A Claude Code / Claude Agent skill that teaches Claude how to write cold emails, job application emails, sales outreach, investor pitches, and high-stakes intros using a world-building framework rooted in applied psychology.
Based on the deconstruction of the viral Soham Parekh cold email — the five-sentence template that reached hundreds of YC founders and landed dozens of interviews from people who would not normally reply.
Effective writing is not self-expression. It is applied psychology — a specific experience engineered in the mind of the reader.
When loaded into Claude, this skill turns any "help me write an email" request into a disciplined, reader-first workflow:
- Audience analysis — who they are, what world they live in, what identity they want confirmed
- World-fit — atomic units of common ground the reader already agrees with
- Identity mirroring — reflecting the reader's ideal self back at them
- Frame shifting — moving the reader from their worldview to yours in stages
- Single core point — the one sentence doing the real work
The output is an email that reads like it was written for the recipient, not at them.
- Job seekers writing cold applications to founders, hiring managers, or senior engineers
- Founders doing investor outreach, partnership intros, or customer development emails
- Salespeople running cold outbound campaigns
- Operators asking for favors, intros, or time from strangers
- Anyone whose reply rate on cold email is lower than they would like
# macOS / Linux
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
git clone https://github.com/thegauravmahto/claude_email_skill.git ~/.claude/skills/writing-persuasive-emailsClaude Code will auto-discover the skill on the next session. Trigger it by asking Claude to "write a cold email", "help me with a job application email", or similar.
# from your project root
mkdir -p .claude/skills
git clone https://github.com/thegauravmahto/claude_email_skill.git .claude/skills/writing-persuasive-emailsDrop SKILL.md into your agent's skills directory following the Agent Skills specification.
Once installed, just ask Claude in natural language. Example prompts:
Help me write a cold email to a YC founder about a role.
Draft an investor outreach email for my seed round. Context: [...]
I need a follow-up email after three weeks of silence. The ask is [...]
Rewrite this draft so it actually gets a reply:
[paste draft]
Claude will invoke the writing-persuasive-emails skill, run audience analysis, and produce an email that:
- Opens with a specific, non-copy-pasteable detail about the recipient
- Mirrors the identity the recipient wants to see in their inbox
- Uses the recipient's in-group vocabulary (GTM, cracked, NRR, ICP, etc.)
- Makes the ask small enough that "yes" is low-friction
- Has one single core point doing the work
| Step | Question | Output |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — Audience | Who are they and what do they believe? | A map of the reader's world |
| 2 — World-fit | What do they already agree with? | Atomic units to open with |
| 3 — Mirror | What identity do they want to confirm? | A sentence that reflects it |
| 4 — Frame shift | Are you introducing a new idea? | Validate → dissonance → resolve |
| 5 — Core point | What one sentence does the work? | Everything else supports it |
See SKILL.md for the full framework, templates, worked examples, and a pre-send checklist.
Hey, I love everything about what [Company] 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.
[Technical stack in their vocabulary.]
Super lean teams, working across the stack.
Why it worked (the blue-pill reading is "decent application"; the red-pill reading is psychological surgery):
"I love everything about what [Company] is doing"— mentioning the company name is the cheapest, highest-leverage signal of research. Most applicants skip it."I don't have many hobbies outside coding"— mirrors the "obsessive builder" identity YC founders romanticize."Super lean teams, working across the stack"— in-group vocabulary. Signals tribe membership without claiming it.
The email did not ask for a job. It sold an identity the founder was already desperate to buy.
Full deconstruction in SKILL.md.
Writing has almost nothing to do with you, the writer. It has everything to do with the reader's existing world and the identity they want to be seen as having.
- You cannot build a new world from scratch in one email.
- You can fit into a world that already exists in the reader's head.
- You can modify that world one small step at a time.
- You cannot bombard the reader with facts that contradict their worldview — the brain has an immune system.
- You can validate part of their belief, introduce one piece of dissonance, and offer resolution.
The same principles apply to prompting LLMs: a good prompt is world-building for the model. A good email is world-building for the reader.
claude claude-code claude-skill agent-skills anthropic cold-email cold-email-template email-writing persuasion copywriting job-application sales-email outreach investor-email networking world-building ai-prompting applied-psychology
claude_email_skill/
├── SKILL.md # The skill itself — framework, templates, checklist
├── README.md # This file
├── LICENSE # MIT
└── .gitignore
Issues and PRs welcome. If you have a real-world email that used this framework (or failed it in an instructive way), open an issue — worked examples make the skill stronger.
MIT — see LICENSE.
Framework extracted from a talk on writing as world-building, built around the public deconstruction of the Soham Parekh cold-email incident. The underlying claim — that effective writing is applied psychology, not self-expression — is ancient; the world-building vocabulary and the case study are from that talk.
Skill author: @thegauravmahto.