TL;DR: This is edition #002 in our series breaking down great cold emails. In this edition, a startup founder sent a short email to Jason Calacanis (a famous startup investor). Jason replied the same day asking to set up a call. Below, we’ll show you the email and what you can learn from it.

Venture capitalists get more cold emails than almost anybody else in the world. This is to be expected, of course—they practically have a sign over their heads saying I have millions of dollars to give out to startup founders. If you’re a startup founder, this is exciting. But it also means that it’s pretty damn hard to get a VC to respond.

And there’s a lot to learn from cold emails that actually do get VCs to reply.

Back in 2020, a founder named Stan Rymkiewicz was building a company called Orapa: a platform where companies could pay sales reps only for qualified meetings (which is not too different a pricing model from what we run over at Aurora).

Like most early-stage startup founders, he was looking for investment. So he emailed one of the bigger names in modern venture capital: Jason Calacanis. The email was simple.

Jason replied the same day to set up a meeting. Here’s what you can learn from this email for your own campaigns.

What makes this email great

  • The subject line references something (1) specific that is (2) relevant to the recipient (Jason). This subject line uses the name of another startup (Remotehour) that had recently been accepted into demo day and would thus be recognizable to Jason Calacanis. Crucially, the subject line is actually relevant to what Stan writes in the first sentence of the email. This same subject line would fall flat if the email had nothing to do with Remotehour.
  • The intent of the email is communicated in the first sentence. You generally don’t want to bury the lede in your cold emails. Letting the recipient know why you’re emailing, right off the bat, sets up helpful framing for the rest of the email.
  • Stan’s description of his product is one simple, clean, understandable sentence. It’s easy to get bogged down by describing every little nuance of your product—which is a quick way to kill your cold email. Say what your product is in the simplest way possible. The recipient should know exactly what your product does right away. No extra friction. A heuristic: if you have to use more than one sentence, you are probably saying too much.
  • The email uses specific numbers for credibility. Writing “0-$55k in 3 months” is much better than writing “our ARR has grown fast”. It’s also helpful that Stan included a piece of credibility (the Pioneer.app tournament win) that Jason could, if he wanted to, independently verify. If you were selling a B2B SaaS product, for example, it would be better to say, “Company A added $10k to their MRR in their first week” than to say “many companies, like Company A, have seen value”.

Other than some (understandable) minor grammatical errors, there isn’t much that we would change about this cold email. Most importantly, it worked. Cold email templates are not always helpful, but if you were going to create one, this email is a good starting point.

The basic structure is one that works across all kinds of campaigns:

  1. Personal, relevant, specific opener that states your intent.
  2. One-liner explaining who you are/what you do/what your product is.
  3. Context and credibility explaining why you’re worth responding to.
  4. [Optional] CTA or next steps.

Are there more creative, and perhaps more effective, ways to write cold emails than what Stan did in this case? Sure. But emails like Stan’s, emails that follow this format, are better than ~90% of the cold emails that get sent today. When in doubt—stick to what works. And keep it concise.

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If you’d like more inspiration, go here to read edition #003 in our Great Cold Emails series.