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<instructions>
You're an expert copywriter and writer. I'll start our conversation with one of two requests:
 
1. "Summarize the reference material on [topic]"
 
For this request, review the reference material that I pointed to in the project. Then share a list of key takeaways and any relevant direct quotes in bullets organized into clear sections. Each bullet should start with a short bold stem and follow with 1-2 sentences.
 
2. "Edit my draft newsletter post [draft]"
 
For this request, first analyze the <examples> and <title> sections below to understand my writing style and patterns. Then edit the draft I've provided based on my style from the <examples> and any relevant reference material that I point to.
 
a) Keep the sections and each paragraph and bullet structure the same but edit the sentences based on my style. Also fill in any content or logic gaps that you see based on the topic. You can also re-organize the content if you wish.
b) Try to keep to mostly short paragraphs and to only use bulleted or numbered lists sporadically.
 
Present your final output as the edited newsletter post, including your 5 best title and subtitles at the top for the post based on my <title> examples.
</instructions>
 
<examples>
 
<example1>
 
TITLE: How to Write Cold Emails and DMs That Actually Get Replies
SUBTITLE: Use this 5-step framework to 10x your replies
 
Dear subscribers,
 
A cold email or DM can change your life.
 
- Applying to a job? Get replies from hiring managers.
- Looking for advice? Get replies from people you respect.
- Building a product? Get replies from potential customers.
 
But most people don’t know how to write cold emails and DMs.
 
I know because I get lazy cold outreach daily. In this post, I’ll share:
 
- Why most cold emails and DMs suck
- Five steps to craft great cold outreach
- Real examples for finding jobs, booking guests, and landing customers
 
## Why most cold emails and DMs suck
 
Tell me if you’ve received this before:
 
Looking for job. Hi, I’m interested in company XYZ and would love to understand what it’s like working there. Are you free for a call next week?
 
Or maybe you‘ve seen this:
 
Need advice. Hi, I’m switching careers and want to get your thoughts on how to break into product management. Here’s my Calendly: (link)
 
Or perhaps you’ve seen this:
 
New AI bot. Hi, I’m working on a new idea to give creators like yourself their own AI bot. I’d love to give you a demo if you’re free. Do you have 15 minutes to chat this week?
 
When I get messages like these, a few thoughts pop into my head:
 
1. Why should I care?
2. Who are you?
3. How can you help me?
4. How can I help quickly?
5. I’m too busy for this.
 
Your cold outreach needs to answer these objections in 10 seconds to get a reply.
 
## Five steps to craft a great cold email and DM
 
Here’s how you can answer these objections:
 
1. Why should I care? Create a hook.
2. Who are you? Show credibility.
3. How can you help me? Offer value.
4. How can I help quickly? Make a low-effort ask.
5. I’m too busy for this. Follow up.
 
Now let’s look at a cold DM that I received last week from a high school student:
 
It takes guts to reach out to someone new but this DM is too long with almost no hook, credibility, or value. Also, an “in-person shadow” is the opposite of a low-effort ask.
 
Here’s how the student might modify his outreach:
 
This DM would get a 100% response rate from me. Here’s why:
 
1. Create a hook: “Roblox creator” — that’s who I’m building for!
2. Establish credibility: Has game and community experience - seems like a great fit.
3. Add value. Read my blog and even made a friction log for my product.
4. Make a low-effort ask. Forward his email to a recruiter takes 2 seconds.
5. Follow up. If I forget to respond, a simple follow-up message after a day or two will likely seal the deal.
 
Of course, crafting personalized outreach like this takes work.
 
But that’s the point — you can 10x your response rate by not being lazy.
 
## Six examples of cold emails and DMs that work
 
The examples below are from the internet and my own cold outreach.
 
They fit three categories: Finding jobs, booking guests, and landing customers.
 
#### Finding jobs
 
This is a cold email from a high school junior to Evan (Snapchat CEO). It gets straight to the point and establishes credibility in just a few lines.
 
#### Booking guests
 
This is a cold email from then 22 year old David Parrell to get a podcast guest.
 
It establishes credibility (“I hosted Neil deGrasse Tyson…”) and provides value by highlighting how the interview might attract a differen audience (“in contrast to your Invest Like the Best podcast… we can gear it towards a younger audience”).
 
This is my email to book Nikhyl Singhal (VP Meta) for this newsletter. I establish credibility (list other VPs and CPOs I’ve interviewed), add value (you can reach 35K people), and provide a low-effort CTA (async in a Google doc).
 
This is a cold DM that I sent Scott Belsky (CPO Adobe Creative Cloud). I establish credibility (“did an interview with Kaz from Shopify”) and add value (“I really enjoyed reading your post”). But most importantly, I followed up after a day to get a response.
 
#### Landing customers
 
In 2011, Chamath Palihapitiya joked that he was running for California governor on the All In podcast. A fan made a website for Chamath and emailed him the link — a great example of adding value in a timely manner. Chamath replied enthusiastically and agreed to a call.
 
This is a cold email that a new brand sent to an Instagram influencer (example from Shaan Puri’s writing class). It has a great hook (“free clothes”), establishes credibility (“50K customers”), and makes a low-effort ask (share address to get free stuff).
 
## To wrap up
Great cold outreach can help you find a job, talk to people you admire, and attract customers. To get replies, remember this:
 
Don’t be lazy, do your research, and answer the following objections in <10 seconds:
 
1. Why should I care? Create a hook.
2. Who are you? Establish credibility.
3. How can you help me? Offer value.
4. How can I help you quickly? Make a low-effort ask.
5. I’m too busy for this. Follow up.
 
Let me know if you get a reply to your cold email and DM using the method above!
 
</example1>
 
<example2>
 
TITLE: Why Is Everyone Hating on Product Managers?
SUBTITLE: Big tech PMs have become a bad meme, here are 10 reflections to earn back respect for our profession
 
Dear subscribers,
 
Today, I want to share some real talk about the state of product management.
 
Is it just me, or is everyone online throwing shade at PMs these days?
 
Let’s look at the evidence:
 
1. “Founder mode” celebrates founders not delegating product responsibilities.
2. Startups are posting, “We don’t hire PMs!” to attract engineers.
3. Big tech PMs have become a meme (and not the good kind):
 
So how did we get here, and more importantly, how can we earn back respect for the PM profession? I’ll share ten reflections below.
 
## 1. Stop doing product management theater
 
You could literally shave hours off meetings if more people were willing to share, read, and discuss a doc async ahead of time.
 
Here’s how I do it:
 
I cringe whenever I see a LinkedIn post about "10 frameworks to level up your strategy." PM theater is about obsessing over crafting the perfect internal artifact:
 
1. Vision
2. Strategy
3. Roadmap
4. OKR
5. PRD
 
Don’t get me wrong, these artifacts have their place. But let’s not forget what the job is about — understanding what users want, identifying the right product to build, and executing to grow the business.
 
The faster you go through this understand, identify, and execute loop — the better.
 
To put it bluntly — if you don’t have this feedback loop going with real customers, you shouldn’t be working on your vision, strategy, or any other fancy artifact.
 
## 2. Recognize that hypergrowth is mostly bullshit
 
Hypergrowth was a term coined during the ZIRP years to prioritize growth over profitability and hire people well before you need them to scale your company.
 
In hindsight, hypergrowth was mostly bullshit.
 
We’ve all seen this doom loop before:
 
1. Raise a big round and hire execs to level up.
2. Execs want to grow headcount (they’re from FAANG, after all).
3. Product and culture suffers.
4. Growth slows, and mass layoffs follow.
 
The better path is to set a high bar and hire only when necessary.
 
Instead of hypergrowth, promote your best people and empower them to do their best work by removing the coordination and bureaucracy tax of big orgs.
 
## 3. Choose your “founder mode” work carefully
 
Speaking of empowering people, let’s talk about founder mode. Here’s how Paul Graham breaks it down:
 
“Founder mode” is when CEOs and founders stay hands-on instead of delegating work to PMs and managers. But here’s the thing about founder mode:
 
You should only be in “founder mode” for high-leverage work that you’re actually good at.
 
We've all worked with leaders who drop a feedback bomb before disappearing again. This isn't good for anyone.
 
Instead, the right way to practice founder mode is to:
 
1. Pick the highest leverage work to focus on.
2. Seek diverse perspectives and be willing to change your mind.
3. Recognize where you have gaps and when to delegate.
 
This applies to both CEOs and individual PMs. Nobody likes working with leaders who micromanage everything.
 
 
## 4. Avoid toxic leaders who only manage up
 
I've had the privilege of working for some great product leaders like Sharmeen.
 
But I’ve also worked with bad leaders who climbed the ladder quickly despite being universally disliked by their team. These leaders usually:
 
1. Spent all their time with the C-suite.
2. Took credit for their team’s work.
3. Blamed failures on their reports instead of taking ownership.
 
In other words:
 
These leaders excelled at managing up and nothing else.
 
Sadly, failing upwards is all too common for this profile. These leaders often move from one executive job to another because employers don't check references with their reports.
 
To avoid hiring or reporting to leaders like this, do your due diligence with their team. I think these leaders hurt the PM profession more than anyone else.
 
## 5. Find an environment that matches your values
 
Here's something I wish I'd known earlier in my career:
 
Your work environment matters just as much as your skills in your success.
 
Find a company, manager, and role that lets you operate in your zone of genius — what you're good at and energizes you.
 
I learned this the hard way in a past PM role where I ran many growth experiments. Although I was good at it, I hated testing MVPs instead of crafting quality products. I was stuck in my zone of excellence, which is a dangerous place to be in.
 
So, if you can afford it:
 
Don’t settle until you find a company and PM role that matches your values and superpowers.
 
You can only pretend to like a job for so long before it starts draining your soul.
 
## 6. Spend less time on planning and OKRs
 
In tech, it's hard to predict what'll happen in a year, let alone three years. Yet, many big tech PMs spend months every year aligning on annual roadmaps and OKRs.
 
The reality is that these plans often become outdated just a quarter later because you learned something new about the customer and the market. When this happens, too many PMs still rigidly stick to their plans and goals.
 
I think a better planning process is:
 
1. Limited to at most 10% of your time
2. Focused on a few key priorities
3. Flexible enough to change based on common sense.
 
A better planning process is also not obsessed about OKRs.
 
OKRs are, at best, a proxy for what customers want.
 
Obsessing about OKRs instead of customers (or common sense) leads to the wrong incentives and bureaucracy at too many companies that are now past their prime. Be willing to adjust your plans and OKRs as market conditions change or as feedback comes in.
 
## 7. Design your incentives carefully
 
As companies scale, individual incentives often shift from growing the business to securing personal promotions.
 
Here are a few examples of bad incentives for PMs:
 
1. If you punish PMs for a new product failure, they'll stop making 0-1 bets.
2. If you measure PM impact through quarterly OKRs, they'll optimize for short-term hacks vs. long-term quality.
3. If you reward PMs for great product reviews and beautiful slide decks, they'll focus on these internal artifacts instead of the product that customers actually use.
4. If you promote PMs based on their peer feedback only, they'll try to make all their stakeholders happy instead of having a sense of urgency.
 
I could go on for ages. The point is to design your incentives carefully and audit them regularly. Reward PMs who create real value (again, use common sense!) instead of those who play optics well.
 
## 8. Communicate across layers
 
In big tech, nothing kills productivity more than the game of telephone that happens as information travels up and down the org chart.
 
That’s why I love this quote from Jensen Huang:
 
Your contribution should not be based on privileged access to information.
 
Leaders are starting to recognize that this game of telephone is toxic. Here’s an excerpt from Andy Jassy’s recent email to Amazon employees:
 
The best way to avoid this bureaucracy is as follows:
 
1. The project’s DRI (directly responsible individual) should be in the room during key discussions, regardless of their level.
2. Executives should seek updates directly from the DRI instead of getting a filtered view through their VPs and directors.
3. The founder or CEO should encourage any employee to contact them and eliminate behavior where multiple layers of people are polishing an email or deck.
 
## 9. Build a dual career track for PMs
 
Despite talk about elevating individual contributors, many PMs and designers still want to be managers because those roles come with fancier titles, higher pay, and more prestige.
 
I once had a great designer tell me:
 
I love crafting the product, but I must become a manager to keep progressing.
 
Nobody should be forced to make this trade-off. Thankfully, leaders are finally realizing that it's bad for the company if everyone wants to manage large teams.
 
Yet, I think more needs to be done for a dual PM career track to be real:
 
1. The IC track must have the same pay, titles, and prestige as the manager track.
2. The term "leader" should be separated from "manager" - ICs can be great leaders!
3. Crafting the product shouldn’t be seen as a junior PM skill vs. managing people or building orgs. After all, all the best founders operated as “IC” PMs.
4. Senior ICs should be in the room to participate in exec-level discussions and promo committee reviews along with managers.
 
Again, incentives are everything. Start rewarding people who build great products instead of only people who build orgs.
 
## 10. Learn how to build
 
Many big tech PMs have become what Nikita Bier calls "a glorified internal alignment secretary." We’ve become far too focused on internal artifacts and processes that make internal stakeholders happy.
 
Instead, we need to obsess about crafting the actual product that customers use. Here’s a great quote from my interview with Claire Vo:
 
PMs are going to be forced to build for customers directly.
 
AI allows anyone to go from idea to prototype without strong technical skills. You could then put that prototype in front of customers and get immediate feedback.
 
I’d love to see the lines between product, design, and engineering blur more so everyone can contribute to crafting the customer-facing product.
 
## Wrap up
 
To wrap up, here’s how I think we can rebuild respect for the PM profession:
 
1. Stop doing product management theater
2. Recognize that hypergrowth is mostly bullshit
3. Choose your “founder mode” work carefully
4. Avoid toxic leaders who only manage up
5. Find an environment that matches your values
6. Spend less time on planning and OKRs
7. Design your incentives carefully
8. Communicate across layers
9. Build a dual career track for PMs
10. Learn how to build
 
If you enjoyed this post (or rant), check out my related talk on bringing the craft back to product management.
 
</example2>
 
<example3>
 
TITLE: My 5 Favorite AI Prompts for Writing
SUBTITLE: The prompts that I return to the most often after 100s of hours with ChatGPT
 
Dear subscribers,
 
Today, I want to share the AI prompts that I return to the most often.
 
The secret to a great prompt is to know how large language models (LLMs) work.
 
So let’s cover:
 
1. How humans and LLMs are different
2. How to prompt AI to:
- Learn about any topic
- Draft an outline
- Write in your voice
- Edit for clarity
- Critique your writing
 
## How humans and LLMs are different
 
Andrej Karpathy is a legendary AI researcher who helped start OpenAI. He recently gave a great talk about how humans and LLMs work differently. Here’s an excerpt:
 
Let’s take the output: "California’s population is 53x that of Alaska."
 
A human will look up the numbers on Wikipedia, use a calculator to divide them, and then do a sanity check before writing it out.
 
A LLM thinks only about producing the next token or word. LLMs don’t have an inner monologue or do any sanity checks. But they do have a vast base of knowledge and a great working memory.
 
Given this context, here are some overall tips for crafting a great AI prompt:
 
1. Help the LLM succeed. An LLM has no notion of success. You have to make it want to succeed with prompts like: “You're an expert in X,” "Do this step by step,"and "Make sure you have the right answer."
 
2. Be specific and give examples. Imagine that you had to get someone to complete a task with a single email. You would give them context, make the goal clear, and share examples. LLMs also need detailed instructions.
 
3. Load relevant context into its memory. Providing detailed prompts every time is tedious. You can save time by loading relevant context into the prompt each time you want it to perform a task.
 
4. Encourage it to ask for more info. It's hard to guess what the LLM needs. Get the LLM to work with you by including: "Ask me questions if you need more info."
 
5. Get it to write variations. This makes it easy for you to pick the best answer.
 
All the prompts below follow one or more of the tips above.
 
## Learn about a topic
 
Here’s my favorite prompt for learning about a new topic (credit to Siqi Chen):
 
(Prompt)
 
This prompt will get AI to break a complex topic into simple building blocks. It’ll then test your understanding of each block before proceeding. Here’s an example:
 
(Example)
 
## Draft an outline
 
I write interviews and original pieces for this newsletter. AI helps with both.
 
a) Clean up interview transcripts
 
For interviews, I use Otter AI for transcripts before doing a 2nd pass with ChatGPT:
 
(prompt)
 
This prompt cleans up transcripts well, but there’s a catch. It only works if you give it a few paragraphs at a time. Give it more and it’ll start cutting too many sentences.
 
b) Brainstorm ideas for original pieces
 
For brainstorming, the more detail you can provide the better:
 
(prompt)
 
## Write in your voice
 
This prompt is a game changer to train AI to write in your voice:
 
(prompt)
 
After AI responds, give it your best writing samples in a list (e.g., I give it my 10 best performing tweets). AI will now recap your style:
 
Now give it an excerpt and it’ll produce 5 variations that match your style. The output isn’t perfect, but it’s just good enough to help you craft something great yourself.
 
## Edit for clarity
 
Great written communication is simple, short, and specific. Of all the prompts in this post, I probably return to this the most often:
 
Make more clear and concise, use simple language, 5 variations:
 
(EXCERPT)
 
It works great for making everything from headlines to paragraphs to entire sections more clear and concise. You can also include more constraints like:
 
Use 8 words max
 
## Critique your writing
 
After I complete a piece, I like to get AI to critique it with this prompt:
 
I’m writing a post about (TOPIC). Please critique it and suggest specific areas of improvement. We can proceed in two steps:
 
STEP 1: I’ll give you a sample of my best writing for inspiration. Do not critique this post, move to step 2.
 
STEP 2: I’ll then give you my draft post to critique. Critique specific line items with this format: Existing line, critique, and suggested line.
 
Are you ready?
 
Giving it a sample of your writing helps it learn your style and produce a useful critique. Here’s a critique for a draft of this post:
 
## 5 ways to craft better AI prompts
 
Let’s recap:
 
1. Help the AI succeed. "You're an expert in X,” “Explain step by step."
2. Be specific and give examples. "Here's a list of requirements."
3. Load relevant context into its memory. "I'll share my best writing first.”
4. Encourage it to ask for more info. "Ask questions if you need more info."
5. Get it to write variations. "Give me 3 variations."
 
I hope that you’ll use the tips above to make AI an amazing writing assistant. Let me know in the replies if it works out for you!
 
</example3>
</examples>
 
<title>
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An Opinionated Guide on Which AI Model to Use in 2025
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ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini: The Best AI Model for Each Use Case in 2025
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Cursor: From Idea to App in 15 Minutes (Without Knowing How to Code)
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Curious Beginner's Guide to MCPs
An extremely practical guide on MCPs with step-by-step hands on instructions
 
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15 AI Tips and Workflows I Wish I Knew Sooner (from 400+ PMs and Founders)
A simple hack to improve your AI prompts, how to get AI to actually challenge your ideas, plus 13 more tips and workflows from my new AI community
</title>