However!

_Bespoke cold emails_ are I think, a dying/lost art. I want to give an example of two cold emails that I (manually!) send a few times a month. (I run Buttondown, which is an email SaaS — think similar to Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc.)

---

The first is to folks who have the following criteria:

1. they hit the front page of HN

2. they have a personal blog that isn't tied to a platform (e.g. they're using jekyll or something similar)

3. they have RSS enabled

4. they do _not_ collect email addresses

The thrust of the email is this:

``` Hi! I'm the founder of Buttondown, a newsletter tool for technical blogs. I'm reaching out because:

1. You just hit HN front page! (Congrats and/or my condolences.) 2. You've got an RSS feed but are not capturing emails.

My proposal: I set you up with a free (for life!) Buttondown account seeded with your blog's RSS feed. All you do is drop in a form tag or an iFrame in your blog and folks can sign up with their email address and get an email whenever you publish something new. I can handle the setup and then hand it off to you for perpetuity.

If this is something you're at all interested in, please let me know! (There's no catch, and this isn't an automated email, so please — I'd love to hear why not, even if the answer is simply "shove off, I don't care about collecting an audience, Twitter and Mastodon are sufficient"). ```

(I tweak the language based on their own voice, mention what in particular I like about their blog, etc.)

---

The second is to folks who fit the following criteria:

1. they're a technical newsletter publishing programming-related content

2. they're using a platform that I know to be particularly expensive relative to me (Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign are the two big culprits here)

``` hi there! I run Buttondown — you may have heard of us, we're used by RELEVANT_CUSTOMER_1 and RELEVANT_CUSTOMER_2. I see you're using OTHER_PLATFORM; is there anything I could do to get you to switch to [us](https://buttondown.com/pricing?count=7500)

(btw, this is a real email, not a marketing campaign. it's still early days for us, so tbh you telling me why you're _not_ interested is just as valuable as getting to call you a customer :) ```

Small sample size for both genres — I've probably sent them a total of ~fifty times — but the response rate is around 80% and conversion rate (though granted for the first genre "conversion" is more of a second-order effect, since I'm offering them a free account!) is ~25%.

I say all of this because, as someone who a priori _hated_ outbound and "sales stuff", I learned that at least for me and my business both the most palatable _and_ most effective method was just being earnest and helpful. It has been the single most useful non-technical skill I've gained over the past few years.

https://github.com/ronynn/ronynn.github.io/commit/f1bc45de82...

Back in 2021 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29648325, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30177907) and 2022 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32608734) Heroku went from "well this is costing enough that it probably makes sense to divest at some point and save the $X00/mo" to "Heroku is now the biggest systemic risk to uptime that I have", and it felt _very_ high-priority to get off of them and onto someone else.

Two years later, though... the inclination has ebbed. Heroku hasn't shipped anything meaningful for my use case in the past 24 months, but also they have been fairly stable. I'm sure I will migrate off of them onto something else in the fullness of time, but it would take a pretty severe precipitating event.

1. Replaced `flake8` with `ruff`;

2. Replaced `black` with `ruff`;

3. Replaced `pip` with `uv`;

4. Replaced `poetry` with `uv`.

Their next project appears to be exactly what I _wish_ their next project to be — a replacement for pyright et al (https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff/discussions/10581). Type checking is my least favorite part of my Python toolchain at the moment; I can't wait to take it for a spin.

To pick on one example: he writes of the linked NYT essay:

> Is greatness overrated? What’s next—Is disease the new health? Is losing the new winning? Is stupid the new smart?

At risk of sounding uncharitable, this is the kind of reaction one might have to the essay if they read the title and skipped the content. The author is specfically talking about the idea of the Nobel canon and its orthogonality to other reasons you might want to read an author. (I don't think it's a particularly good essay, but it's certainly not saying "bad stuff is good, actually"!)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601933

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

My margins are solid and there aren't a lot of competing opportunities to deploy capital besides pulling forward cloud costs or hiring folks (which is a very different value prop altogether), so reasoning about the lump sum was pretty easy, but you're definitely right in that objectively speaking I should have just gotten a line of credit and amortized it that way.

(T/Y — fixed.)

As for why important: a melange of reasons. I had heard a _lot_ from customers and prospects that they couldn't find the site because they searched for/navigated to buttondown.com; I was faintly worried about SEO/brand impact from using a vanity TLD like `.email`; I was faintly worried about a more well-financed competitor buying it and redirecting to their own property; there are a very real number of legacy pieces of software that do not _accept_ `buttondown.email` as a valid domain, which is important when you're dealing with UGC.

(When I was debating what a reasonable purchase price might be, the framing that helped me make a decision was: "if this helps my overall conversion funnel grow by 2% in perpetuity, is it worth it?", and that answer was yes. Time will tell, of course, to see where that number actually lands!)

(I would also be remiss if I didn't say that I am grateful to HN for introducing me to what was called microISVs a decade ago, "indie hacking" five years ago, and now I suppose is mostly called "building in public" / "lifestyle businesses". I was inspired to start Buttondown in no small part due to reading about Candy Japan, Appointment Reminder, et al, and learning that there was a different yet equally valid path for growing a SaaS)

Nuances of self-hosting aside, I'd recommend caution looking at that pricing pane.

The disclaimer is:

> Calculated based on the plan that best matches the features of Plunk at 2500 emails per month.

And the author then cites prices of $0.001/email for Plunk and $0.013/email for Sendgrid.

I am neither a user or fan of Sendgrid but that feels like disingenuous anchoring. Sendgrid's free plan is 100/day; if you want to eliminate the free plan entirely and just focus on their cheapest paid option, it's $19.95 for 50K emails — or $0.000399/email, cheaper than Plunk's sticker price.

It's not entirely obvious to me how that $0.013 was even calculated ($0.013 * 2500 = $32.50). Either way, be sure to spot-check against live sticker rates before making a decision there.

https://www.shovel.report/ycombinator.com

2. Maybe it's me being a little tin-foil-hatty, but parts of this feel aggressively LLM-written (a suspicion enhanced by looking at some of the other essays on the site.) OP, if you're the author — I strongly advise just getting rid of fluff like "By leveraging Evidence.dev, we've created a comprehensive and visually appealing dashboard that provides valuable insights into FC24 player statistics. This dashboard includes high-level metrics, top player highlights, and detailed analyses of countries and clubs. Whether you're a data analyst or a football enthusiast, this dashboard offers a powerful tool for exploring and understanding FC24 data.". It helps no-one, I promise!

(That being said, I am a sucker for all new tooling in this genre and am excited to play around with it!)