Best Practices for Intros and Emails
Written by and all credit to JL.
In no particular order, these generalities that don’t apply to every case.
Giving intros:
1. In general, double blind is preferable. That means check with both people and give adequate context to each separately before making the intro.
2. Subject line: Amy <> Bob.
3. The more important person’s name should go first. If they are part of a company, it could be appropriate to put that in parenthesis. Amy (Khosla) <> Bob (Slack)
4. In general, make the email body extremely short, depending on formality of the intro/your experience with both parties.
5. call out the next action item explicitly.
Example:
Amy, Bob, please meet! You both have context already. Both of you are amazing people and I think would greatly benefit from a conversation.
Bob, I’ll let you take it from here!
//Signature
OR (more formal)
Amy, I’d like to introduce you to Bob @ Slack. I worked with him back from X and he would love your thoughts on Y.
Bob, Amy is one of the best investors I know, who will be able to give you great feedback on Y. I’ll let you take it from here.
//Signature
Receiving Intros
1. In general, especially if you are reading this guide, you will be the less powerful person in the conversation. That means you should respond first.
2. Responsiveness is important, especially for the first intro email.
3. Shoot for < 2 minute response time. You read that right. 2 minutes. Successful people are on top of their emails.
4. Certainly within 90 minutes, no longer. [Editor note: My take is that it depends on the context and the intro. An alternative guideline is ideally within 10 minutes; if not, within a few hours; if that’s not practical, then within 24 hours. Again, this might depends on the context.]
5. The decision of whether or not to move the intro-er to CC or BCC is dependent on how probable you think it is the person will respond. If high, BCC. If low, CC keeps the social stake high for the person to respond (ie, the person will know CCd person will know that they didn’t respond, therefore feel compelled to respond).
6. Always CC or BCC the intro-er. That way they know you responded and don’t feel that they spent social capital and you let them down by not responding. This is important.
6. Thank the intro-er, give 1–2 sentence context, then get straight to the ask.
7. Separate the above points into paragraphs, which will match how the receiver mentally parses the email.
8. If it was a high stakes intro, send them a separate email/text thanking them :)
9. Email the intro-er after the mtg/etc has happened, so the loop is closed and they know what happened. Keep them updated.
Example:
Thanks Richard! To BCC to save your inbox.
Amy, a pleasure to be introduced.
As Richard mentioned, I’m currently at Slack considering spinning out a really cool product that does X with Y (metric here) growth, and we’re going out to raise soon. While we know we’re not in your space, we’d love to practice pitch you to get feedback on our story, and Richard said you were the best.
Might we be able to find a time late next week?
Bob
General tips for email and entrepreneurship
- This especially applies if you are coming out of school, ie a set of professional norms.
- Response time is super important. Email response time should be < 2 hours 9am-10pm, no exceptions. Aim for <20 mins. [Editor note: My take is that it depends on the context and the intro. An alternative guideline is ideally within 10 minutes; if not, within a few hours; if that’s not practical, then within 24 hours. Again, this might depends on the context.]
- If you have prized/close connections over text/whatsapp/messenger, response time should be <10 mins, aim for <2 mins.
- These timings probably seem extreme. They’re not, especially if you’re trying to hustle/break in. If you’re already well known, you don’t have to do this. But if not, you do.
- Weekends: double the expected response time.
- Be extremely short and crisp.
- Specifically, separate every thought with a paragraph.
- 95% of emails should be <100 words.
- Don’t expect a busy or important person to even respond if it’s > 100 words.
- Shoot for < 60 words.
- Optimize for response vs completeness. Ie ask 1–2 questions, then when they respond ask for a coffee (where you can ask 10). Or ask 1–2, get answers, then ask another 1–2. Much higher probability of getting what you want vs 4–10 questions in one email.
- Superhuman is a great email client. Worth the $, and there is student pricing.
- Use zero inbox method.
- If you don’t use superhuman, use boomerang to set reminders/pings.
- Super busy people: aim to send at 7am so you are at the top of their inbox.
- Use gmail.
- Use a gmail address without numbers. ideally first.last.
- Send decks as PDFs. They show up easily in gmail (what everybody uses) and avoids any formatting issues.
Editor note: See also the book “Don’t Reply All” — highly recommended!