Fred Wilson's Email Stats | Hacker News Reader

Fred Wilson's Email Stats

avc.com

34 pointseduardo_f11 comments

TLDR: the secret is sending him emails of less than 30 words between 5 and 7am.

I wonder if that works for other notable people that get a lot of email?

Those graphs were really confusing.

The email volume line graph. Are those data points per hour? every half hour? How can they have a seemingly continuous line graph for this histogram-style data?

The "<20 words" graphs.. they don't look cumulative but the labels make them seem like they are. The correct labels should be, for example, "20 <= w < 30".

Great points - a histogram might make more sense with the email volume graph and the labels for # of words can be improved for additional clarity. Thanks for the great feedback - please let us know if you have any more.

Does the "response rate" only reflect initial emails? If there is a conversation, then it's going to end eventually, so the fact that you don't respond to an email that says "okay" wouldn't really mean much.

We don't have a response rate graph yet. We do have a time before first response rate graph. Fred is comparing the total number of emails that he gets vs he sends from/to certain people, which is not the same as response rate.

Thanks for clarifying that.

Maybe I missed it, but this article said nothing about "the secret to getting a reply from him."

Write an email of < 30 words.

"I've asked the Gmail Meter folks to add a chart showing reply ratio on emails less than 30 words versus emails greater than 100 words. When I get that chart I will publish it here because I think that is single best secret to getting a reply from me."

Was it supposed to say something about the secret to getting a reply from him?

If you pull the data together it shows that the best way to get a response is to send a short message early in the morning (during his peek email hours): "the one time I reply to more email than I get is the 5am to 7am time frame."

Pretty good place to start if you want to get a response.

My original submission title was "Fred Wilson's Email Stats (and the secret to getting a response from him)". Looks like a Hacker News moderator edited my title, even though Fred talks about the secret to getting a response from him at the end of his post.

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