I have an email address that you’ll find in the footer below this post, I rarely get emails to it, the ones I do get fall into two categories: very, very kind people paying compliments to me about this website; secondly some sort of cold email, usually from a SEO expert explaining that my SEO is shit. Like Eric I am often tempted to email back and see what they would do if I took them up on the offer.
The other day I got a cold email that stuck out, here’s what it said:
hey luke,
this is an out-of-the-blue email but i’m writing on behalf of the small team behind ruks.org: we’ve been (manually!) compiling a big database of design + creative individuals and firms who we think are awesome. if you’re reading this email, that means at some point and somehow, we came across your portfolio and/or your work. (manually. no web scrapers.)
for context, ruks.org is just a nice, short domain that we bought a while back, but we’ve decided it stands for the “[r]esource of [u]n[k]nown [s]pecialists.” that is to say, it’s a database of creative talent.
we are not venture-backed, and the platform is currently free. it’s a side project of family office, a design studio based in new york. long story short, our spreadsheet of portfolios we had saved got a little unwieldy, and we figured it’d be nice to make the resource public. our hope that it can help route opportunities for work to the inboxes of great creative talent.
you can click here to make an account and take a look at your profile. if you would like to correct your profile or would like to recommend that any other creatives be added, please let us know. you can respond directly to this email since this is a manually sent note.
all the best,
annie swanson at ruks.org + family office
What have I just learned?
- I have been added to a database of other creative people
- The database has been hand-crafted
- It was hand-crafted by a small team
- It was built to offer a resource to the wider community
- It is currently free, probably not always
- It does not need to be profitable because it has no outside funding
- It is called ‘ruks’
- The name has a fun back-story
- It was originally an internal tool used by the small team
- I can take a look at the entry they’ve created for me
- This email was sent manually, by Annie
- I can reply to this email because it was sent manually by Annie
- The small team is called Family Office
- Family Office is based in New York
And so on…
Isn’t that nice? It’s a cold email from a real person, at a real company, in a real place, who have built a real thing, that has a real use.
In those four paragraphs I have learned so much, it answered every question and settled every doubt I had in real time while I was reading it.
It gives me some decent, optional action items, and it gives me an easy way to ask more questions.
It’s very sad that this seems so original and refreshing to me. But let’s not dwell too much on that feeling.
Go check out ruks, I’m in it. Thanks Annie.