We always went for the CEO of a company and regular emails worked best for us. Stats: 100 emails sent => 4 interviews with CEOs

  1. We usually start by researching basic information about companies including the name of the CEO (found in the Imprint on German websites). https://imgur.com/a/4n2qSAV
  2. Obtain the CEO email address for every business
    -- Use https://apollo.io (free) - it scrapes email addresses from LinkedIn. You can also reverse-engineer the email address of the CEO if you got smith@company.com, musk@company.com and Vincent Baker is the CEO name => baker@company.com will probably work.
    -- If you tried different email combinations and your email still bounces, we just send the email to the general support address, but that usually yields a very low success rate
  3. Devise an email -- here's an example from us:

Subject Line: Interview Request

Dear Mr. Ozturk,

My name is Moritz Hofmann. My partner and I are software engineers and we are looking to identify potential software solutions for Shopify businesses. If you would be open to it, we would love to discuss problems you may have encountered with Shopify, and we are also interested in learning more about ways in which we could make businesses like yours more profitable and efficient.

Do you have time this week for a 10-minute phone call?

Kind regards,
Moritz Hofmann

  1. Track the open rates of your emails
    We use MailTrack free version (https://mailtrack.io/en/), since we use Gmail to send our emails. MailTrack tries to place a sponsoring banner into your email, because you use the free version. But I found out that you can simply delete the banner from the email and the email tracking will still work just fine.
  2. Send your emails
    You can schedule emails in Gmail. We like to schedule for Tuesdays between 8-10am. Or you send the emails one by one => the timing won't be perfect, but as your emails are more spread out, the chance of getting an automated spam flag is lower.
  3. Follow-Up
    After 2 days, if the email is shown as read but you did not receive a reply, send another follow-up email.
  4. Email again to set up a phone call and provide plenty of options (dates and times)
  5. Phone Call
    You got an appointment for this. If your emails were read, but the CEO never replied, try to call the company to get through to him. In most cases his assistant at least informs the CEO of the call.

Contents of the Phone Call
First ask the CEO about the different things that they do as part of their core business. And then address each of those things individually. Talk about their problems with each activity. Don't jump to your idea! How to do that? Check this post: Talking to Users - Cheat Sheet

Some notes:

  • We've had different amounts of success with this method depending on the target group we're contacting. For target groups with few conversions, try to
    a) Refer to your own successful background to make yourself more interesting
    b) For the first few crucial interviews, offer lifetime free access to the software product that you'll develop in the end. Be bold.
  • Save contacting businesses located close to you for later, because they are more valuable
  • We're not software developers, but we use this phrase in emails, because software developers come across as less threatening than sales people.
  • A 10-minute phone call is also much more acceptable to a CEO than 30 or 60 minutes. It looks good and don’t worry - the actual conversations were way longer in our experience.
  • Cold outreach emails shouldn't be more than 5 sentences or more than 70 words. We couldn’t keep that exactly, but we tried to keep it as short as possible.
  • If you're contacting companies with 10 employees or less, it’s best to talk to the CEO directly. As for bigger companies, the CEO will refer you to the right person. So you still try to reach the CEO or the highest person in the company you can reach, and then just ask him about who to talk to regarding your interview.