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Writing a Cold Email Template for Venture Capital Investors

Alexander Jarvis
Writing a Cold Email Template for Venture Capital Investors

Tl;dr: You need to raise money and know you should have warm intros but you have no network. Now you need to reach out to investors with a cold email template. Your chances of getting a response are low, but you can improve them if you write your email properly. In this blog, we go through the ins and outs of writing a cold email. I will share some old email examples that worked and will share a cold email template I have written for you (of course). I’m going to help you learn to think and make interactions more effective with any cold email you write. Let’s do it!

You have started your fundraising and now you need to open up your funnel by populating it with investors. But you need to access investors the right way.

You have read that you need to have warm introductions to investors (Read this!) and that makes total sense!

There is a catch though.

You literally don’t know anyone and you don’t have the time to build your network presently (Note: You HAVE to make the time, buddy).

So the last resort is cold outreach. Only, what are the in and outs of spamming investors? I’m sure you would like a cold email template for partnership.

If that is the case, this blog is for you. I’ll tell you what to do, and what not to do and give you some examples that can work.

Be warned, your mileage from cold outreach is going to vary a lot.

I say this a lot, but fundable startups are fundable. If you don’t have enough to grab investors by email, this whole exercise is futile and you are better off investing time in getting traction and then doing fundraising later.

Just saying.

Does cold email outreach work?

In short, it can. It is generally a waste of time.

Two examples of why you shouldn’t spam send cold emails from fellow Quora Top Writers:

There are people who get meetings with investors through spam (That’s what it is) and even have been funded through the process.

It is just the exception, not the rule!

The three examples of successful funding through cold email are all from Mark Cuban

The people who generally get responses from cold emails (Excluding Mark, who seems to be an outlier):

I’m going to admit to you that I have cold-emailed investors in the past. I have a pretty large network, but I, of course, don’t know everyone. I was raising for a fintech company and wanted to get in touch with some corporate VCs. I had around 25 shared connections, but have reached out to my contacts, they either they didn’t respond fast enough, or said “I’m not best placed to make an intro. We met briefly at an event.” Pointless introductions are in fact almost worst than a cold approach in my opinion.

Linkedin is your friend

Linkedin is going to be key for your cold email outreach. You are going to be able to learn about VCs including:

But you can also use it to reach out to people.

When doing cold outreach I try Linkedin first and email second. Why?

LinkedIn can show you have shared connections, so there is some social proof. The InMail goes to their inbox and their Linkedin messages. If they use LinkedIn, there is a better chance of getting noticed. Now, I have no empirical data to back up what is better. I tend to use my judgment as to what the best approach is.

However, watch out as there are a lot of people that are not active on LI (Mainly senior people). In which case, find their email.

How do you tell if LI is a waste of time?:

If they don’t respond on LI, I email them a week later.

Note: Adding people and adding a note is my last ditch attempt (Never add without a note you numpty!).

What if you can’t get in touch with the partner you want?

If I know the Partner at a firm but I can’t seem to get to them, what I do is approach them tangentially. There are two paths:

How to think about cold emails

You need to understand your prey to make cold emails work.

So let me introduce you to investors:

Now let’s introspect on you:

That was pretty harsh, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was meant to be. I want you to take this cold email seriously.

Each cold email should take you a minimum of 5 minutes. It may take you hours. That is going to add up, so prioritize people!

Ok, I’m going to teach you a really important concept. It needs to become your mantra.

Escalation of commitment

I do not care about you now. The more I get to know and like you, I will care more. I will spend more time getting to know you, the more I like you.

The first interaction needs to grab attention and ‘leave em wanting more’.

The first meeting is the first date. The investor is learning the ropes of your business.

Every additional meeting is to then learn more and more.

If you can’t grab my attention in the first cold email, it’s over before it began.

Think of it this way. If you were an investor and you got  50 emails in a day, and you responded to one email, why would it be yours?

Yes, every other startup is your competition for investor time and money. Hopefully, you are understanding how all the details in your outreach are forming a picture for why you are the one in 50 to even get an email response.

Anatomy of a cold outreach email

There are three parts that you want to think about:

  1. Content
  2. Structure
  3. Personalisation

Content

The content is what sells you. It is what gets someone (if they read your email) to respond to you.

There are things that you need to touch on in this email, these include:

You only need to say enough to get them to want to know more. I’m going to keep repeating that as it is important. You DO NOT have one shot to say everything in your cold email outreach NOR in your pitch deck! I keep having to explain this to founders when I do decks at Perfect Pitch Deck.

Structure

The appearance and ease by which one can parse your cold email impact your conversion rate. If your cold outreach emails is not approachable, no one will even read it.

You want to be as structured as possible in your cold email to make it easy to read. Bullet points, bolding in headers, some white space, t-shaped email structure, lack of paragraphs aid in this.

Don’t make your email an essay! No one wants to read it. Leave em wanting to know more! Shorter is read. Longer is not read.

Personalisation

Finally, illustrating to investors that you are reaching out to them specifically matters in passing the ‘why the feck did I get yet another email‘ filter.

You cover this by mentioning their name, firm, deals they have done, as well as random shite like you met at an event, you have a Shiba too, or your mothers go to the same church (whatever you can work with).

Those are the headlines. Now we are going to get into more detail.

What should be in an email – how to draft a cold email?

Start with what you do

You get a normal sentence… maybe two, max! Less is more. Get the actual core across. If you aren’t sure how to write a short pitch summary, read this blog on how to make writing a startup description easy.

Your goal is for the investor to have a decent idea of what your startup does and what the sector is so they can filter for interest. If you do healthcare and reach out to a SaaS investor, they can delete your dumb email fast.

Mention the problem you solve

Either in the second part of your description, or the next sentence (sentence!) explain who you solve a problem for and why it sucks for them. You want to explain this in terms of the problem a customer has that an investor can understand (Don’t use jargon).

Why did you reach out to this investor specifically?

Investors know many founders spam every investor in your cold email list in the hope naive hope of getting a response. Being very specific about each and every investor shows that you put in some time thinking about that investor and so will give you a shot.

The best best cold call emails mention:

Traction time

Traction is what investors care about. If you don’t have any, this is going to be tough for you. You are going to have to have some to tell a story that intrigues them.

How much you are raising and stage

Investors want to know how much you are raising so they can again triage. Are you raising $500k, or $25m series-B? Tell them we are raising “$2-2.5m series-A”.

More detail in the deck

You have a line which says you have attached the pitch deck to learn more. Simple. I write “Kindly find the pitch deck attached”.

What do you want?!?!?!?

Make it clear what the ask is. If you reach out to an investor they know you want money, right? Excuse the reference, but if you go to a strip club, the strippers are waiting for a dance. You just need to say the word ‘dance’.

Say how much you are raising and ask for the meeting to progress. Do not be shy. You are reaching out for a dance, I mean a transaction.

Next, we are going to talk about some of the details of what to do and what not to do.

How to structure your cold call email template (The basics)

Personalise the name

Your cold email will be more effective if you add anything that is unique to the recipient in an introductory sentence or ask them a question that you know is relevant to them.

Personalisation has been shown to increase response rates.

Personalise the subject header

Short and to the point is what you want to aim for. According to Campaign Monitor, 65 characters is the sweet spot for email subject lines.

Before your recipient can read your email, they need to open it. Choosing the right email subject line greatly affects the chances that your recipient opens your email. Write something like “RAISE: SaaS, 10% WoW on growth, CS Stanford grads, $500k raise”. It’s a bit better than writing “Startup name” which no one has heard of.

Add social proof

Who do you know on Linkedin? “Socially, we know 25 of the same folk on Linkedin”… though that begs the question why you didn’t get an intro?

Build trust with your recipient by using existing customers as evidence that your product works. Include a recent, measurable, positive result that your product has had on an existing customer. “We recently signed Sony, Facebook and Flexport as pilot customers.”

Use whatever you have!

Bullet points

Bullets are structured. I like them a lot. When you are making a series of points, you want to use bullets. I use them ALL the time.

Note the bold headers and the bullets.

Be short

No one wants to read long emails, and studies seem to back this as they have shown that the average person spends 10 seconds reading an email. Keep your cold email short to increase the chances that your recipient will read it in its entirety.

How do you know if an email is too long? Simply put, it should fit on, or be less than a viewable screen (i.e. no scrolling).

The probability of you getting a response from an investor, mathematically is: 1/ (Length of the message)

Be specific

Why are you reaching out to them… specifically? I love you for your money is generally not endearing, despite what your ex-girlfriend from Russia says.

Typically you want them because:

Say something like “I love your blog. I’ve learned so much about SaaS sales tactics. I would love to have you as our partner guiding us!” in cold outreach emails.

Call to action

Always provide an action that the recipient can take in the last sentence of a cold email. Examples include: scheduling a phone call, visiting a website, replying to a question, or signing up for your service.

“Let me know if you are interested?” is a lame way to end an email. Better to be specific about the outcome.

Example:

End with your name

“Hi John- My name is Alexander.” No shit Sherlock. You say that in closing. You do not need to say it upfront when you send cold emails. This is not something that pros do in any part of their life.

Tips on sending cold emails

Keep the message simple

If you have a complex business with a few lines, don’t share them all. You just need to say the absolute minimum to get their attention. You do not want them to be thinking “what exactly do these guys do? Sounds like a lot.”

Schedule your email delivery time

The time that you send your email will also affect your open rates. A study of email open rates (Best Time to Send Email Backed By 10 Data-Driven Studies) summarised that Tuesday & Thursday are the best days to send emails, with 10am & 8pm the best time of day.

Use bold text

You can use bold to make a point or to structure your information better. I prefer for structuring as founders typically bold stupid shite like “we have the best team”.

Use bold in structure (with bullets) like this:

Use dollars

Unless you are only reaching out to Indian investors, don’t use Rupees. No one can convert that to USD. Use USD unless you are German/French and EUR is fine (It’s only 10% different anyway). Indian investors understand Dollars too.

Read this blog: Use dollars in your startup and financial model

Plain text email

Don’t spend any time making a HTML email with images. Not only is your email less likely to get through the spam filter, but it will seem like a marketing email. Keep your email in plain text and simple. The most complex thing should be a hyperlink.

Always attach your pitch deck in a cold email  outreach

If an investor is interested you want them to be able to utilize that interest immediately to learn more about you. Meaning, attach your deck in case they will read it!

If you are worried about an investor sharing your deck, don’t reach out to them in the first place.

You have two options:

Do not ask investors to sign an NDA!

Sentences are better than paragraphs with cold outreach email templates

Never make an email look like a wall of text. I get emails from clients offering to pay me $5k and I literally ignore their emails as I honestly can’t be fecked to read them. I’m not joking.

Look at how I write my blogs. There are more sentences than there should be because I make it easier to parse (hopefully!). I really try not to use paragraphs. Key to this is one idea per line.

Part of this is also using bullet point as I have mentioned before. You want to make an email ‘appear’ easy to read by how you structure with white space. I think about this every time I send an email.

Use data

I don’t fricking trust you! I honestly don’t give a shite about your ‘mission’.

Use numbers and be specific (with few words). If you have positive metrics, show them. I’ll find out if you are lying, but I LOVE data. It feels like you are real and data-driven.

What not to do in your cold call email templates

Don’t use a Gmail address

You are raising money for your company. If you are sending from a Gmail account it immediately flags you are super early stage and may not even have bought a domain name. Impressions matter and this is a really easy one for you to deal with.

Never write an essay

NO ONE wants to read your essay. Investors have little time and a lot of emails to conquer. Less is far more. You want to escalate commitment with a little detail, so you get the chance to share more information.

Never mail merge / bulk process outreach

There are not 20 million investors to spam. Investors will notice immediately if you are ‘saving time’ by spamming investors in a batch. It’s just too risky.

Spend time curating each and every outreach email you do.

Never write ‘Hey,’

‘hey,’ or ‘Hello,’ without their name screams a lack of attention to detail and mass spam. Use their first name.

I get a lot of people doing this to me for non-investment reasons and I immediately think the founders are lazy and not taking reaching out to me seriously. You’re emailing me at alexanderjarvis.com. What the frick do you think my name is, dude?

For the love of god… spell their name!

People care about their name. Dale Carnegie wrote:

“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language…Using a person’s name is crucial, especially when meeting those we don’t see very often. Respect and acceptance stem from simple acts such as remembering a person’s name and using it whenever appropriate….We can make people feel extremely valued and important by remembering their name.”

Aaaand you are going to spell their name wrong? Yes, people do this.

If you get this wrong you proved you did not give a shite. Most will delete your email straight away.

Never ask for coffee

Everyone hates being asked for coffee. Mike Butcher (Editor at TC) wrote on FB last week that “The world would be a better place if founders stopped asking me for a fucking coffee and just got to the point!” (I wrote that, but 95% close)

Never ask to:

Don’t supplicate yourself

Don’t write any salutation with a title such as Mr. ‘Mr. Alex’, ‘Mr. Jarvis’. Don’t do it. You want to come across at their level. Furthermore, remove any content that is self-deprecating. You want a healthy dose of confidence (but no arrogance).

The only exception might be in say Germany or Switzerland if you are emailing anal people (likely in healthcare sector) who have doctorates. Some of these people expect the ‘Dr. John’ thing. You probably know if you should or not already. Just don’t use titles otherwise.

Also, my guess is it’s ok in India since I get a lot of Indians emailing me like that. I actually don’t know though. If you’re Indian, tell me in the comments so I’m not ignorant and I will update the blog.

Actually, do the same if you are German etc. Interested to know!

Don’t use jargon

This email needs to be easy to read. Things like ARR are OK for a SaaS investor… but there are angels who don’t know what ARR means. I’m not kidding. I had an investor ask me to write a blog to clear up MRR, booking, billings etc.

Don’t say you are an AI, Blockchain platform that leverages AR… I actually had a founder email me with some BS like this and they did none of it. They were a food delivery company.

MMC released research that 40% of AI startups that pitched them did nothing with AI. You are only fooling yourself.

Write a lame ass subject header in a solicitation email template

My friend Patrick at Toba Capital mentioned this one, which is hilarious actually and didn’t think to add: Lengthy/cheesy/silly title (example: “Is Toba Capital ready to help us change the world???”).

Don’t be that chick.

Know how to spell and use grammar, good

You just lose credibility. Do I really need to explain this?

I’m dyslexic, but how many errors are you going to find in any of my long-ass blogs? No excuses. Show you care and have attention to detail.

Who am I kidding, there are some…

DON’T SHOUT

Never use CAPS in business communication.

You will see I occasionally do it in these blogs. It’s to make a point though and usually max 3 words. You will frankly scare investors if you do.

Rely too much on cold email templates

Your email outreach template needs to be unique to you and not of that made by someone else. You can learn from the best practice, but don’t just use someone elses’.

Don’t stalk

My final do not here is not to be a freak.

If you do not get a response after 1-2 weeks. Follow up in a logical manner, with ideally an update on the business (“We have closed 50% of the round“). You can then send an email 2 weeks later (with another positive update on the round) to see if you can hook them again.

If you email every day for 5 weeks with “Why didn’t you respond, you are rude” or some lame ass shite like that you are never getting a dime from them. Ever.

Founders in startup land have somehow developed this entitlement mentality that is nauseating. It will get you nowhere.

Now I’m going to show you some examples.

Example of a founder trying and failing… then succeeding

Allie Janloch, Founder of Mapistry wrote on Medium the following example of a cold outreach after briefly meeting an investor at an event. She shares some of her learnings on the best cold email templates.

On the plus side, I made the email somewhat personal and mentioned something that he had talked about during the event. But a lot is missing. I didn’t explain what Mapistry does, I alluded to it, but didn’t provide a clear explanation. In the second paragraph, I was pretty self-deprecating, which looking back at, I hate. I didn’t brag about our progress; I mentioned our MRR but essentially said “our traction is pretty lame, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to talk to me now,” which might be true, but why did I say it? Finally, my ask is awful. “Can I reach out to you in a few months…” That isn’t an actionable ask. Plus, I didn’t follow up in a few months! Overall the email comes off as unconfident and vague.

Two years later, I was ready to make a real pitch. I had worked on my confidence, my social anxiety, and Mapistry had made a ton of progress. But I still didn’t have anyone to make that warm introduction to Jason, whom I really wanted Jason to invest in Mapistry.

I started by putting together a template email that I used whenever I was emailing an investor cold. I shared this template with lots of mentors and got feedback. This was not a quick email I threw together. I spent hours and hours honing the template.

Next, for each investor I emailed, whether it was an intro or cold, I modified the template to personalize it for them. For Jason, who was my number one choice for an investor, I spent a couple of hours researching and putting together the later part of the email. Here is the final product:

If you want to learn from her learnings, you can check out her blog here.

Jason lemkin, the recipient said:

It does a good job of summarizing the opportunity, early customers and traction, growth profile, and market size. Perhaps just as importantly, it is truly personalized.

Also for me at least, it’s low drama. “Do you have any time the week after next?” The confident and relatively data-rich but low drama emails work best. Knowing there’s a little time makes it much less risky to meet a founder you’ve barely met before and dig in.

Example of an immediate response to a cold email sample

This investor, Ted Serbinski says in a blog that “I get a lot of email. I mean a lot. Close to 100,000 emails last year” (Which sounds BS if it pertains to startups).

He shares an example of a cold email that he liked:

I responded immediately to this email. And I’ve traded a handful of emails with Nate. I’ve reposted this email with permission of the author to share with others.

Hi Ted,

I hope you are having a fantastic day! My name is Nate, and I’m a co-founder at XS. I am reaching out because you backed Miso Media, which I love, and I wanted to get your advice about our new company since we have just opened our seed round. To thank you for your time, if you’re interested in surfing and you find yourself back in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’d love to give you a lesson, or more traditionally, buy you a cup of coffee.

I know your time is really valuable so in the spirit of the 30 second pitch here is an overview of XS.

XS is creating a mobile community for action sports enthusiasts. Our app is a place where people can view and share high quality user generated & professional photos/videos. As we grow, we’ll leverage user behavior and information to sell discounted sporting goods. Think Instagram/Pinterest meets Fab for sports.

  1. Pitch deck: https://joinus.xsapp.co
  2. 3 min pitch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MgExhuSJsw

Thanks for your time and I look forward to meeting you in the near future! Best,

Nate Mihalovich Co-founder, XS www.xsapp.co

How one founder did it

Brett Fox is a fellow Quora writer. These are his thoughts on the best cold email template:

I can show the cold email pitch I used to get meetings with VCs. It had about a 20% success rate.

There are three steps that allowed us to have success with cold emails. Here are the steps:

Step 1: The first thing I would do was make sure I was targeting people who were investing in our product area.

It seems obvious. But you’ve got no chance if you target a random group of VCs.

So do your homework and make sure the firm is investing in your business area, and you identify the partner that actually does investments in your business area.

Step 2: Make your subject line to the point.

In our case, we were making Analog ICs. So my subject line was: Analog IC investment opportunity.

That’s it. You can’t trick people into opening your email. They’re either interested or not.

Step 3: Make your message short.

Introduce yourself and tell them what you’re doing. A key point is don’t try and sell the deal in the email.

You want to provide enough information to let them know what you’re about, but not so much that you’re trying to pitch in an email.. The goal is to get a meeting or a phone call.

So, I did something like this:

Hi Name,

My name is Brett Fox. I am the CEO of Touchstone Semiconductor.

Touchstone is a high-performance Analog IC company (think Linear and Maxim) that achieves profitability with minimal funding.

The founding team, including the design team, are alumni of Maxim. The designers average over 20 years of experience.

We have a term sheet from a very good VC on Sand Hill Road, and we are looking for an additional investor. Please let me know how you would like to proceed.

Best regards,

Brett Fox

You can follow the same process, and modify the email I developed for your business.

OK, me again. So his email is not great and doesn’t follow the best practice I taught you. But the bar for a response is binary- reply or no reply. Who cares about great?

The thing going for Brett is that he says he has a term sheet from a VC. That’s all a VC wants to hear!

Thoughts from a VC and a real example of a cold email template

Konstantin Vinogradov, VC at Runa Capital shares his thoughts:

Raising $1m with $300k soft from angels so far. Looking for $500k from you which is your sweet spot according to your Storm site investment thesis.

Kindly find our deck attached.

I’m in Palo Alto in three weeks time on Tuesday and Wednesday (6/7 June). If of interest, I’d love to show you the product and take you through our business.

Best,

Alexander

My thoughts on the cold email template

So this isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough, right? Let me share my thinking:

I wrote that quickly, but I think it’s good enough to get a response if he is interested in my traction. Or rather, enough to get him to open the pitch deck and learn more. I only want small commitments from him. If he doesn’t like the deck, I’m screwed anyway. If he says no I save time and I keep plugging away on more investors.

Conclusion on cold email templates

Get warm intros. Read the blog I mentioned on how to do that. It makes a big difference!

If you can’t then you can do the cold email thing. Remember to write for each specific investor to give you the most potential conversion. You are going to get a lot of nos and no responses, so play the volume game. Maybe 100 angels for each $500k.

Raising sucks. If you need to do it, do it properly.

If you want to learn about how to raise, book a call with me and I can teach you more.

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