[icambron]

Putting aside all the sleazy parts for a moment, there is some good advice on actually writing a cold outreach email. But this part seems mistaken, or at least would be if I were your outreach target:

> My best rule for writing good subject lines is that they feel like they could be the subject lines of an internal email—this helps them feel natural in the inbox. For example, “Quick question”, or “Idea for better outbound” are two casual, natural-feeling subject lines.

I immediately delete any email with a subject line like “quick question”. It does not give me any reason to think I will get any value from it, and what are the chances I will care about answering whatever the question turns out to be? I’m not sitting around waiting to answer questions from strangers, so an email subject line has to tell me what I’m being offered for me to invest that time. In fact “quick question” is already asking me for something (“answer my question”) which just seems unreasonable from an unsolicited email.

[dsr_]

Also, nobody uses my first name in their subject line except people trying to sell me something.

And the only people using my first initial as my first name are people who scraped Linked-In.

[gus_massa]

I use the name in the first line when there is some people in the cc (or bcc :) ) but it's a request for someone in particular:

> Hi John!

> Can you send me X for the Y project?

In particular when the people in the cc (or bcc :) ) don't have the info about X but is interested in Y.

(I use also "Hi everyone!" when I want to make it super clear that the email has been sent to a lot of persons.)

[dsr_]

You sound like a perfectly reasonable person, rather than a scammer.

[josh_carterPDX]

The moment I started reading, "Set up multiple domains" I felt like I needed to shower. Sleazy indeed.

[tomjen3]

I somehow ended up on the spam list for the last election (funny, having never set my feet in the US) and it was painfully obvious that the goal of those headlines were to make people click them, thinking that it was a work e-mail.

[liontwist]

> I’m not sitting around waiting to answer questions from strangers

So you’re not a subject matter expert for important business procedures or technologies?

[nzealand]

I am. OP is correct. To get his or my attention, you would need to put in more significantly more effort than you are asking back.

[liontwist]

> significantly more effort than you are asking back.

This is backwards.

The transaction does not balance against an individual party. This is the double coincidence problem from economics.

You’re describing yourself as a net loss. I hope I’m not in your organization.

[tgv]

Then the email address probably would have a familiar domain.

[nzealand]

This is for startups who are looking for that one in a hundred person hungry for their solution. Enterprises who have already scaled use an entirely different cook book to get the attention of a VP like yourself. A well-targeted and personalized email has a much better response rate for enterprises with a proven solution and well known brand.