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The email that landed
Mike Krieger, then the chief product officer, got a short cold email: love the product, the company badly needed a growth team, want to chat? Anthropic had no growth PM roles listed and wasn't hiring for the function, though it was just starting to think about building one. Krieger wrote back that he was interested, and one thing led to another. The sender remains the only PM Krieger has hired from a cold email.
How he writes them
Amol Avasare had honed cold email as a founder. He tested the subject line until it earned a very high open rate, and he went for personal email addresses, because LinkedIn and work inboxes are where everyone else is already sending outreach. The message itself was short: who he is, why he'd be a good fit, and a suggestion to talk.
The follow-up rule
His rule of thumb is to follow up a few times, and to keep reaching out to anyone he really cares about until they ask him to stop. Krieger answered the first time.
Why do personal inboxes beat LinkedIn for outreach?
LinkedIn messages and work inboxes are where recruiters, salespeople, and founders already send most of their outreach, so the volume there is high and attention is thin. Work email also passes through corporate spam filters, and for executives it is often screened by assistants. A personal address sits outside those systems. Messages sent to it arrive in an inbox that is mostly full of mail from people the owner knows.
How do senders test subject lines?
Senders write several versions of a subject line and send each to a small random slice of their list. They then compare how many recipients opened each version and send the winner to everyone else. Open tracking works through a tiny invisible image that loads when a message is opened. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, introduced in 2021, preloads those images automatically, so reported open rates now run higher than real opens.
Why do companies start a dedicated growth team?
Growth teams grew out of Facebook's early growth group, formed around 2007 under Chamath Palihapitiya, which focused on getting new users to come back and invite others. The idea is that one team owns the whole path from acquisition to activation to retention, rather than leaving each piece to a different department. Entrepreneur Sean Ellis coined the term growth hacking in 2010 to describe people who focused on that path.
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
