💰 The Ultimate Guide to Cold Emailing VCs

Toby Egbuna
April 4th, 2024

Hello! Welcome to my newsletter - Finessing Funding💰. Every other week, I’ll be sharing stories, strategies, and ideas about funding for your startup. Get Finessing funding delivered to your inbox every week 👇🏾

Earlier this year, I made a LinkedIn post about the two most common ies that VCs tell:

1. They accept cold emails

2. They invest with conviction

We’ll tackle #2 another time, but today, let’s talk about cold emailing. I got some great feedback from folks like Josh who claim that plenty of VCs respond to cold emails, but they need to be good cold emails.

So that got me thinking, what makes a good cold email?

I hit up a few VC friends (thanks Dez and Evelysse) to get the answer. Let's dive in 👇🏾

The three ways to get in front of VCs:

When fundraising, there are three ways to get meetings with venture capitalists:

1. Warm introductions

   Pros:

   • Build rapport by getting an introduction from a trusted source

   • Potential to get directly in front of the general partner who makes the investment decisions instead of having to go through an analyst

   Cons:

   • Warm intros are hard to come by if you don’t know anyone who can connect you with people at the firm

2. Applying for funding on the fund’s website

   Pros:

   • Gets you directly in front of a fund with no barrier to access

   Cons:

   • Hard to know if anyone actually reads the application

   • You probably won’t get an update if the fund passes

3. Cold emails

   Pros:

   • Gets you directly in front of a fund with no barrier to access

   Cons:

   • Investors receive tens of these a day, so it’s hard to stand out

I will say this now and probably forever: the best way to get in front of VCs is through a warm introduction. It’s just how the game is played.

With that being said, you have to be versatile. Treat fundraising like sales; try every route to get in front of a fund (i.e. the customer in a sales process).

How to write a bad cold email

It’s easier to start with what not to do. If you want to make sure that none of your cold emails get opened, follow this guidance.

1. Use a bad subject line

The subject line is what makes people open your message. If you make it too long or too generic, people will just delete your email.

Instead, keep your subject line short (less than 60 characters is ideal), and mention your most impressive traction point.

Compare these subject lines for our pre-seed round for Chezie:

1. Future of work startup raising pre-seed round

2. Chezie - Employee upskilling platform - $151k ARR bootstrapped - pre-seed

#2 is much easier to read and stands out in an email inbox. #1 could be spam 😶.

2. Send a generic email

Investors aren’t dumb; they can tell when they’re receiving an email blast that’s gone out to 100 other VCs. This isn’t a newsletter; this is you asking for someone to believe in you enough to give you hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Treat it as such.

Instead of sending an email blast, consider adding a personal touch to each message. Mention a similar investment the fund has made or a social post that the investor made that resonated with you. This is optional, but it just might get you a response.

3. Make it too long

VCs spend about three minutes looking through an entire pitch deck on average, so you can assume that you have between 10-20 seconds for them to skim through your email. Get to the point. Put the eye-catching stuff like your traction, team, or industry (if you’re building something super relevant to the investor; more on this in point #4).

Instead of writing a novel, make your email easy to read and concise by using bullet points and formatting to draw attention to the important details. You can woo the investor with your communication skills after you’ve gotten his attention and secured the meeting.

4. Email the wrong investors

Please. Please. Please.

Do your research before you send a cold email. The best way to guarantee that you don’t get a response is to email a healthcare VC about the B2B AI startup you’re working on.

Instead of emailing investors randomly, find investors that are a good fit for your company based on the big three categories:

1. Stage

2. Location

3. Industry

All three of these need to match before you decide to send that email. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time and that of the investor.

Cold email example

I was going to share the email examples that Dez and Evelysse sent me, but even after scrubbing them for sensitive information, it still felt like a breach of trust for the founders sending them.

Instead, here’s a cold email that I sent during our pre-seed raise that I now realize was just okay:

The Bad

• At this time, our traction was bootstrapped. I should’ve mentioned that in this note.

• This is clearly an email blast as it doesn’t include anything that lets the investor know that it wasn’t. I could’ve taken more time to find something specific to each investor and added that to the email.

• My subject line sucks. It was so generic; there are 1000 future of work startups out there.

The Good

• I shared our traction in a list format so an investor could easily skim it.

• I made a clear ask with a link to my pitch deck for the investor to dive in if they were interested and/or schedule a call.

The template you should use for your cold emails

As always, here’s a template that you can use for your cold email outreach to VCs:

Hi <investor first name>,

I’m <your name>, Founder of <your company>. <insert your one-liner>.

I saw that you <insert personal note - optional>.

Since launching in <date, year> we’ve had great traction:

1. Traction point 1

2. Traction point 2

3. Traction point 3

We’re raising <insert round details>. You can read through our deck here: <insert Docsend link>.

If you’re interested in learning more, let me know and we can talk on a call.

Best,

<your name>

Using this template, here’s how I would update my cold email:

Hi <name>!

My name is Toby Egbuna, and I’m one of the Co-founders of Chezie (http://www.chezie.co/).

We're building a talent platform for employers to retain and upskill employees through employee resource groups.

We’ve had some significant traction since closing our pre-seed in January 2023, including:

1. Increasing revenue 185% from $136.5k to $390.3k ARR

2. 20 enterprise customers including Docusign, Greenhouse, Chegg, and Trimble.

3. Average contract value up from $16.5k to $19.5k

I'm raising a bridge round of $500k to hire a Head of Engineering to accelerate product development and reach $1M ARR. You can read through our deck here: https://docsend.com/link

If you’re interested in learning more, let me know and we can schedule some time. Hope to hear from you soon.

Best,

Toby

Summary

The best way to get in front of a venture capital investor is and will continue to be, through a warm introduction. With that being said, don’t be afraid to send a cold email. Just make sure the email is easy to read, relevant, and exciting enough for the investor to open.