How To Get Replies

👋 Hey friends

Since my post about coops, we’ve discussed it as a team and have decided to entertain the idea a little more. The concept sounds completely aligned with who we are and what we want as a company. It also helps that Keith’s a huge BJ Frank fan and he was the first person to start a US coop in 1752.

However, we don’t know enough yet to make any decisions and actually execute. Cause that’s the thing about pioneering, there's no one to follow. Even to talk through what being a consumer-coop would look like, we mostly had to just devour REI’s blog and bylaws. And as you can imagine, it’s not really a direct 1-1 between a retail brand and an enterprise software company.

So, we need to talk to people smarter than us about how this works. Luckily, contacting smart people is easier than ever in the digital age. Scour the internet, find emails, and send. The hard part is getting a reply. And by some stroke of luck, I actually have a pretty good track record of getting replies from people who are way out of our league. So, in this post I'm going to share my secret:

Say what you mean and mean what you say…quickly.

Let me show you what I mean with an example email I’m sending to the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy.

Hey Trebor, Aman, & Team,

Okay, a couple things right of the bat. This email is going to pcc@newschool.edu - a generic contact alias. Usually, people would address these as, “To whom it may concern” or something god-awful like that. The point of addressing someone in an email is to form a human connection based on respect.

Starting an email with a generic header is treating the person on the recieving end as an inbox, not as a human. By doing two-seconds of research, I figured out that there are only two people on staff: Aman and Trebor. Writing their names in the header makes it more likely that if they read the email, they’ll feel like I’m truly talking to them.

My name’s Drew - I’m an online creator turned founder of a digital coworking space called Lumastic. For the past two weeks, I’ve been devouring your and the ICDE’s materials on platform cooperatives and our team thinks this structure could be a great path forward for our company and our members.

This first paragraph is designed to humanize me and explain why I’m emailing them. Notice how I let them know that I’m serious and not some rando by saying I’ve consumed the resources on their website and talked with our team. This is important because in the next paragraph, I’m going to ask for their most valuable resource: time.

We’d love to talk to someone at the ICDE regarding some questions about executing these principles and see how we can be helpful in terms of documenting our journey and findings so founders that come after us have more of a basis to go on.

Notice the structure here, “We’d like help and in return we’d like to help you“. I know that this whole system is early and the more case studies and materials they can have of success, the better off their organization is. So, right up front I offer to do that work for them in exchange for the work of sitting down with us.

Thank you for your work,
Drew Lytle
Co-founder, Lumastic
🗓 Schedule A Meeting | 📞 (703) 966-8218

The signature here is very important. The stuff below my name again let’s them know I’m not some rando, but the non-generic sign-off gives me an opportuntiy to again show my respect and admiration without wasting time with another paragraph.

Recap

And that’s it. That’s how I write cold-outreach. Show respect, give context, shoot my shot, and get out. But above all, be authentic. If you’ve got ulterior motives that aren’t in your email - i.e. if you’re lying, people will know. So don’t lie.

Always happy to hear thoughts - slide into my DMs on twitter, or email me.

Until tomorrow.