Comment by fab1an | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fab1an | Hacker News Reader

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First off, you can't talk 'to a company', but will need a specific idea on who's the person / function you want to get feedback from. Companies aren't people ;)

Cold email / LinkedIn should actually work fairly well for this. If it doesn't, your approach might not be specific enough, the person you're targeting might not be the right person OR your problem hypothesis is flawed.

Re: general approach, I've seen great response rates with a template like this one below.

Hi <NAME>

It looks like you’re an expert on <SPECIFIC FIELD YOU’RE SOLVING A PROBLEM FOR> - I would love to get your opinion on something I’ve been working on.

<ONE SENTENCE TEASER>

I’m not looking to sell anything at this point, but would love to understand if something like this would actually help you with your job. I don’t want to build the wrong thing!

Would you be willing to hop on a brief call with me sometime in the next week? This would only take a few minutes and if we’re onto something, you’d be the first to know about it.

Best, X

The problem here is that among the multitude of emails / requests a working professional goes through everyday, you might often just end up being noise. Cold emails are usually ignored when there is no context to the request; the attention span given might be only a few seconds and frankly, only a little thought would go into your "valuable" proposition — there are too many of them that land in the inbox everyday and not to forget, a "brief call", unlike a small response, is a good commitment to ask.

Of course, the success rate won't be zero and you are bound to get your foot into the door in some companies but set expectation should be of getting a cold shoulder many many times.

The success rate, however, can be tweaked by —

a) Being a bit influential (like, having many Twitter followers or a somewhat famous blog)

b) Establishing a context. (hey, I read your piece about the SPECIFIC PROBLEM and that's something we're working on).

c) Writing something that puts you way above the crowd. (my friend often used to read people's Twitter and LinkedIn profiled before requesting anything. Like, "Hey. I read how you recently paid off your education loan. Mine is still pain in the ass")

I understand that if the problem is super-relevant to the business, they might agree in a whim but usually, it won't be the case. I am not undermining the value of the approach, but it's just not that simple as often portrayed.

Well we are thinking of some specific problems related to data science. Developers, Product managers, marketing folks would benefit immensely from this and naturally all of them could give feedback from their own perspectives. Decision makers might be VP, Founders. Currently I am writing to founders of startups.

This email looks great. Will try it out and tweak based on who I am getting feedback from. Thanks !!

Don't sell to someone who doesn't feel the pain. If the developers feel the pain but a VP has to be on board, get the developer to be a fanatical user of yours then advocate on your behalf. They'll have more sway than you.

See: Github, Slack

Well little hard in my case since service I am offering, developer himself cant approve to use it (as it involves company data). Agree about enterprise-consumer approach for products like github, slack. We might think of some variation of this approach after we validate problem. Thanks!

I hate the request to "hop on a call". That suggests the person hasn't considered their questions well enough to write them down. Whenever anyone asks me for a call, I always reply asking them to write their questions instead. Often they ask just one or two questions I can answer trivially. Much more efficient than a call.

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