stage startups (like X and Y).”

• Do not be spammy or dishonest. Don’t send more than 1 or 2 follow-ups. Don’t lie about your experience. Don’t include fake personalization (the ‘I saw your post on LinkedIn!’ stuff). There’s also no need to say things like “been a fan of your company for years” if it isn’t true. It’s completely fine if you learned about them because they just raised a Series B. Be a real, honest human.

These are the minimal sufficient conditions for writing a good cold email to a company you’d like to work for. While it’s true that there are 1,000 more things that may make your cold email ineffective, using the list above helps you avoid them by default. For example: writing three big paragraphs about your life story may make your email ineffective, but the 300-word limit makes it impossible for you to do that.

Note: These are general rules and can on very rare occasions be broken. But, strictly based on the probabilities, you are probably not the person who is supposed to break them. Try sticking to the book at least to start—straying from these rules makes it easier to write a bad email.

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Quick aside: it’s easier to write better emails—to write better everything—when you have people who can give you feedback and help you improve. If you would like to get feedback on your writing (and much more), consider joining Writing Club. It’s like a run club, for writing. People in it range from founders to professional writers to software engineers, and all of them have one goal: become better at writing.

Right now, you can use the code “nextplay” for $49 off.

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An effective cold email format you can use

So now it is time to write, and for most people this is the intimidating part. To make it less scary, I’m going to share a simple format that most great job-seeking cold emails use. Lucky for you, we’re not doing B2B sales outbound en masse, which means we don’t need to A/B test 87 different email formats and personalized variables. When you email a founder because you’d like to work for them, you are basically just introducing yourself in hopefully the most useful way possible.

In your email, say:

1. Who you are.

2. Why you are reaching out.

3. Why they should care.

This sort of advice can be frustrating without real examples.

One famous email, which got a real reply from Evan Spiegel (former Snapchat CEO), is this:

“Hey, my name’s Niraj Pant.

I understand your time is valuable. I’ll only write three bullet points.

Programming since 8th grade.

Have most experience working in Java/Obj-C/Android/iOS.

Want to intern for Snapchat this summer as a high school junior.

How?”

Here is another real and successful email, lightly redacted:

“Hey Ryan - [product] is so good. Used it last week for [reason] and was impressed (especially by how good the notification selection/timing is).

Question: how are you doing on copywriting at the moment?

Asking because I write for startups.

Don't want to blast you with a wall of text so re: work background, that's mostly on the site in my email address. Happy to share a bunch of past work if it would be helpful.”

Here’s a final example, this time hypothetical but modeled on a real email that landed real work.

“Hey Kevin - heard about Your Company from a friend. I'm emailing because I saw you just raised a seed round and I’d like to help you build the product. Two things that may be relevant:

• I worked at That Company, where I helped to build Successful Feature (big driver of ARR).

• I built Personal Project, which currently has 100,000 active users.

Can share more about other work, but feel like these two are perhaps the most relevant.

I think I could help you build out [Product] quickly and would like to learn more.

Worth a chat?”

I hope you are encouraged by the fact that these emails are not particularly creative, nor are they perfect. Anyone could write them. It’s just that they all (i) avoid the mistakes in the first section, and (ii) follow the format in this section: who are you, why are you reaching out, and why should they care?

How to find people and reach out to them

You may have noticed in the last section that none of the example emails were referencing a specific job posted on a company’s website. That is intentional. You do not need to wait for a company to post a job about your role before you email them. All you need to do is find companies you are interested in and email the person who would hire for your position at the company.

If you are stuck, I recommend trying this:

• Go to Next Play and find companies that seem interesting. We post a lot of them.

• Read about the companies so you get a good feel for what they do. Start thinking about what you think would actually be helpful to them.

• If you’d like to work there, find either the CEO or the hiring manager on LinkedIn. If you are in doubt about who the hiring manager may be, email the CEO.

• Find the CEO/hiring manager’s email address either by guessing (it’s usually firstname@company.com) or using a tool like Nymeria or ContactOut or Clay.

• Send your email, maybe after double-checking with the list in this post.

• Follow up once.

Now for some bad news. Even if you send a great email to the right person, there is still a reasonable chance that they will not reply. Hence…

You probably need to email more than 1 startup.

Knowing how to write a good cold email does not automatically mean you can get a job via cold email. That’s some of it, yes. But the reality is that you also need to have a bit of luck. So while it’s true that writing a good email avoids one of the reasons that someone may not to reply, there are many others:

• What you’re emailing about is not a priority for the founder right now

• You don’t have something valuable to offer (or it’s not valuable enough)

• The founder is too busy and didn’t even see your email

• They did see your email but forgot to respond (hence why it’s good to follow up ~1-2x)

• The founder doesn’t like your email for some odd reason, even if it was technically good

• Your email got sent to spam or some other weird folder

You can do your research. You can email a founder just at the right time, as their funding round closes, right when they post a job for the thing you do—but there are certain factors that are out of your control. It’s possible that you could send the world’s greatest email and it never gets replied to.

If you want to make the most of this essay, we recommend you do this for 10, or 20, or 30 companies. Email more, over time. Read Next Play every week and email the companies that seem most interesting. There are plenty of companies out there. And while not all of them will respond, my guess is that if you follow the advice in this essay and email ~30 companies, at least one of them will. Is it worth a few hours of work for an email that may change the course of your life? That’s for you to decide. Good luck. You can always practice with us — hi@nextplay.so :).

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By the way, if you want to improve your writing skills (including your cold emails), consider joining Writing Club. It’s a group of people—from founders to engineers to professional writers—who all have one goal: become better writers. Get and give feedback, share your writing, meet people, be held accountable, and more. (As an example, if you joined today you could ask for feedback on cold emails that you send to startups next week.) Right now, you can use the code “nextplay” for $49 off.