cold-email

name	cold-email
description	Draft a cold email that gets a reply from someone influential — an investor, founder, hiring manager, podcast host, or potential collaborator. Use whenever the user wants to reach out to someone they don't know personally.

Cold email

A cold email is an invitation to a trade. The recipient replies when the trade excites them and ignores it when it doesn't. No subject-line trick, length optimization, or warm intro rescues a weak trade, and a strong trade survives clumsy writing. So most of the work happens before any drafting: find the real win-win.

Find the trade

Three things have to be clear before writing — who the user is emailing, what they want, and what they can offer that makes saying yes worthwhile. The third is where people stall. Dig for it rather than accepting a vague answer.

Ground it in what the recipient actually values, not what the user assumes they value. What are they working on right now? What have they said publicly that they need help with? Many influential people state this outright on their site or feed. When the user can't answer, research beats guessing.

Then state the trade plainly — what each side gets — and check with the user that both halves are genuinely appealing. A shaky trade is a signal to go back to the trade, not to write more persuasively.

Draft

The body — everything between the greeting and the sign-off — stays under 150 words. This is the one hard constraint. Influential people scan in 15–30 seconds, and every word past the point where they get it costs reply probability. If the trade needs more than 150 words to explain, it isn't sharp enough yet.

Four principles, woven together rather than stacked as separate paragraphs:

Competency — compressed proof they should keep reading: a known network, a hard number, a mutual connection who suggested the intro. Not a resume.

The ask — what the user wants and why it's worth the recipient's time, tied to something they're actively working on. Concrete beats open-ended: a specific thing to look at, a specific amount of time.

Transparent self-interest — why the user wants this and how it fits their trajectory. Hiding the motive reads as untrustworthy; pretending to pure altruism reads worse.

Extra effort — one line pointing at something concrete that already exists: a brief, a prototype, an analysis, offered for the taking. An offer to build something later doesn't count.

Cut

Count the words. Over 150, cut: merge sentences covering the same ground, drop qualifiers, drop pleasantries, drop meta-commentary about the email itself, and compress any list longer than two items into a pointer to the full version.

Tone check: an equal proposing a collaboration, not a fan asking a favor. No flattery opener, no "thanks for your time" close.

Show the draft with its word count and iterate with the user.