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Comment by mgl | Hacker News Reader

If you have a product that may generate profit, e.g. a SaaS application targeting businesses, not a money burning consumer-app train (see: twitter or another photo album app) one of the strategies that work is cold emailing:

0. Identify and name your target group, e.g. commercial real estate agents in CA.

1. Find these people on Linkedin using advanced search option and invite them to connect.

2. Once connected you have their e-mail address, so send them a short e-mail (better response rate than InMails) describing the business problem and your solution. Short means 3-5 sentences, no attachments, just try to attract their attention.

3. Don't forget about follow-ups.

4. They will reply if interested and bam, you have a lead! Now it's time to set up a call and go into details.

5. Rinse and repeat. Stay persistent, you should send at least 20+ every day. Track response rates and adjust, you should achieve at least 5-10% easily.

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This is borderline to SPAM, so I think the e-mails should be very personal.

If you have many competitors I am probably getting lot's of these e-mails which means you would have much harder time to get my attention.

Let's say you are a hosting provider, I probably would not like to get an e-mail from you offering me some good price or hard to understand feature of yours, because there are probably lot's of cheap hosting providers out there and every other provider is trying to differentiate themselves somehow. Other than "identifying my problem" you really shouldn't sound like giving me a sales pitch.

But if you noticed that, let's say I have 350ms response time in Asia when it's only 50 in USA and you have some solution for it, I probably will reply you even if I am not going to buy your service right away.

Very good point on "identifying my problem", maybe it's better to be "identifying my specific problem" that nobody else can resolve for me. Thank you.

I'm sort of learning this point from others and trying to apply it to draw people's attention. I showed people that you need to build a private version of the web that stores the only information you are interested in or related to you. And we have a tool to help you create your Private Web with a few clicks. But I failed. Can you please pinpoint out why? The Kickstarter project is here: http://kck.st/JNqv8z

That reminds me of a technique I used when doing freelance Web design. I focused on restaurants with bad websites. I wrote a crawler that searched for restaurants with email addresses on the site, but bad html like font or center tags or flash. I would then email them a sample site with their name and logo inserted programmatically. It got pretty good response.

This is Cool! Actually it was my plan to find local businesses with bad/outdated websites and offer them a "renovation" but I didn't think to do this pragmatically. Thanks for the cool idea :) If I am going to look for some freelance work, I may actually try to imitate your approach.

Yeah, to me some evidence that the person has attempted to understand what I do and why this product would actually help me (considered honestly) is what distinguishes interesting contacts from spam. I'm in academia rather than industry, but I think some at least vaguely similar principles apply.

I get some cold emails that, while slightly disguised, boil down to: "a paper you wrote came up in a Google scholar search for 'Prolog', and we also have a logic and/or rule system that's great, pls see this website and let me know if you want any details on licensing". Those are not usually that interesting, since of course I know there are such systems out there, and can Google for them myself...

On the other hand, if you read in the Future Work section of a paper I wrote something along the lines of, "it'd be great if X existed, but it doesn't seem to", and you think you really have built something meeting the description of X, then emailing me saying so is usually quite interesting and non-generic.

Exactly! This is how I differentiate SPAM from legit e-mails too. I don't mind if somebody is offering me some service or something, why should I? If I have a problem to be solved, I would be happy to get the offer.

You're better of calling RE agents. They do lots of business over the phone, so they're likely to pick up.

If your solution really works, it should be an easy sell.

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