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Comment by joshu | Hacker News Reader

a higher chunk of cold email i get don’t bother explaining what the company actually does. please don’t do this.

when i do see an interesting company, i want to read more immediately. when a deck or something isn’t included, it kills that momentum. you don’t have to include everything, just give something.

i skip everything that has clicktracking on links. it usually means that it wasn’t a targeted email and was sent out by a mailing list.

edit: another thing people do is have a “VP of fundraising” or someone external send the email. this is also a bad look. it should be from a founder or the CEO.

edit edit: i will honestly review your pitch if you email me and reference this thread. generally i don’t give negative feedback because i don’t think most founders really want it.

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> a higher chunk of cold email i get don’t bother explaining what the company actually does. please don’t do this.

PG had a recent tweet that touched on this in response to someone pitching an intentionally ridiculous product (at least, that's how their tweet read to me):

"Believe it or not, this is not the worst pitch I've received. It's (a) concise and (b) I can tell what your product is. Those two alone may push it into the top half." [0]

It's apparently harder than it should be to succinctly explain what the company does before explaining why it's a good investment or why you need investment.

[0] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1175837682242609157?s=20

yes. a LOT of them go for a cure teaser.

i simply jump to the conclusion that the founder is bad at communicating if they can’t get this one detail across.

cure -> cute

It is extremely difficult. And extremely important. Until you can succinctly explain what a company does, you don't understand the problem/customer/solution well enough.

Perry-Air! Damn, I never realized how many good ideas are hidden in sci-fi movies!

But then people are selling glacier and iceberg water in bottles or ice cubes, so...

The marketing is done for you. All you have to work on is the tech.

> generally i don’t give negative feedback because i don’t think most founders really want it.

As a founder, I strongly disagree. The feedback I care about most is negative feedback. Negative feedback helps me improve.

If I don't agree with your negative feedback, next time I'll communicate better why. If I agree, that helps me address the flaws in the business sooner. I'll be grateful, not upset. Just like with user/customer interviews.

The legal risks that dissuade employers from giving feedback to job applicants don't apply for investors. If you're trying to keep your options open to invest later, I'd rather return to someone who pointed out a flaw that I then fixed which led to success.

I realize most people in general don't react well to negative feedback, so maybe this is just me, but I imagine there are others out there like me.

" If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; "

A lot of people say they want negative feedback, but most of those people are human, and they react the same way most people react to negative feedback.

unfortunately, engaging deeply after i have decided i'm not interested is too expensive in terms of time.

if i think i might want to invest later then i am much better off spending the time fixing it or understanding it better now and then invest now.

There isn't as much of a legal risk, but it's definitely mitigated.

In addition, the feedback they gave is now written. What if the founder lacks social etiquette and tweets "VC Y said my idea sucks because Z [some charged topic]"? If you look at the missed out on investment X/Y/Z emails that VCs sometimes release (anti-portfolios), you'll notice almost aways the releasers asks for permission first. VCs network effects largely need to be polished and appear to be knowledgeable about sectors -- giving feedback to a random startup that might be horribly wrong would hurt that reputation.

It makes sense as to why many VCs don't give feedback.

That being said, the answer is to never ask for direct feedback. Instead, you should have a middleman and backchannel. Ask the middleman to find out why they didn't like X -- this generally works. The middleman is impartial and can be objective (versus the founder who is often defensive) and is able to extract truth.

Re: tracking - I don't have a huge problem with email marketing tracking aggregated opens in theory, but unfortunately, it's far too easy to use the same technology to track personal emails, which does bother me. So I turn off images. Really wish there was a better way to manage this that made it simpler for the layperson to understand the tradeoffs.

I don't really have a problem with click-tracking anywhere, but as I work through the logic, I can't really tell you why. It isn't really any different than open tracking. Thinking more about it, I guess I'm ok with tracking that I landed on a URL via a referrer or UTM, as this is tracking how someone arrived at your property and is ostensibly less personal, not whether or not they read the letter you sent them. I'm less ok with tracking that person clicked link in email you sent them. Again, speaking specifically about 1-1 communication, mass email is a separate issue (that I have some problems with, but they're not equivalent to me).

specifically, don’t love the mass email pretending to be specific 1-1 email. mostly i dislike the asymmetry of people to do a very little work and give me a bunch of work (having to review the company.) i am much more likely to do the work if i think they were talking to me specifically, especially since that means there is a much greater chance that it is a match. much the same as spam, i guess.

the tracking itself doesn’t bother me too much. i do type in my email to docsend decks which is also tracked. i do not like the fact that the docsend decks disappear though. i suppose that is a different issue.

> specifically, don’t love the mass email pretending to be specific 1-1 email.

In the context of an email soliciting a 1-1 interaction, I completely agree.

I'm ok with a marketing email personalizing itself to me ("Hey <name>, from <name> at <company>.")

How to cold email investors:

1. Don't.

1.a. Self fund and co-develop with a team that understands that if your company is the point where you have to cold email investors, you're going to be so strapped with shitty contracts and lose so much equity that you're absolutely never going to make any money on an M&A event and you should start over.

If you don't mind my asking, what sort of terms can you expect to get with an angel investor? What ownership stake vs funding levels are normal, and is there a point at which you revoke funding, or is it delivered all at once?

Do angel investors typically fund startups that don't have great capital expenditures?

Is this type of investment sought in the initial bootstrapping, before VC funding?

How much of a prototype is expected? A fully working product with customers?

Angels come before VCs. Offer 10 to 30% understanding that in the end they will come out with 5/10%.

The amounts are smaller so anything under 200k you will probably get it all at once.

Angel's fund companies they believe in.

No investing before a bootstrap product unless you have a background or more to offer.

Thanks! That clarified my understanding. :)

ok my inbox asplode even more than usual. oof

What do you know, maybe you got a million dollar idea in there

Sorry in advance. Thanks for offering this to us.

Sending an email your way!

Please revive Delicious.

Pinboard owns Delicious now.

it is only one step on the way to owning all of us. never compete with pinboard.

I sent you my pitch :)

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