As an introverted dev trying to sell I often assume silence means they don't care and they hate me. I've learnt this is almost always wrong - the recipient is typically just busy or indecisive. Stay polite/respectful/human but keep at them and don't let the void kill you.

Still figuring out the details but getting over that was quite a profound feeling and has turned out pretty useful in life generally

I'm fine with ignoring unsolicited emails and politely declining phone calls.

- Formatting is useful, and should be used as needed, especially headings and, as indicated, color. Don't become a plaintext zealot. It's not a good hill to die on.

- Emails, like all communication, should be as short as possible -- but no shorter. Brevity itself is not a useful thing.

- The 2nd bullet is, about the request as a distinct paragraph, is good. A proper email that requests action should make that requested action VERY clear, along with expectations and ideally a timeline.

- Contrary to this assertion, email is actually an EXCELLENT forum for discussion in the right context. This is because email is easy to archive, and leaves a trail of the discussion. It's not the ONLY venue, but it's very useful, and in my career has been commonly used as such.

* Overtesting. I have received multiple emails from different people at the same company with the exact same subject line ("Hey Evan, let's chat"). I am sure this subject works better than the other ones that they tried, but a little variation would make me feel like I am more than a conversion goal.

* Being vague about the purpose of "chatting". If an engineer emails me and saying he or she "would love to hear more about X", where X is something I've done, it's not immediately apparent that they actually don't give a shit about X unless they can hire me. Don't be bashful, just say your company is hiring. At least when a recruiter (or founder) emails, I know what page we're on.

For a software dev, however, not so much. I think it could come off as insincere and/or spammy.

If I'm emailing a company about a job, its because I'm particularly interested in working there. Therefore, I really try to be as personal and specific as I can when reaching out to the company. Especially in the initial email.

Otherwise I'd risk misrepresenting myself.

1) Keep emails short. I set a 200 word max on all emails. If you can't say what you need to say in 200 words, schedule a meeting to discuss. If you have to send long documents, send a 2-3 sentence summary. Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them... in 200 words. (=

2) Keep detailed time records and make them available to the client on-demand. They paid for it, might as well show them what they are getting. Be honest... if your team wasted 4 hours trying to make sense of a BS email from the client... make sure they understand that.

3) Being on time and inclusive; inviting them to daily standup meetings with the team, and posting notes from those standup meetings in case they (or anyone else) can't be there. Easy with a Google Sheet to just type a few notes each day during standup. I don't have any tools for the team that the client can't access, or hasn't been given a rundown on how we utilize it.

I've also learned the hard way to do my own homework. I will never reply to a cold email until I have had a chance to look up details about the company, the recruiter themselves, etc.

Or conversely, write it to the most junior person. Sometimes having to explain context also helps.

* Plain text

* Directly addressed to me from name@company.com

* 3-4 sentences max, slightly personalized

* Optionally have a link to the company career page/job listing (better if the raw link is pasted instead of embedded in text, to save me the time hover-checking it).

I'm more likely to reply because it feels like there's a real person on the other end that "hand-wrote" this email. Not some amorphous system that crawled my LinkedIn and sent me an automated message. Kudos to recruiters that are doing this — doing the thing that doesn't scale to get an edge.

Like it's either

"Dear Sir, I am writing to acknowledge that you RSVP'ed yes to our calendar invitation" or

"sorry about missing the meeting. we didn't end up making a power point, so we'll just send you a couple drawings our friend did of a different thing that's pretty close to what we were thinking of doing."

* Don't send a "Hi are you getting this email, reply to confirm and then I'll send over what you asked for, so that it doesn't go to spam" - just go right to sending the info

* Minimize the usage of GPT to fluff up your email. It's not a dealbreaker, but it's often pretty easy to tell, and generally all it does is make it harder for me to skim the email for things that aren't fluff.

* Write it in your personal honest style. This way the client can get a bit of a sense for you, and it's more likely to be a good long term match. "Write like you talk" - or write it in whatever style you'd use if you sent them a weekly update about what you worked on that week.

* In general, optimize for helping the client see you accurately, because this will help you find clients that are long term fits. You can obfuscate your style and then clients who might love you and want to work with you long term won't realize it, and clients that won't want to work with you long term might not realize that and then you've invested time into something that didn't become a long term working relationship.

* Consider including a Loom video where you introduce yourself, 30-180 seconds, a generic one - not a custom one for each client - have a project you worked on in the background and show it live.

* If you you don't have a style, consider using the HN style of concise and clear. Think of the style of HN - it's like craigslist. Clear, concise, barebones, and it works. That's kinda what I hope for when freelancers reach out to me. If I wanted long and fluffy I'd post on a forum that valued long and fluffy. But HN's style is more fast facts, bullet points.

I have two (related) criteria for good cold emails:

1) The sender should do a little bit of research on me/my fund (Susa Ventures). Susa is a seed stage fund, and our website lists some of the things we look for. For example: "We invest in founders and companies that are building competitive moats using data, network effects and/or economies of scale." A cold email that makes it clear why we might be a good fit -- e.g. because a company is building a unique dataset -- is much more likely to get attention than something generic that was clearly bcc'ed to dozens or hundreds of investors.

2) Building on the previous note, some effort to personalize the email goes a long way. I feel uncomfortable not replying to emails -- after all, I don't like it when people don't reply to my emails -- but replies do take time and I'm pretty busy. The rule of thumb I've settled on is that if it's clear that the sender didn't spend 5 minutes to write a targeted email, then I don't feel bad not spending 5 minutes to reply. If someone clearly put in effort, I'll try to reply even if it's not a fit for my fund.

Edit: Also, the email should give a decent sense of what a company does. It should not be too vague (e.g. this is not compelling: "I'm working on some amazing tech. Could you meet me on Thurs at 1pm or 3pm for coffee?") nor should it be too long (i.e. don't send rambling emails that are 3 or 5 or 10 pages long)

As other posters mentioned, a brief, straight-to-the-point subject followed by at most two paragraphs. Personally, I'm not a fan of flowery language either because it sounds a little insincere. There may be cultural differences here.

To Japanese developers, my emails tend to be wordier and often the only form of response seem to be a visit to our site. That's good enough for me, for now.

Not that it's terribly successful, but I usually try to make a (genuine) reference to something the other party has published / written / made before saying something relevant to it like, "for your product X/task X, would you consider trying out something like Y(our product) to see if <benefits> can be realised?"

If it feels like you’ve copied and pasted some mess of tech buzzwords and addressed it to “dear hiring manager” (I get this a lot), then it’s going straight in the bin. Ideally, I’d like to see:

Hi <my actual first name>,

I’m a junior developer trying to break into the industry. I studied x at y, and I’m super interested in <some specific technical thing>. I’m hard-working and I love to learn. Are you available for a chat about this?

Regards,

<your name>

- Technical leadership reaching out. Not a recruiter. HUGE. Do this.

- Personal! Actual knowledge of who you are as a developer. Not just a quick scan of github and then a project name drop. (Literally had this happen to me yesterday. Ick. And soooo obvious.)

- Early appeal to "what's in it for me?" and "who will I work with?" BEFORE the "who are we?" bit.

- Dogfooding in the email. Nice touch.

Downers:

- The popped-collar, Natty Ice tone. Kind of a filters out the non-bros. But I guess it tells you about the company culture...?

- I don't know if this job is remote or local, but if it's local, show me pictures of where I'll work.

I understand why Kyle wasn't receptive (and love the creative response), but this is probably enough to move a lot of people on to that next step of the face to face meeting. Personally, I'd probably do the Hangout just to see. Now if it was Worldstar, that would be a whole other matter.

As soon as I started hiring at my last company, I got a lot of worthless email. Tons of contacts from companies selling low-rent coding. Randos selling things totally irrelevant. People who sent in resumes apparently without even reading my advertisement. Kooks.

That left me generally ill-disposed to anything that looked spammy, thoughtless, or clueless. So if you're going to write directly, make it worth the reader's time. Your email should be smart, clear, and short. You should have read and understood absolutely everything publicly available. And you should be either asking or telling me something that is not already obvious.

Best of all, of course, is that you get somebody to make an introduction. If somebody I already respect is willing to vouch for you, that's worlds better than a cold email out of the blue.