A Good Email Pitch

I generally dislike email pitches, and I get a lot. In past years I have worked to steer people to sending me twitpitches, which limits them to 140 characters at least. And then if they sound interesting I can explore via Twitter, which is also lightweight contrasted with a demo or phone call.

But today I got a good pitch by email [my comments embedded in brackets]:

Dear Mr. Boyd,

[I am not a stickler for honorifics, but since we haven’t met, a slightly more formal ‘Mr Boyd’ is probably better than ‘Stowe’. ‘Your Highness’ is also acceptable.]

My name is Sid and I’m the Founder at Rolotrak. We will be launching our Beta at this year’s TechCrunch50 conference from the DemoPit. I would love the opportunity to give you a private demo of our product during or following the conference!

[Immediately introduces himself. The entire email is in the first person: no disembodied ‘the company’ or the natterings of some PR flack writing a Wikipedia entry. Tells me about the upcoming conference and asks to set up a demo. To the point.]

[And then, he takes the tack of assisting in angles: the story lines that writers are looking for to separate yet-another-tool-launch from all the others.]

I think we can offer you a couple potentially interesting story-lines and can share with you any aspects of our startup story/experience thus far:

1. Rolotrak helps you manage you relationships, which is directly related to landing a job in today’s tough economic and job climate. Rolotrak can help people tap into their network with new and effective tools for possible job leads.

2. I am boot-strapping this startup myself. I left Silicon Valley to find and work with a low-cost engineering team in India to build our Beta over the past 6 months, and we’re now back to launch at TC50. I am also a first-time entrepreneur with no prior software development experience.

3. We are a YCombinator (www.ycombinator.com) rejected startup launching now at TC50. Proof: YC model works even without the funding!

[This third idea caught my interest. Even provides what would be a good title, although I would have to see if he suggested it to 200 other journo/bloggers.]

We’re building a product called Rolotrak which helps turn your contacts into relationships. You can think of Rolotrak as the life-support for your network, we keep it alive and active! We do this by telling you who you need to contact and when based on your own requirements and the best part is we give you tools to make the process easy and efficient. You can take a look at a quick demo video of what we’ll be launching at TechCrunch here:

[Various one liners to establish the point of the product in my head. ‘Turns your contacts into relationships’ is pretty good. I immediately started thinking about competition, pushing into LinkedIn and Salesforce.com territory. I actually wanted to meet this guy and talk to him!]

Rolotrak Demo Video (6 Mins)

http://myroloweb.theprojectdemo.com/030809/

[Provides a demo, which I glanced at, but it moves too slow for me, so I decided to watch for a live demo from my new friend, Sid.]

Best Regards,

Sid

Sid Viswanathan

Founder & CEO