Andrew Whelan shares how to write professional emails and LinkedIn messages that actually get read, and why showing up to meetups and volunteering beats cold outreach for building real connections.
Chapters
How I write things. Most people, when I was teaching in college, I would write this like super long email to a student going over their work and everything, and then I would literally get the letter K in the response. And I'd be like, ugh, you kids, right? One of the things I want you to remember is everything you put out into the world today affects how you're going to get that network connection. So be prepared. Don't give this long professional, dear sir and ma'am, but make sure you respond completely to people. Well, then you just answer it. All right. I had someone recently and they're like, I've been trying to reach out to these people for so long and they won't respond. And I was like, okay, show me the email. And they were writing, dear sir and madame. And I finally was like, how do you know they're French? And they were like, I don't. I said, that's what you wrote to them. So you have to be aware of that and start preparing. Yes? Does that work if, for example, Vayner has a profile on that? It works for everyone because it'll pull from what they see, all their profiles online, so it pulls from all social media profiles. So it's machine learning at its best, right? It's predicting for you what the best possible way for you to respond to this person is, and then you start to gain confidence because you're like, oh cool, I'm feeling better about how I'm writing to people. Right? This is my boss and she is incredibly busy, so she's like, get to the point. And that's basically what the profile tells me. I could have told you that before I put this up, but that's just the way it is. Make sense? Yes. It is blurry, right? Yeah. So, so you're, you're, you know, like India may be different, Mexico City might be different because I know like Spanish has a formal and a less than formal tense that we speak in, right? So I can't speak across everybody, but I will tell you I find it's most effective when you are yourself. Be professional and be an adult. Don't be like, dear so-and-so, because like right now we know in Silicon Valley if you are applying for a position, whether it be in a company like Salesforce or a startup like Snapchat, You can just start the email with, dear hiring managers, or, hello Snapchat, or, hello Salesforce, right? It's fairly informal. My suggestion would be know the formal rules of how to respond before you break them. So study that first, but then be yourself because no one has time to go through a formal letter anymore. And I think what happens especially for young writers is you feel like there's white space on the page so you have to fill it with something and no one cares. Get to the point. Does anyone know what the attention span of human beings is right now? 5 seconds. It's close. It's 8 seconds. A goldfish's attention span is 10 seconds. Congratulations to us. Goldfish don't have Snapchat. Exactly. If they did, they'd have like a 4-second. So you're right. Good point. But here's the thing. People are not going to look at that document for more than 10 seconds. Unless it's engaging. What's the purpose of LinkedIn? Short and sweet. It's like Facebook for professionals. Facebook for professionals. Their purpose is connect, inform, and engage, right? How many of you, when you look at LinkedIn, if you read someone's summary, if the first sentence is boring, do you read the second? Mm-mm. So for you, it's less about formal or not formal and more about make sure that first sentence is engaging. And you'll start to see that when people respond to you. If you want to send out an email for an informational interview, if you start writing, dear so-and-so, I'm a huge fan of your company because of this, this, and this, and you get no response, but maybe you put it more into your style— I don't know if this would be yours, but like if you wrote, I want to take you to coffee, that might be a little bit more engaging, right? So you've got to test your prototype and go from there. within your style, you know. Some people might be like, I need it professional, but very rarely— within reason. Be an adult. Okay. Meetups are another great source. I talked about putting them in your calendar. It's so funny because I normally don't work with 2 screens, so I see half people looking over there and I'm like, pay attention to me. You're looking at the screen. It's pretty hilarious. All right. So I love meetups. Start finding meetups. The best part about networking for meetups Is go to ones that suck too. You get to practice. No one is expecting, and this is the pressure we put on ourselves, I'm going to go to a meetup and my life is going to change. And some of them it will, like some of it is there. But go and experiment and go to some and practice till you start to feel comfortable being yourself and talking about who you are. And then don't go back to that one if it's not very good so that when you start to regularly go to the ones that matter, you feel confident and comfortable. Bring friends. I like looking at events. These are some that are coming up soon for you. They might be interesting. I like to connect with people who are keynote speakers and the organizers of these events because they tell you what's coming up next. Can I volunteer? So you want to do that. I love—
