TL;DR: This is edition #001 in our series breaking down great cold emails. In this edition, a high schooler sends a short cold email to Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s CEO, and gets a positive same-day reply. Below we’ll show you the email and what you can learn from it.

Niraj Pant, who today is the co-founder of Ritual and an angel investor, started coding in eighth grade. During the spring of his junior year of high school, he started looking for a summer internship. Snapchat was a particularly exciting option—this was 2014 and the app had just become a huge deal.

So, to pitch himself for the internship, he wrote a simple (and excellent) cold email.

That same day, Evan responded. Here’s the screenshot from Niraj’s original tweet.

It is generally not easy to get a reply from the CEO of a famous and rapidly-growing company (though, of course, it can be very valuable). So what’s going on here? There are a few things you can learn from an email like this—and a few things that might not apply to you.

What makes this cold email great

  • The email is actually relevant and valuable for Evan Spiegel. One of the issues with cold email ‘templates’ is that they are (basically) useless unless you are emailing the right person with something that is valuable for them. This exact email format, with the same copy structure and flow, would not have worked if the thing being sold to Evan wasn’t obviously useful. In this case, (1) Evan wants engineering talent, and this email offers that, and (2) there is low downside. The kid is asking for an internship, not a 90-minute meeting or a $50k contract.
  • The email has a clear narrative flow. 1. Acknowledge awkwardness, 2. Establish credibility, 3. Make the pitch. Plenty of cold emails flounder because people are all over the place; they don’t have a good narrative arc. This one does.
  • There’s no fluff. No fake ‘I saw your LinkedIn post’ personalization. No rambling. You could almost call this a Minimum Viable Email—it has just enough information to make sense and be useful. But not a word more.
  • It’s short. Brevity almost always beats wordiness. You may feel like your emails need to be long. You may make excuses for why this email can be short but yours needs to be long (because you just have so many important things to say). The truth is that your email can always be shorter. There are rare exceptions where long emails work, but your email is probably not the exception.

There are things you should be wary of copying, too. This is a perfect email for a high school student emailing a startup founder about an internship, but copying it 1:1 for your campaigns will likely not be effective. You’ll need to make tweaks. The tone, for instance, may not work in other contexts. The ultra-directness may not, either. The format of the email may need some mixing up. The ‘your time is valuable’ callout works for a child, but could sound cheesy coming from a seasoned sales rep.

As ever with great cold emails, focus on why the email works. Don’t blindly copy.

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