How to Cold Email Startups for Internships (best hack to land an internship ASAP!)

Summary

Ethan Young demonstrates a cold-outreach process for finding startup internships, particularly when larger employers have finished hiring and an internship or co-op start date is about a month away. His central pitch is to identify a specific business need, explain how you could help address it, and propose testing your contribution through an internship.

Outreach playbook

• Find startup decision-makers on LinkedIn. Search for people using terms such as “Series A founder,” then filter by location. If an in-person role is important, target the city where you want to work.
• Research the company before reaching out. Review its website, LinkedIn page, and the founder’s profile. Identify a genuine observation about its mission, product, audience, or operations.
• Look for a concrete business gap. In the example, the startup’s LinkedIn page had fewer than 1,000 followers and infrequent original posts. The presenter saw content marketing and visibility as potential areas where he could contribute.
• Focus the pitch on value to the company. Suggest a specific contribution—such as content marketing, lead generation, or market research—instead of focusing only on your need for work.
• Make a low-friction internship proposal. Offer to test the idea as an intern and demonstrate results. Roles may be paid or unpaid, part-time, casual, on-call, or full-time.
• Include proof of capability. Attach a tailored resume and a short Loom video. In the example, the presenter records a roughly one-minute walkthrough explaining the company’s opportunity and how his skills could help.
• Find and verify the founder’s email. Check LinkedIn contact details or use an email-finder extension, then verify the address because lookup tools may be inaccurate.
• Follow through consistently. The presenter recommends sending double-digit emails per week, or as many as 10–20 per day when time is short. These are suggested activity levels, not reported performance results.

Example message structure

1. Context: Explain how you found the company and acknowledge something specific about it.
2. Observation: Point out a relevant aspect of its mission or a business opportunity you noticed.
3. Value proposition: Offer a specific way you could contribute, ideally supported by relevant experience or results.
4. Internship ask: Propose trying the work as an intern and proving your impact.

Case example: Commend

• The startup’s website described it as an operating system for patient-led research groups, including groups focused on rare diseases.
• The presenter used the company’s mission—improving infrastructure and visibility for people affected by rare diseases—as a personalized opening.
• He observed that the company had just under 1,000 LinkedIn followers and posted infrequently. The cited posts were separated by roughly six months, three months, and a year.
• He proposed turning the company’s ideas into regular LinkedIn content to increase visibility and potentially attract clients or funders.
• To establish credibility, he cited growing his own LinkedIn account to nearly 10,000 followers.

Broader startup-career advice

• Start with a contribution you can credibly make, even if it is not your preferred function. At a startup, responsibilities can span multiple areas, and an initial project in marketing or research may create opportunities to learn about sales or finance later.
• For finance-oriented applicants, look for practical entry points such as market research or budgeting support rather than assuming a startup will hand over accounting responsibilities.
• Cold outreach may uncover an unplanned opening, but the presenter provides no conversion rates and does not guarantee that this approach will lead to an internship.

Presenter/source: Ethan Young (the channel is listed as Ethan Jong).