[siruva07]

How not to write cold emails to investors -- lessons from a serial founder whose companies have raised $150MM+.

TL;DR Don't chase. Be chased.

1. Don't write cold emails to investors. You automatically give the investor the upper hand by chasing them. It's counter intuitive, but it comes off as desperate. VCs write checks into companies that they have a fear of missing out, or that other VCs are backing, not those that end up in their inbox (e.g. Sacca & Pinterest: https://twitter.com/sacca/status/620344394189647872?lang=en)

2. Take the time that you would have spent emailing investors and build product. Get traction.

3. Get investors to email you.

[brk]

This works when your product is something that is B2C or a very B2B direct-sale/SaaS kind of thing. It does not work as well, IME, when you are selling something more enterprise-y or selling through a channel, where the social media and viral marketing approaches basically do not work.

[gumby]

We are doing an enterprise startup and as we call people in our network to see if they could use it, a few have called VC buddies and said, "Hey we're seriously looking at this product, it's really cool and we know these guys too. They haven't raised any money yet so you should look at them". This has cause us to accelerate our pitch-deck-writing.

Lest you think this is some kind of humblebrag, this hasn't turned into any investment yet. Just giving a scenario under which it could work.

It's in these enterprise folks' interest for us to have investment as it reduces their risk in adopting our product.

[Cilvic]

unrelated but https://www.makespace.com/ returns 502 for me

502 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. The Lambda function returned an invalid entry in the headers object: The header must have a value field. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation.

Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront) Request ID: DFzajQj3Qn2NiP4mPERWYWVljBFZz7W3GtFt8maH2FaBgpyaDjY-YA==

[aerosmile]

The TLD without the www works fine: https://makespace.com. Obviously something they should fix.

[adventured]

Gotta drop the www off of it.

[fnord77]

so how do you get the word out? And how do you make your product enticing enough to be chased?

[d_silin]

To answer the second question: get revenue with a good growth.

[aerostable_slug]

There are plenty of startup pitch/demo events in the major markets. I imagine they've all gone virtual now, so no need to hop a flight to SF (or wherever) to get your few minutes on stage during open mike night.

[newstandard]

To the second question: build something that a specific set of people love

[aaro]

Choose your channel – whether that's Twitter, LinkedIn, Indie Hackers, etc – and double down on that

[tnolet]

Customers / users and sales.

[unnouinceput]

150MM? That's a trillion, yes?

[mark-wagner]

In this case "M" is a Roman numeral meaning 1000. So "MM"is one thousand thousands, or one million.

[carpedimebagjoe]

Sales cure all.