Great Cold Emails — September 2025 Edition (Part Two)
I’ve sent millions of cold emails and wrote The Cold Email Handbook, widely considered the best writing on the subject. Here I’m sharing more examples of emails that have performed well for friends, so you can get some inspiration for what a good cold email might look like.
Remember, though, that your email should be perfect for the person you are emailing, and that examples you see online might not reflect what’ll work for you.
I try to do this each month, and this is the September Edition, part two.
Example One – Better Stack
Better Stack offers uptime monitoring and logging for software companies, rolled into one simple tool. If I were them, I’d reach out to companies that had recent big incidents, since right after those fires are put out, I’d imagine people are most willing to change the tools they use if they just experienced frustration.
James, hey. I saw your status page, and that ya’ll just fought off a big issue.
I was wondering, how hard was it to figure out the specific issue and fix it? Did you have to dig through a bunch of different tooling and spend a lot of hours figuring it out?
This is a concept I love to nerd out on. I work at BetterStack, and we built a set of transaction monitoring tools that make it easy for teams to see everything so they can fix anything.
Would it be ridiculous if I showed it to you?
-clint
Example Two – Prodio
These folks offer manufacturing software for small companies. Their software tracks progress of manufacturing, shows orders coming in and out, does time and attendance tracking for factory workers, and keeps a database of all products and company knowledge. Production management software is the industry term.
Hi Chris, I saw your manufacturing plant has been running for 6 years now. Congrats!
I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to running smaller manufacturing shops. Especially those in the rural US.
I work at Prodio, and we build software for small manufacturing companies to gain free time and control over production, costs, and employees.
Would it be ridiculous if I show it to you?
-matt
Example Three – Wflow
I’ve seen a lot of these digital accounting software startups pop up recently, so I thought it’d be a good place of inspiration for cold emails. For this example, I’m going to act like I’m reaching out to companies with large accounting teams. And since no one likes to be replaced, I’m going to reach out to the CFO instead of the individuals on the accounts payables team.
Hey Shaun, how much of your budget goes towards the payables team processing documents?
I’ve got a new way to reduce errors and speed up document processing by up to 40% with AI.
I know you know time is money so would it be insane if I showed it to you?
-keef
PS we’ve now saved thousands of hours across hundreds of other finance orgs
A word on “getting your jargon down”
A surprisingly common failure mode for cold email: using the wrong vocabulary.
Every industry has its own shorthand. If you don’t mirror it, you sound like a tourist—someone selling, not someone who belongs.
In finance, for example:
- “Assets under management” or just “AUM” (not “fund size”)
- “Alpha” (not “outperformance”)
- “Desk” to mean a trading team
- “Basis points” or “bps” (not “percentage points”)
- “Buy side” vs. “sell side”
- “The Street” to mean Wall Street broadly
There are thousands of these. If you know the space, you already speak it. If you don’t, the fix is straightforward: find where practitioners talk (industry Twitter, niche forums, subreddits) and watch how they phrase things.
Also: pay attention to how organizations refer to themselves. You wouldn’t write “BlackRock Inc.” in your email, you’d just write “BlackRock.” Using the wrong name feels like you pulled it from a CRM export.
