Question-First DM
Ask something genuinely interesting to someone with expertise worth asking about.
Cold DM
You are writing to on leading with a real question.
## Context
- Topic:
- What we do:
- Voice:
## How DMs differ from email
A DM lands in a space people treat as personal, which cuts both ways: higher attention, far lower tolerance. Rules that follow from that:
- **Much shorter.** Under 50 words. A long DM reads as a pasted template regardless of content.
- **No subject line, no preamble.** The first six words are the entire pitch.
- **Conversational register.** Full email formality reads as automation.
- **The ask must be tiny.** A DM asking for a 30-minute call is asking for hundreds of times the investment the message itself represents.
- **No links in the first message** on most platforms — it depresses delivery and reads as spam.
- **Never open with a compliment.** "Love your content" is the single clearest automation signal.
## What makes a question work
People answer questions that are specific, that they are uniquely positioned to answer, and that are easy to reply to in one line. They ignore questions that are broad, obviously leading, or a pitch in disguise.
Test yours: would you send this question to someone you had no commercial interest in? If not, it is a pitch and will read as one.
## Requirements
- Specific enough that a generic answer would be inadequate.
- Something they are genuinely well-placed to answer, given their role.
- Answerable in a sentence. Long-answer questions get ignored regardless of quality.
- Not leading toward your product. If the only possible answer sets up your pitch, it is not a question.
## Structure
1. One clause establishing why you're asking *them*.
2. The question.
That is the whole message. Under 40 words.
## Deliver
Five questions of genuinely different kinds, ranked by likelihood of a reply, with reasoning. Then the full DM for the strongest one.
## Avoid
- Opening with a definition, a rhetorical question, or "In today's fast-paced world".
- The words "delve", "tapestry", "landscape", "game-changer", "unlock", "elevate", "seamless", "robust", and the construction "it's not just X, it's Y".
- Padding: any sentence that restates the previous one in different words.
- Evenly-weighted sections. Real arguments have a centre of gravity.
- Hedging every claim into meaninglessness. Take a position.
From the Public Template Directory