Article

Write Better Subject Lines

Hustle Fund (The Founder Playbook) Free Beginner

Written for the exact founders who are about to cold email investors, so the advice is calibrated to your actual reader: someone scanning a crowded inbox. It walks through brevity, personalization, and sounding like a friend rather than a pitch, with founder-specific examples instead of generic sales copy.

  • Stay under about 60 characters, most inboxes truncate longer subject lines anyway.
  • Reference the recipient's name, company, or recent work rather than your own pitch.
  • Personalized, casual subject lines to qualified prospects vastly outperform generic mass-email subject lines.

The question it answers

  1. What should my very first cold email subject line actually say?

Read with it

  1. This is the short, canonical essay that names the exact trap: people switch into a stiff, impressive-sounding written voice... paulgraham.com Essay Write Like You Talk Paul Graham
  2. This is the canonical structure for the investor cold email, written by a YC partner who reads them from the other side. It is... Y Combinator Startup Library Essay · 5 min read How to Cold Email Investors Aaron Harris
  3. Once you have a list of people to reach cold, this shows you how to write emails they actually answer. Seven concrete... Y Combinator Startup Library Video · ~33 min How to Convert Customers With Cold Emails Aaron Epstein
  4. Podcast · 50 min How Khadim Batti Built Whatfix Into a Global SaaS Leader (500 cold emails to first customers) Khadim Batti with Prime Venture Partners
  5. A short, direct conversation between two founders on when cold email works, who to send to, and how to write the subject line... The Startup Chat with Steli and Hiten Podcast · 18 min The Startup Chat, Episode 014: Cold Email Steli Efti and Hiten Shah
  6. This collection was built for asking strangers for small favors like introductions and advice, which is a gentler version of... 80,000 Hours Article The Best Email Scripts for Cold-Emailing Benjamin Todd
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →