Ask HN: Why is it so hard to get responses from founders over email? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is it so hard to get responses from founders over email?

2 pointspreston-kwei8 comments

I’m currently building a B2B product for SMBs and doing sales myself. The target users are early-stage founders.

I can usually get meetings through warm intros, but cold outreach over email has been inconsistent. My emails often get ignored, and I rarely receive replies.

For people who’ve sold products founder-to-founder: what actually changed outcomes for you?

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Can you paste an example title and email here? I'm a founder and get 100's of emails per day. I often reply to cold emails, but honestly, with 90% of them, I can't really tell if they will solve one of my top 3 problems.

Totally. Here is what my emails typically look like:

Re: quick scheduling question

Hi [name],

I’ve followed [company] for a while and the scale you’re operating at is impressive. With customer and partner meetings, plus internal meetings, I imagine your calendar gets pretty full.

I’m working on a way for founders to cut down the email back-and-forth of scheduling without hiring or managing an EA.

Is scheduling something you still handle personally at all?

– Preston

I feel this is the wrong business direction. If you do it well, at most you'll only save on the salary of an administrative assistant, but they actually want much more, and this small improvement won't attract their attention.

I get the concern if the value is framed as “replacing an admin assistant”, but for many founders, the real win isn’t salary savings, it’s eliminating context switching, follow-ups, and mental overhead around coordination. As well as eliminating the mistakes that can be made by humans. Even small logistics can disproportionately drain attention. If done well, this is less about cost reduction and more about reclaiming focus and execution speed.

I think your second sentence is the strongest -- it's specific about what you actually help with.

Right now, the title and preview text on mobile probably look like "Quick scheduling question" / "Hi [name], I've followed [company] for...". This looks like a lot of other emails in my inbox that are requesting a meeting time. So I think a lot of people who quickly scan their inbox would pass this by and not even open the full email.

I'd also drop the "re: " part unless it's genuinely a reply. It breaks trust.

Got it. That's fair, I could definitely remove the first sentence. However, I still want the email to seem personal. Do you think it is important to have that personalized part somewhere in the email?

There's no re, I just put that there instead of saying Subject:. Sorry, that's confusing.

What magnitude response rate would you expect? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? Have you ever benefited from following up on a cold email?

Very low, like 0.01%. And oftentimes these people just say no. I try following up, but that usually doesn't do much.

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