Most people are terrible at selling themselves. We’re conditioned to be humble, to let our work speak for itself, to wait for opportunities to find us. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t always work that way.

Sales professionals understand this intuitively – perhaps too well. Look online and you'll find plenty of complaints about aggressive sales tactics. But beneath the aggression lies a fundamental truth: if you're selling B2B SaaS, you need to reach the right person and make a case for why your solution matters.

The same principle applies to selling yourself, whether for a job, a collaboration, or any other opportunity - yet few do it.

The irony is that selling yourself well isn't about being pushy – it’s about being clear on what you bring to the table, and making it easy for the right people to say yes. It's about taking agency over your outcomes instead of hoping someone phones you up.

The recent Soham Parekh news is a good case study in how to do this – the ethics are questionable but the results aren’t. He optimized for roles at interesting startups, and landed too many jobs :).

It’s worth digging into what he did as an example though:

(This is the email he sent out, from here)

tldr;

I love everything about what Happenstance is doing. I don't have many hobbies outside coding. I am not athletic, bad at singing, don't drink, can't dance. Building is the only thing I am good at. At this point, I want to be a part of taking something from 0 -> 1 or 1 -> 100. I just want to be heads down chasing that goal

Hi,

Really loved what you were building at Happenstance and wanted to reach out to see if there were any openings for Engineers in the early team.

I have 5 years of relevant experience building full-stack applications primarily data-driven at DynamoAl (https://dynamo.ai), Antimetal (https://antimetal.com) Union.ai (https://union.ai), Synthesia (https://synthesia.io) and Alan (https://alan.app) as a part of their early teams where I helped scale internal micro-services to thousands of workflows and users.

Being a part of super lean teams, one of my strongest suites has been ability to work across the stack from building scalable, robust backend systems to high throughput data ingestion pipelines to production grade frontend components in React. As a part, I have build several end-to-end systems that involve several layers at the intersection of Ul (Next.js), Backend (Python, Node + Go based services using GraphQL and GRPC) as well as infrastructure pieces (AWS + GCP over K8s) from building complex workflows, DAG visualizations and drag and drop component canvas for Union cloud to architecting the entire platform for Alan Studio and Synthesia.

I would love to be a part of the early team at Happenstance and define its work and culture. Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

Best, Soham

Go Direct:

• If you can go direct to the source - do that. By emailing the founders of these companies, Soham can directly reach people who matter with a compelling pitch, as opposed to being just another resume in the ATS.
• https://hunter.io/ is a pretty good tool for finding leads, and you can also use Perplexity to find people’s emails if they have a public presence
• I’ve heard that LinkedIn Mail is a very underrated way to get to the right people, because there’s less competition for attention here – but it depends on who you’re trying to reach

Be Succinct:

• The tl;dr at the beginning of the email is a succinct way of getting your value prop across to the other person
• I wouldn’t do a tl;dr - but explaining why you’re interesting in 3-4 bullet points is a good format to follow
• The same classic writing advice they teach you in middle school English applies here – you always start a piece with a compelling hook
  • If you have more to share, you can always share it as an attachment, or as Soham does, a bigger email body, beyond the tl;dr

Be actionable:

• I’ve heard this in other contexts but the more actionable you can be, the better:
  • It’s a small tweak, but making your request actionable makes it easier to respond and fulfill what your asking for
  • You need to have empathy for the receiver – think, how would they respond to this email?
  • Some examples:
    • ‘Looking forward to hearing from you soon’ to ‘Would love to chat sometime later this week, here’s my Calendly’
      • Respondent books on Calendly and replies ‘I’ve booked’
    • ‘Would love to meetup sometime’ to ‘How’s Coffee at 3pm on Thursday sound?’
      • Respondent replies, How does 4 pm sound instead?
    • ‘Love some introductions to some people’ to ‘Would love the contact info/an email intro to people who can do XYZ’
      • Respondent replies, ‘a, b, c would be good to talk to’.

Be Personalized:

• It’s not worth mentioning if there’s a very weak relationship (remember – be succinct!), but if you have a good mutual, went to the same school, or are a big user of their product, make sure to mention it!

Conclusion:

The advice here isn’t revolutionary. It's mostly common sense wrapped in job search tactics. But that's precisely the point.

Regardless of your ability, by using these tips, you can demonstrate high agency to the person you’re trying to reach.

You’re taking the initiative to indicate interest, instead of submitting a webform and hoping for the best – which might matter more than any specific point on your background.