yc-cold-outreach

What This Skill Does

The yc-cold-outreach skill transforms your cold email strategy by applying the battle-tested, high-conversion principles taught at Y Combinator. Rather than generic blast templates, this skill acts as an expert copywriter and editor, ensuring every email you send feels human, personalized, and hyper-targeted. It focuses on the 'Startup School' methodology, emphasizing brevity, clear value propositions, and an 'uncommon commonality' that makes recipients feel recognized as individuals rather than leads on a list.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, run the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/pors/yc-cold-outreach

Use Cases

• Customer Acquisition: Reach out to potential early adopters by highlighting their specific pain points.
• Investor Relations: Draft concise updates or initial discovery notes for seed investors using direct, high-signal language.
• Partnerships: Establish rapport with potential strategic partners by finding the 'uncommon commonality' between your organizations.
• Critique & Iteration: Paste an existing draft to receive a 'YC Grade' with actionable feedback on how to improve your human tone, reduce friction, and increase mobile readability.

Example Prompts

1. "Draft a cold email to the CTO of a Series A SaaS company. Use the yc-cold-outreach skill to highlight their recent blog post on engineering culture and ask for a 5-minute chat about our infrastructure automation tool."
2. "Critique this draft for me: [Paste Email Draft]. Give me a YC Grade and tell me if it sounds too robotic or if the CTA is too high-friction."
3. "Help me rewrite this sales pitch to be more human. I need to reach out to founders in the fintech space, but I want to avoid sounding like I'm spamming them."

Tips & Limitations

• Less is More: The golden rule here is brevity. If your draft takes more than 10 seconds to read on a mobile screen, the skill will likely prompt you to cut content.
• Deep Personalization: The skill relies on your inputs. The more specific details you provide about the recipient (a recent talk they gave, a shared connection, or a specific problem they mentioned), the better the output.
• Human-in-the-Loop: Always review the final draft for tone. While the skill is excellent at structured communication, adding your authentic voice in the final sentence can drastically improve response rates.
• Limitations: This skill does not automatically send emails or pull data from external CRM systems; it is strictly an expert drafting and critique engine.