Best way to contact startup founders?

Question

I work for Corgi (YC24) and I specifically work with startup CEOs and founders and wanted to know if anyone had any ideas on the best/most out the box outreach methods to get in touch with them (not just traditional cold calling/LinkedIn outreach).

Founder & CMO, Coral Gables, FL · Answer

Show up in their GitHub issues and PRs. Technical founders live there. A thoughtful comment or a small useful contribution on their repo gets you noticed by the actual builder, not a gatekeeper. Value first, pitch never in the first touch.

Founder & CEO, New York, NY · Answer

Reply to their "we're hiring" posts as a non-candidate. When a founder posts a role, they're paying attention to that thread. A sharp, relevant reply that isn't an application stands out precisely because everyone else is applying. Then DM off the back of it.

Student & Aspiring Founder, Washington, DC · Answer

Buy the product and send real feedback. Become a customer, use it properly, then email the founder with specific, useful observations. Nothing opens a founder's inbox faster than a paying user who clearly gets what they're building.

Founder & GP, New York, NY · Answer

Catch them right after a fundraise. Funding announcements are a signal flare. Newly funded founders are staffing up, spending, and in build mode. Reach out within days of the announcement with something tied to what the money is for.

Angel & Advisor, Coral Gables, FL · Answer

Go where they answer publicly. Founders reply on X, in niche Slack and Discord communities, in subreddits, on Indie Hackers. Engage there in public with substance first. The DM lands warm because they already recognize your name.

CPO, New York, NY · Answer

Use their podcast appearances. Founders do interviews and almost nobody follows up on them. Reference a specific thing they said, not "great episode." It proves you actually consumed it, which 99% of outreach doesn't.

Juan Francisco Verhook · Answer

Get the intro from their portfolio peers, not the VC. Everyone chases warm intros from investors. Founders trust other founders more. Find someone in the same YC batch or accelerator cohort who'll vouch, that carries more weight than a VC forward.

Andres Gomez · Answer

Send a Loom, not a paragraph. A 60-second personalized video showing you actually looked at their company breaks through text fatigue. Founders skim walls of text and delete them. A face and a specific insight is harder to ignore.

Joe Berrizbeitia · Answer

Trigger off job changes and new roles. When a founder announces a new hire, a promotion, or a fresh raise, that's a live buying window. Set alerts for it. A message that references the specific change ("saw you just brought on your first RevOps hire") lands warm because it's timely and obviously not a blast. Low effort, high hit rate, and you're reaching them exactly when priorities are shifting.

Henry Waltz · Answer

Time it to their pain, not your calendar. Reach out when something just happened to them, a bad review going public, a churn spike they tweeted about, a hire that fell through. Relevance to a live problem beats any clever channel.

Daniel Ochoa · Answer

Meet them at small events, not big conferences. Skip the mega-conferences where everyone's selling. Founder dinners, demo days, niche meetups of 20 to 40 people, that's where real conversations happen and a founder actually remembers you the next day.

CEO, New York, NY · Answer

Offer a genuinely useful artifact upfront. A short teardown of their onboarding, a list of three bugs you found, a competitor breakdown. Give something they'd have paid for. Founders remember people who made their job easier before asking for anything.

Cofounder & CTO, New York, NY · Answer

Instead of reaching out to sell or ask for a meeting, invite them to be a guest on an industry-focused "Micro-Podcast" or "Founder-Insight Series" that you host.

Best way to contact startup founders?

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