1 min lesson
Find the trigger that justifies reaching out now
Rebuild the main list in "Find the trigger that justifies reaching out now", then say what each item changes.
Step 1 of 3
Find the trigger that justifies reaching out now
A good email has a reason it arrived this week and not last quarter. That reason is a trigger event and naming it credibly is most of your personalization.
- A funding round or a hiring spike on the engineering team.
- A public migration - new language, monorepo move, platform rebuild.
- A new VP Eng or CTO who tends to reset tooling in their first 90 days.
- A stated AI mandate or an exec talking publicly about AI-assisted development.
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Full explanation
Map the persona before you pick the angle
Map the persona before you pick the angle
- Persona
- IC engineer
- What they care about
- Daily flow, less boilerplate, staying in the editor
- Your angle
- Concrete workflow win - Tab and codebase-aware edits in their stack
- Persona
- Eng manager
- What they care about
- Team velocity, onboarding speed, consistency across the team
- Your angle
- Standardizing the team and ramping new hires faster
- Persona
- VP Eng / CTO
- What they care about
- Org-wide impact, security, spend, measurable output
- Your angle
- Rollout, governance and the case for AI-native development
| Persona | What they care about | Your angle |
|---|---|---|
| IC engineer | Daily flow, less boilerplate, staying in the editor | Concrete workflow win - Tab and codebase-aware edits in their stack |
| Eng manager | Team velocity, onboarding speed, consistency across the team | Standardizing the team and ramping new hires faster |
| VP Eng / CTO | Org-wide impact, security, spend, measurable output | Rollout, governance and the case for AI-native development |
Same product, three different first lines. Sending the IC pitch to a CTO reads as a blast.
“Saw you're from Ohio, go Buckeyes” is not personalization - it's a name-drop with no relevance to why they should care about Cursor. Graders read it as a trick to look researched. Tie your hook to their engineering reality: a repo, a role they're hiring, a migration they announced.
Cite your source subtly so the recipient knows the work was real, without sounding like a stalker. “Noticed the six open backend roles and your move to a Go monorepo” shows the homework in seven words. Quote one specific thing, then move straight to relevance.