Don't be that cold emailer
Over the past few days I received two cold emails likely sent by indie hackers. Both the mails open by mentioning the sender had checked my GitHub profile.
The first invited me to apply as a developer for their startup, despite all my repos mentioning they're hobby projects by a hobby programmer (did I mention beginner code?). The mail also featured sloppy text formatting, such as all lowercase, and included an email tracker.
The other mail, formatted as a single long text paragraph, pitched an app hosting platform. As an example, it summarized the steps for deploying one of my repos, a purely documentation project containing one Markdown file (I guess this is one of those fancy no-code app, cool).
Why so much sloppyness? Why don't they take some pride in their creations and polish their content a bit?
Don't be that cold emailer.
Cold email is tricky but here is what I've learned over time to keep from getting strikes from hosting provider.
i need to start cold emailing soon aswell, will porpably start this weekend. already sent one email but got no answer. ive developed a event Ticket service, might gonna start emailing all night clubs in my area, searching on eventbrite etc for organizer who could fit my product, maybe messaging my university if they have any use for it. any tips on how to do this?
I'd start by paying a little bit more attention to properly format the mails, e.g. capitalizing the first letters after full stops. Then I'd focus on sending the mails only to users and creators you know well and whose work you admire.
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Thanks for the feedback, at least here you have choice over whether to check out my post or not.
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LOL Got it.
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I couldn't agree more. If you're going to bug someone with a cold email, at least make it look professional.
Grammarly has helped me catch silly grammatical mistakes and get my point across clearly in a few short sentences. I use the free version.
Those looked like mass mailings, so the authors didn't likely care much about grammatical mistakes.
Funny, my 14yr daughter told me that someone freaked her out by using full stops in DMs to her. She said she probably won't answer this person because "only weird people use full stops".
I guess seeing a capital letter or "I've" instead of "ive" will me her scream.
That's understandable given we're 2-3 generations apart. Which, when it comes to cold mailing, is one more reason to know the audience and properly target it.
Exactly. Imagine starting your cold email to a TikTok influencer with "Dear Sir". They will probably think you're a Nigerian prince or something. "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?" won't work either.
Four scores and seven posts ago... 😀
Hey there, fellow indie hacker here building a cold email tool called Breakcold!
I believe it's super important to hyper personalize cold emails. People tend to send a lot without personalizing but end up with few responses :(
In the case you mentioned, I believe they just went for it without doing proper research on how to do it in a gentle way without being off topic.
I see it like marketing, most indie hackers struggle with it if they have a pure tech background. Consequently it's harder for them to sell themselves for a job in general or sell their software/services.
But I think the future is bright, more people start to be aware about cold email good practices. Resources on the topic are still not spread enough but it's coming.
Happy to help anyone who want to step-up their game in cold mailing, always a pleasure to help fellow indie hackers, I'm most available on Twitter if someone want to talk in DMs.
I also got those emails and besides bad formatting and grammar, it also has little to no relationship to the repo in question.
I tried to reply politely to one of those but got no response, so it goes into SPAM.
Yeah, that was the giveaway of a mass mailing.
I am currently taking Cold Email Outreach MasterClass course taught by Quickmail founder. It is worth the price. Filled with actionable advice and coming up with an email outreach plan.
it wasn't their intention but there is data that shows emails with typos perform better. this is likely because they're one off, personalized messages
That's interesting. But I'm not in the target group of that data as I prefer other forms of personalization and authenticity.
Thanks for letting us know. I'll keep a look out.
These are some good takes, thanks for sharing Paolo.
Do you have any good cold email example you've received?
I realized I didn't answer your question, apologies.
I don't have good cold mail examples handy. But I replied to several such mails by indie hackers who wanted to invite me to video calls about product ideas they were researching or seeked feedback on products they developed. All the mails clearly showed the senders did check out my online content and profiles and were familiar with them.
You're welcome.