How My Startup Raised $1.1 Million From a Single Cold Email | Hacker News Reader

How My Startup Raised $1.1 Million From a Single Cold Email

ericbieller.com

18 pointsbleachtree11 comments

I've had some startup clients do this and it's not worked out well for them (of course, we're in Dallas, not SV, so the response/pace of business is different).

I think a lot of this sort of thing works "once in a blue moon" rather than "do this as a formula" as your email simply happened into someone's email box when they either felt that need and/or were receptive to something new.

Thanks for the input. I agree with this not being a sure fire way to get noticed. Again, it comes down to how you write the email, what your goal is and what your product is. But I don't agree that this is a 'once in a blue moon' type of thing.

We actually got quite a few responses from very influential people, not just Naval. The reality is, a lot of them spend hours on email a day. If you give them something worth responding to, they will respond!

> If you give them something worth responding to, they will respond!

The problem here is that not everybody is objective when it comes to determine what is worth responding to. So this will be applied as a winning recipe because it worked once for someone and that someone blogged about it.

I can see a whole pile of heavy hitters waking up to people trying this scheme out wondering what is the cause of this inbox deluge :)

I've actually gained several very valuable contacts from this method, not just one ;) So it's actually worked out for me several times in the past, which is why I still do it.

In either case there's no harm in sending the email. Of course your conversion rate is going to be low. But if you can send 10 well written emails and get 1 valuable response, that certainly seems worth it to me!

Agreed. The thing I took most from your article was where you mentioned the email was fairly concise, not long winded to end up with a "ugh, a book, deeelete" response.

Since I worked from a BlackBerry for so long, I find that emails that are about the length of these 3 messages (individually, not combined) is about as much as you can expect people to really read... more than that deserves a phone call most of the time.

It looks like you guys built a solid product that's clearly useful, as well as a website that makes the value proposition immediately obvious. I would guess that this had more to do with your funding success than your cold email strategy.

Thanks ohazi, appreciated! We still have a long way to go :)

Thanks a ton! Indeed having an interesting product helps, but what good is an interesting product if your email gets chucked straight into the trash because it's too long, or seems too arrogant? ;)

Turns out the founder of AngelList is a good person to have advocating for you.

Indeed he is, nice guy too ;)

It's almost like making a good product that solves a real problem is a differentiator in the Valley.

But also it further reinforces the notion that there is a ton of money to be made facilitating other startups.

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