Hacker News Reader

Comment by GlennFarrant | Hacker News Reader

Original email writer here. I generally agree with the comments about how it could have been improved. In hindsight, it was probably too wordy. My impression is that David processes emails more "deeply" than the average person, so I think he could handle the wordiness. Others would probably trash it more quickly. I did get a very thoughtful response from David which actually helped us immensely. As a result of taking the path he suggested we've now got a great business going, and the main problem is hanging on to the rocketship it has become. Obviously, a high-class problem to have.

It took me a couple of hours to write the email. Definitely time well spent.

View on HN

> It took me a couple of hours to write the email.

It always takes longer to write short emails, which is why so few people do it.

I tried to explain this just yesterday to a colleague who complains about my long emails. He said this obviously demonstrated I had no logic in my brain. It was an annoying day.

Writing a short email is easy. All it takes is actually knowing what you're trying to say.

IMHO, this is simply not true.

Practice makes perfect. Writing short, concise pieces of text that express your thoughts in an easily digestable is really hard, a challenge of its own (despite what you want to say) - it's like a form of "professional" art, that few master.

Do you happen to recall what the subject line was? Seems like an important detail that has a big impact on first impression.

The subject line was: "Real time location and status startup struggling with the Infrastructure vs Application decision"

Also, on reviewing the email, there was some formatting which may have helped the readability and draw attention to the central question. There was a fair amount of whitespace between the paragraphs and the main question was center-aligned and in bold.

Completely out of context, but I have visited your website http://www.criticalarc.com/ and I was very surprised to see this pixelate image on the home page http://www.criticalarc.com/_content/index/slider/2.jpg.

Thanks. We'll sort it out.

Sounds almost gimmicky, which it probably is not: Would you mind providing a screenshot of the email?

Not gimmicky, it's empathizing with the end user.

It took me a couple of hours to write the email

This seems weird when someone else says it...but I relate!

To a job well done!

Well done! I felt it used a lot of the points from this article on how to cold email people: http://www.ashmaurya.com/2012/08/cold-emailing/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com