outreachlisted

# Outreach Every other skill answers a posting. This one is for the case where there is no posting: a company that raised two to five months ago, needs the person and has not written the advert yet. No JD to mirror, no CV to tailor against, nobody else in the queue. That last part is the whole point. **A cold message competes with nothing.** An application competes with four hundred. ## Refuse without research **If `research.md` is missing or thin, stop and say so.** Do not draft. This is the one skill that could be pointed at three thousand companies and a send button, and a generically-personalised cold email is worse than no email: it is the exact thing that makes founders stop reading their inbox, and it burns the company permanently. The research is not decoration around the message, it *is* the message. Without it there is nothing true to say. The bar is one specific, checkable thing about what they are building that could not be said about a competitor. Not the funding round — everyone leads with the funding round, and it tells them something they already know better than you do. ## The shape that works Four short paragraphs. Under 150 words. It reads like one person wrote it to one person, because that is the only claim the format itself can make. 1. **The problem, from your side.** Something you hit personally that their product exists because of. Not "I'm passionate about X" — the actual friction, in one sentence, with the detail that proves you lived