How To Convert Customers With Cold Emails | Startup School

[@chapterme]

Chapters (Powered by ChapterMe) - 00:00 - Intro 00:17 - All-time best email outreach hack 00:36 - How to get warm intros? 01:16 - Cold emails are unavoidable, but most are ineffective. 01:47 - First focus: Map out your funnel. 02:31 - Work backward from your goal to build your funnel. 03:59 - Begin manual, personalized emails before automation. 05:10 - Expect conversion rates to drop as you scale. 06:19 - Screen recipients will see 07:49 - Finding stranger's email 08:48 - Early-stage outreach relies on your personal brand. 09:52 - How to get more responses? 7 principles of effective email copy 10:12 - Keep emails focused on a single, clear outcome. 11:14 - Be human 13:44 - Personalize 16:19 - Keep it short 17:03 - Establish credibility 18:10 - All about the reader, not you 20:01 - Have a clear call to action 20:50 - Summary 21:21 - One email is not enough: Follow-up 22:12 - Let's see some examples - Not effective 22:37 - Example 1 23:35 - Example 2 24:41 - Example 3 25:46 - Good examples 27:17 - Example 2 29:12 - Example 3: Before and After 30:59 - Final Advice 32:29 - Outro

[@chrismarin5333]

Ran an outbound agency for 10 years - here’s the checklist you can use: -Run manual outreach until you book 10 meetings -Offer up something interesting (see donuts example) -Keep it short and personal (emotional) -Monitor if your emails are getting replies (shoot for 1-10% reply rates)

[@user_journeys]

Sent a dozen cold emails before this video: got 0 responses. Sent a dozen cold emails after this video: got 4 responses Once again, THANK YOU YC!

[@nicholasautomation]

Congrats bro! How are you doing today?

[@viktorfromsales]

All-in-all good video but have to add some corrections: 1. don’t use those subject lines. They get archived instantly. Keep to 2-5 words that sum up what the email is about. Sometimes an empty subject line helps as well because it not only shows more of the email preview, it draws the recipient’s attention to that empty line in their inbox. 2. If it’s a cold email, keep the first email to plain text. Any links, images or gifs risk landing in the spam folder. 3. Personalisation at scale is just clustering prospects based on similarities. Sending emails that feel personal because they’re highly targeted/segmented.

[@alexeykardo1629]

OMG I love studying at the YC academy This is what it feels like when we re watching your videos Thank you! Can't wait to start doing right away!

[@qet-lab]

YC startups are killing it on Product Hunt.

[@RicardoSeixas]

Fastest way to get deleted: “Quick question”

[@imAskja]

It’s never quick

[@user-Alina123]

Yeah Quick Question is a bit outdated 🙃

[@ZachBoughaffour]

literally the exact video i needed today

[@robertnicoletti]

100 agree

[@mrPCoding]

If you are getting ZERO resonses read this! This is great but there is alot of very important points missing from this. 1. You can't send hundreds of cold emails from one address that is not warmed up and expect not to end up in spam. 2. You can't have anything but text in cold emails expecting not to end up in spam. (making anything bold/italic, adding links, images or anything else will make the email HTML and not text) 3. If you get flagged as spam, you will be flagged for 2 weeks or more unless you have a good warm up system. 4. If you are scraping emails, there is something cold spam traps that you need to know about. If you email them your email is marked as spam for the foreseeable future. Let me know if you want all my notes from over 1 000 000 cold emails.

[@chrisrosch4731]

yo can u send me those notes?

[@Daniel_fisseha]

Can i get those

[@Raymond23432]

I’ll take them too

[@prempatel3762]

Yes I want them

[@spencermerrill2546]

I'd love these

[@dineshvarma6117]

Dear Aaron Epstein, Thank you for sharing your valuable insights on cold outreach. Your experience will undoubtedly benefit countless startups. I watched your entire video with great interest and have a question. To maximize results, is it advisable to send the same email to the same person multiple times in a day? If so, what is the optimal frequency for email outreach? Let me know if you have any thoughts on this.

[@noraiz-anwer]

Here are the 2 things:- 1. Never send the same email to a person. If you are sending the initial message then make 2 or 3 follow-ups next to it and they should be differ. Like First follow-up should be discussing the initial message and so on wards. 2. Mark date at which you're sending initial message , then first follow should be like 7 days after, 2 nd Followup should be after 7 days and 3rd followup should be after 7 days to last follow up. This is what strategy i use, like to here from others about this.

[@danielr5343]

The cold emails I write get a 30 or even 40% response rate. The quick and short of it: 1) Have a sense of humor in your cold email 2) Tell people the genuine reasons why they should not reply, and then find unexpected upsides to them 3) Think of the traditional cold email styles and break as many rules as you can Most startup founders don't have the guts to experiment like this. I don't expect a single person to see this and think "yeah, good idea." Well, have fun sending your 800 emails per customer, I'll send 3 or 4 and call it a day:) Edit: I actually got positive responses ... for some reason. Anyone interested can drop me an email in the replies and I'll send them templates that have worked.

[@factorysec]

You had at least 1 person think it's a good idea. 👀

[@chriswilfrid]

Thank you for added insight

[@jaskaran.24]

i do this. works

[@waseemosman8321]

Using this comment as a prompt for AI to customize my shitty cold emails, thanks!

[@dreyCdflowAI]

I'd love the templates please.

[@lnplum]

Sending 50 emails a day and sending personalized handwritten emails based on networking and deep research sounds a bit unlikely, especially when you're doing more than just sales.

[@yarapolana]

24:48 This example is clearly cultural though, I see that in the US this doesn’t cut it but in other cultures people want to know how in the world they got their email since these things are not publicly available in some countries…

[@sieglindegeruldis5841]

thanks. helped me a lot!

[@Syed.Naqvi1]

Very informative Video. thanks.

[@rafaelribasdetoni2276]

awesome, great video!

[@in-motion6419]

Super valuable content! What is the best way to track and measure?

[@stableandhappy]

Thank You 🙏♥️

[@StephenWheadon]

I feel too many emails from the founder can make you come off as “small” - if headcount is low but you are set on establishing market dominance, considering other titles as the sender may add even more personalization.

[@HaydenHelin]

Subject: Thank you for your Informative Video on Cold Emailing:) Dear Aaron Epstein, My name is Hayden from Toronto, Canada, and I just wanted tell you thanks for your informative video on the Y Combinatoor KZbin channel. I promise I'll work on improving my emails to people!! Warmest regards (because it's cold up here🍁), Hayden Helin

[@scrapycholo2659]

Good stuff

[@chriswilfrid]

A+

[@HaydenHelin]

@@chriswilfrid lol thank you 🫸🫷

[@manuelchabierescolaperez9444]

Is it possible to find the podcast in a platform where you can just listen to it? I used to follow it in Spotify but no podcasts have been uploaded in the past months. Thank you!

[@betafishie]

Why not automate cold emails? Sorry if this is a bad question.

[@Ty-gt6qz]

I believe he explained in the video, but essentially its because you need to learn and personalize. You can't really automate while personalizing for each individual email. Also, you need to learn what messaging resonates the most by manually writing them and learning by trial and error.

[@eahefnawy]

I can't imagine writing 800 emails manually. Each would probably take me at least 10 mins to research and personalize. If I spend 6 hours every day sending cold emails, it'd take me 22 days to close a single customers. Not to mention the time spent prospecting, sourcing and targeting. Am I missing something?

[@rilwanj]

@@ogopogoman4682but you’d have to fact check the LLM, as they tend to outright lie.

[@skyhappy]

That's a disingenuous though​@@ogopogoman4682

[@jimbobu]

​@@ogopogoman4682so 3 mins instead of 10 minutes? 7 days per customer

[@TheHamzaSohail]

You can make a template like the one shown in the video, which looks personlised but is actually a template. You will still need to tweek some things in the email but it should take lesser than 10 mins at least.

[@Tonu]

You missed that you are spammer.

[@madzr3093]

Thanks for these great tips, Aaron!

[@zachomis]

Awesome presentation. You reaffirmed a lot of what I already do, and gave me more precise reasons for some of my habits.

[@eahefnawy]

If I'll be sending emails manually just using my email client, how do I track each step of the funnel? I wish you mentioned some tools you use for that.

[@MBAnoBrainer_GMATPrep]

I’m pretty sure a simple spreadsheet could do the work. At least, I would do it that way.

[@ankitpanda1860]

@@MBAnoBrainer_GMATPrep good luck with that lol. You will pull your hair out. been there done that.

[@vivekagrawal4607]

Try mail-suite extension if using google, it tracks read receipts

[@samisstudio]

Thanks

[@orkhan_help]

tons of value..comments is also valuable below

[@ruans.p.5323]

Can you guys make a video about how to target the right people ? :) Please 🥺

[@松井健-s2m]

Sending 800 truly personalized emails will take huge amount of time, Maybe one or two months will be gone.

[@vivekagrawal4607]

That's what I needed from YC!

[@RZernach]

Thank you, your tips really speak to me at this time of my startup’s journey.

[@rilwanj]

This doesn’t seem feasible, how do you personalise let’s say 5-10 minutes researching each company, 50 emails a day. 7-10 hours sending emails per day. Then you have to consider also allocating time to follow up emails, demo prep, onboarding calls, customer support, user research, etc.

[@AJ-ht2eh]

That's the whole point of doing the unscaleble...

[@rilwanj]

@@AJ-ht2ehI work on my business after work hours so I can only work on one or two a day, this will probably take years to result in any positive returns

[@monzermasri4490]

Masterpiece 🙌

[@damonguzman]

By far, the best YC video in a while. Actionable insights, thanks

[@andrewmoffat3649]

Send hundreds of emails to day, but make them all feel personalized and friendly, so the person doesn't feel like they're 1 of 100s of emails per day, because then they know you don't really care about them, which you don't.

[@MindfulMansi-o8f]

Loved it!

[@taaayooos]

Literally gold

[@artepedraza]

great!!

[@chriseun0503]

Thank you for the video! I'm currently exploring ways to systemize warm introductions in the M&A space. By integrating with outlook / gmail, and enriching with apollo / linkedin (will also include university db as mentioned in video), I'm hoping to build a knowledge graph of all your (and team's) relationships (first degree). By using LLMs to analyze context and sentiment of discussions, in addition to looking at the metadata (frequency / duration of convo), I'm hoping to identify and quantify the strongest relationships. From here, I'm curious if there is a way to find their connections (second degree) by again looking at organizational data, cc'd, attendee list, etc - ultimately to map out everyone your existing network can facilitate introductions to. I'm still trying to understand the landscape, but KG-based CRMs feels more compatible to the needs of relationship-driven industries with long sales cycles.. but i may be wrong. If anyone watching this video is interested in providing feedback / discussing, would love to connect :)

[@CreativeDm9]

Just commented ab this - would love to discuss. What's the best email to reach you at?

[@yurijmikhassiak7342]

Sounds as interesting topic to discuss. The chellange is understanding what is the most important connection point. We will need to start with human in the loop and than use this info as a training data. I'd subscribe for such a product. Let me know if you plan to productive it)

[@nishantchoudhary7888]

That I, I, and I 🤣

[@amishthaker7270]

I love the part at the end where he says you should do this for hours a day if cold email is the main outreach channel and that automating directly at the beginning is a bad idea. Been there, done that.

[@amfa42]

I understand Epstein suggestions are generic, so I guess that's why he says email is better than linkedin outreach 7:13 , but I must say (captain obvious) it depends on the industry you are and who are you targetting. In my personal experience as outbound lead gen. leader for a nearshore software dev company from Latam, I've got way better convertion conversion rates from Linkedin outreach using automation tools like Expandi than with email.

[@TatyanaEliseeva-o8g]

Feels very high-level tbh for a YC piece of content

[@amishthaker7270]

We just started using apollo and this couldn’t have come at a better time. Going to implement some of this…

[@yashgupta417]

how to balance founder conviction and feedback from user interviews? one says to keep going and other to maybe rethink.

[@SuperKillaki]

Deliverability is trash across the board rn. Many GTM teams have pivoted to cold call and linkedin as their core outbound channels.

[@rickynari]

Open rates are not trackable anymore. Gmail changes.

[@yarapolana]

people who are not english native speakers and LLMs can write very similarly 😅

[@vikrambuilds]

What a gem!

[@sid06]

800 emails? That's like 800 days! No, seriously, how long does it take you to get their personal info and use it in an email?

[@david6178]

Cold calling combined with cold email is best 🎉

[@CollinRutherford]

It’s crucial to focus on the recipient’s needs rather than just pitching your own agenda.

[@ambikeshgautam8420]

Amazing

[@sarthak_arc]

great stuff. gpt written though.

[@CreativeDm9]

Aren't warm intros a much better way of doing this once you get your initial learnings on value prop? It's way easier to go thru the YC network than to go cold

[@isaac_x]

❤❤❤

[@youtubevideos415]

I doubt that this will ever work. If you need to send 800 emails out to get one single customer, how on earth would this work if we need to try their products to. be able to write a personal email. So i got to try out 800 products to get one single customer? I think we're better off with Google ads than wasting our time with this approach.

[@Opeyemi.sanusi]

That’s not the norm 😂 800 to one is such a terrible conversation rate 😂

[@BathshebaStahlhut]

Clark Matthew Allen Maria Gonzalez Dorothy

[@asdf_12345]

3:32 terrible

[@ordinarygg]

but true

[@rohanborawake6865]

SUBTLE LINKEDIN MARKETING haha

[@ankitpanda1860]

Is this worth it????? 800 personalized email for 1 customer. I don't think its the right approach and waste of valuable time. yc you should work on creating better videos just saying.

[@EdithHazel-g9o]

Clark Jeffrey Jones Dorothy Hall Sharon

[@BitAmericas]

Amazing, I have emails if you’re reading this and would like to talk about a collaboration ✅

[@rilwanj]

This personalisation is impossible, it’s unlikely for you to reach out to 1000+ people, and have a shared experience/interest.

[@JeffTheBackPackTraveler]

That 3rd email was cringe af 🤮🤮

[@Tonu]

We lived to day when YC promotes spam.

[@chriswilfrid]

💌 800:1 👤