🧊✉️🧊✉️

I have a friend who was the best student in his class. Graduated from Stanford, interned at Google and now can't find a decent job anywhere.

If this doesn't scare you, it should.

But what it also says is that you don’t need any of these qualifications as much anymore. Because what you do have is your story that is authentic to you.

You just need to craft it in a meaningful way - not something like “yeah when I was a kid I fell of a rock which taught me persistence and teamwork”

So how do you craft your story?

Let me show you the sauce

1 Cold Email That Worked

Now this is a very clear example of how the personal story worked,

With his mom using Asana during covid etc. This is authentic to the person sending the email, no one else can just copy paste it.

But what if you didn’t have that specific personal relation to the software? Let me show you how you can find what makes yours unique:

2 Reasons Why

Instead of 2 reasons I’ll give you 2 things to do.

1) Write a blurb

set a 15-20 min timer and write down everything that comes to your mind about your story, why you got to where you are, what you were interested in and where that took you.

here’s an example:

This is was mine a couple of months ago:

2) From this blurb, find 1 or 2 sentences that would be exclusive and authentic to you

For our high school friend above, it was going from using AI for homework to publishing a research paper in the world's biggest NLP conference.

But even if he didn’t have that amazing outcome, his story of playing around with LLMs because he was genuinely fascinated by them is what makes him interesting

For me, it was using cold email as my weapon to get into rooms I didn’t belong to. With founders inc being the specific room in this case.

See how this works so much better than a generic CV or you saying ‘you’re deeply passionate about the company’s mission’…

They can see your qualifications in the resume anyways.

3 More Cold Email Tips

🧊 Establish context fast. Like in the successful cold email above, do it quickly in one sentence

🧊 Write like you’re speaking to a friend. With a certain professionalism but not big, fancy and useless words. Like “spearheading”

🧊 Be as authentic as possible. Your authenticity will resonate with people far more than your polished persona ever could

That’s it for this week.

I actually have a BIG ask. If this newsletter post/ previous ones provided ANY value to you, please reply to this email and let me know how.

I’m asking for this because I’m re-designing the landing page and want to post some honest feedback from people that are subscribed to this newsletter.

I will literally screenshot your replies (blur out your names and emails) even if the feedback is BAD.

Reply and let me know how/if this newsletter helped you and I will put it up on the site!

Btw if you’re new, we have a Whatsapp group to share cold emails + get feedback if you’re interested.

And if you’re in a season of cold emailing you might want to see all the cold emails in the Hall of Fame here.

I hope one day I can feature you there.

P.S - Know anyone who’d benefit from this email? Please do forward the email. Anyone new can subscribe to cold emails hall of fame here :)