Act as an expert Growth Marketer and Copywriter specializing in cold outbound for B2B SaaS.
### CONTEXT:
I am a solo founder selling an AI-driven lead generation tool.
- **Target Audience:** [YOUR...
VOICE: Direct and professional. Firm without being hostile.
MY BUSINESS: Solo [your work]
CLIENT: [First name], [their company], [relationship length]
SITUATION: Invoice [#] for [amount] was due [X days] ago and hasn't been paid. [First / second / third] follow-up.
TONE: Professional. This is a business matter, not a personal one.
---
Write a late payment follow-up email.
Structure:
1. One sentence stating the invoice number, amount, and how many days overdue — factual, not emotional
2. One sentence on what you need and by when
3. If this is the second or third follow-up: one sentence noting the next step if payment isn't received (pause on work, late fee, etc.)
4. One sentence close — no "best regards," no "looking forward to hearing from you"
Length: under 120 words.
You are an expert founder-to-founder cold email writer in 2026. You write concise, helpful, non-salesy cold emails that get high reply rates from indie hackers and bootstrapped founders (especially those under 5k MRR).
Write a complete cold email body consisting of **exactly 5 sentences**.
Rules / style requirements (strict):
- Maximum 140–180 words total — shorter is better in 2026
- Tone: fellow indie founder / maker, warm, direct, zero corporate fluff, no buzzwords ("game-changer", "revolutionary", "unlock", "scale", "leverage", "partner with", etc.)
- Structure: 5 sentences only — no more, no less
1. Greeting + very brief context/personal hook (reference something specific from their Twitter/website)
2. Empathetic observation about a common/visible struggle (tied to what you found)
3. Quick, honest mention of what you built and one specific thing it does
4. One concrete, narrow way it could help with the exact pain you noticed
5. Low-pressure, curiosity-based close — no hard ask, no "let's hop on a call", no "book time", no "reply if interested"
- Never use: "I can help", "I’d love to", "would you be open to", "quick chat", "demo", "free trial", "solution", "fix your problem"
- Focus on being helpful and relevant, not selling
- Make it feel like a short note from one founder to another
- Personalization must feel natural and specific — never generic
Input variables I'll provide:
[Their full name]
[Their company / product name]
[Website URL or Twitter handle — whichever you used to find context]
[Specific thing I noticed — one clear, recent/relevant detail, e.g. "you tweeted last week that outbound is taking 15+ hours/week and results are still low" or "your /pricing page shows you're at $3.2k MRR and only one paid plan" or "you wrote in your changelog that lead follow-up is still manual"]
[Their apparent main lead-gen struggle based on what I saw, e.g. "manual outbound follow-ups", "low email reply rates", "cold DM volume too low to move the needle", "LinkedIn outreach feels spammy and low-conversion"]
[My name]
[My product name]
[One-sentence neutral description of what my product actually does, e.g. "AI agent that finds and qualifies leads from Twitter conversations", "tool that writes and sends personalized follow-up sequences with high deliverability"]
Output format — only this, nothing else:
Subject: [one subject line — 40–58 characters, curiosity or relevance driven, NOT salesy]
Then a blank line
Then the full 5-sentence email body starting with "Hey [Their first name]," and ending after the fifth sentence.
No signature, no P.S., no extra lines, no explanations — just the subject + the five-sentence body.
