Is this a good cold email?

This morning, I saw a LinkedIn post by Noah Kagan. Noah is the founder of AppSumo, which is likely valued at $500M or higher.

Getting a meeting with him is hard. He's extremely busy and has got important shit to do.

Noah posted this and called it a good cold email. Read it and see for yourself.

It's a great cold email. It has everything the gooroos tell you.

1. It is personal.
2. It has references mutual connections, shared history.  
3. It is short.
4. It has a specific ask.

It's the perfect email. But these are not the things that make it work.

What many would tend to skip is the one single line that makes this email work.

"We have bootstrapped to over $150m in total revenue"

If you remove this line, the rest of the email is irrelevant. This is the grand slam line, it's the only thing that makes this email work. It's the only thing that adds credibility and makes Noah want to meet Arjun.

If Arjun Ohri did not do the difficult task of bootstrapping his business to $150M, his tactics are down the drain.

Beginners fail to recognize this.

They want their cold emails to work because they use all the fancy tactics they find online. The tactics are the easy part. They're what comes AFTER you've done the work, after you're credible. The personal line and specific ask are just icing on the cake. The cake is the work.

People don't want to do the work and think it's the tactics that will help them.

Arjun could've simply eliminated all the fluff and said

Hey Noah,

I was a freshman at Berkeley when I heard your pitch at the first CSBA meeting.

You inspired me to start my company which I've bootstrapped to $150m over the last 8 years. I'm down in Austin on Monday and our 53 mutuals on Facebook tell me we should totally meet!

You down?

Simple. The only thing that matters here is the work that Arjun did. Everything else is just bells and whistles.

Do the boring work.