You’d like someone to connect you with someone else. Maybe you’re asking an investor to intro you to a potential customer, or maybe you’re asking a friend to intro you to a potential candidate.
To do this most effectively, use the forwardable email: a ready-to-go email where your “intro-er” doesn’t have to do anything other than hit forward.
Why this works:
By making it easy, you improve the likelihood that it actually happens—if your recipient has to do any work, they’ll “get to it later” (which means they might never get to it).
You can make this even easier by picking a subject line that will make sense to the eventual recipient.
It’s “from you”, so your introducer doesn’t need to do a bunch of wordsmithing to make it sound like them.
You get to frame up the context to the person you’re trying to reach in exactly the way you’d like to.
If you want people to help you, make it super-easy for them to do so. If they can’t manage it in 30 seconds from their phone, you’re unnecessarily slowing things down.
I’ve included two sample emails below.
Recruiting example
Here’s a sample forwardable email I recently sent. I was searching for candidates for a role I was trying to fill, and came across someone who looked promising, so I asked my shared connection, Devon, to help broker the introduction with a forwardable email.
From: Waseem
To: Devon
Subject: Intro to Abby Smith?
Hi [friend],
Hope you’re doing well. I saw that you were connected to Abby Smith [the name was a hyperlink to their LinkedIn profile]; any chance you could see if she’s open to a short chat? (Feel free to just hit forward on this email if that's easiest.)
[ Context on Pilot ]
[ Why the role is important ]
[ How we’d work together ]
If she's potentially interested in hearing more, I'd love to be connected.
Thanks,
Waseem
Some notes:
This format doesn’t only apply for recruiting—it also works for investor intros, customer intros, etc.
Note that I didn’t say “Thanks for offering to introduce me”—Devon hasn’t yet offered to introduce me, and I don’t want to suggest to Abby that she has. (It might make Devon less likely to forward the email, especially in an investor context.)
The essential trick is you’re writing an email to Devon, but you’re really writing an email to Abby, because the only thing Devon is going to do is to hit forward.
Investor intro example
I’m trying to get an email introduction to a potential investor.
From: Waseem
To: Sarah
Subject: Intro to Mark Goldberg re: Pilot.com?
Hi Sarah,
I hope you’re doing well. I saw that you were connected to Mark Goldberg at Index. Would you mind seeing if he’s open to a short chat about participating in Pilot’s seed round? His investments in Plaid and Vouch make me think that he’d be a really great partner to the business.
As a quick recap of Pilot:
Three-time founding team, all met at MIT undergrad where we studied CS, previous ventures acquired by Oracle and Dropbox
We do accounting for startups, in a tech-enabled way: we pair you with an expert on our team who takes care of your accounting, and under the hood we’re building the Iron Man suit for our experts—software that lets them do the work more accurately and scalably, with AI superpowers
We have [xx] customers who love the service
Revenue is [xx] and has tripled over the past year
We’re closing our seed round later this month, and I’d love to chat with Mark to see if he might be interested in joining the round.
Thanks,
Waseem
Some important notes about this email:
It’s incredibly turnkey—Sarah can just hit forward with no modification, not even to the subject line.
It’s sent to Sarah, but it’s really written for Mark—Sarah might already know these details about the business, but you should include them anyway
It’s from you, so you get to frame it up exactly as you’d like to—and the introducer doesn’t need to do a bunch of rewriting to make it sound like them
Note that the request is “Do you want to meet to learn more?”—your objective is to secure the next meeting, not to secure the investment
I remember the first time one of our investors asked me to send him a "forwardable email" to make an intro, I had no idea what he meant. I thought, "Isn't every email forwardable?" 😂 Anyway, wish I'd had this guide then. Do you have a good example of a template you like? Here's a post with an example that I like to share with others: https://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/2015/06/24/how-to-write-a-forwardable-introduction-email