Ask HN: What do you write in cold emails?

Is your target market developers? Unfortunately, I don't have a helpful solution; I just wanted to say that developers are probably one of the worst possible markets to use email to attract. I think I'm like a lot of developers in that if it isn't already in my spam folder, if I quickly scan the sender and subject and neither completely jumps off the screen at me as something I need to read, I trash it.

I'd approach it like this:

"How can you help me?"

And then have a simple answer, one you wouldn't mind giving a friend or relative, because you genuinely want to help by providing a valuable service.

I see commercials for legal and financial services all the time that say "Get money now" over and over again. I don't really like those commercials but their message is simple and clear.

"Remember when we..."

An introduction, "I have been working on a project and I found your email by ... and I would love to hear some of your feedback as I work to continue to improve it"...

Then a very short paragraph about the startup, a sentence about what it does, three sentences about the process of starting it. Then a personal plea to see if (1) they know anyone it would be useful for (2) they could spare a moment to give some feedback and (3) there is anything you can do to return the favor, but for now here's a special link to get access to the startup and I'm putting your name down so that once I start charging for features you can have a period of time for free.

I would experiment with different approaches, including something very simple: "Can you develop a great advertising app? We've created a marketplace for that. Let me know if you're interested in working with us."

The website might need revision (the "Dear Awesome Developers" post certainly does). You might ask HN about that.

I haven't had much luck reaching out to developers via cold email either. Face-to-face seems to work best. Even phonecalls result in most people activating their anti-sales shields.

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?"

I think quality is better than quantity. Build relationships with folks you are targeting. Take them out to lunch. I know in-person meetings are not something most of us love to do, but they are really important -- especially for the potential user. Get a handful of say 5-10 people that you really want to reach. Listen to them. Solve their problems. Ask them for blurbs. Put the blurbs on your site. Ask them for referrals etc.

This might not be answering your question, but the hundreds of emails approach (at least to me) doesn't seem like the most efficient strategy.

The words 'monetize content" are on the edge of joining the set of words 'viagra britney cheap mortgage now', so I think people are likely to mentally filter/bias against your emails.

Could you post here an example of your cold email?