Stop Starting Emails with I Hope This Finds You Well

The phrase is not warm. It is a habit. Here is what warmth in an email actually looks like.

Every week, somewhere, a startup founder sends a cold email to a potential investor that opens with “I hope this finds you well.” A student emails a professor for a recommendation letter: “I hope you are doing well.” A marketing manager follows up on a brief: “Hope you had a great weekend.” A small business owner sends a newsletter to three thousand subscribers: “I hope this message finds you all well.”

None of these people are being careless. They are following a script that professional culture handed them a long time ago and never bothered to revise.

The old thinking was that you soften the transaction of an email with a gesture of warmth before getting to your ask. That instinct is not wrong. The execution became the problem. “I hope this finds you well” has been sent so many times, across so many contexts, by so many people with so many different relationships, that it no longer reads as warmth. It reads as autopilot. The person receiving it does not feel greeted. They feel processed.

The worst part is that it tends to undo what it is trying to do. A generic opener makes everything that follows feel more transactional by comparison, not less.

Here is what the best communicators do instead, and it is not complicated.

The startup founder cold emailing an investor might open with: “Your post about pre-seed valuations in B2B SaaS last month is exactly what I needed to read before writing this.” That is nine seconds of research that signals more genuine interest than any pleasantry can. The student writing to the professor might open with: “The seminar you ran on discourse analysis in March changed how I am approaching my thesis.” The marketing manager might open: “The brief landed this morning and I want to talk through one assumption before the agency sees it.”

Each of these does the same thing. It proves the sender was paying attention to this specific person, not composing a message for a generic recipient. That specificity is the warmth. It is also more respectful of someone’s time than any throat-clearing phrase because it signals immediately that the email has a reason to exist.

In Korean professional communication, there is a concept called 첫 인상 (cheot insang), the opening gesture that sets the tone for everything that follows. The idea is not that the opening needs to be warm. It is that the opening needs to earn what comes next. A strong 첫 인상 is one that makes the other person feel that this interaction is worth their attention. “I hope this finds you well” asks for attention before offering any reason to give it.

The bar is not high. It is just different from what most people were taught. Before you write another email opener, ask: does this sentence do any actual communicative work? If the honest answer is no, delete it and start where the message actually begins.

What is the last email you sent that opened with something genuinely specific to the person you were writing to?

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If you want to find out whether your writing is doing what you think it is, the Copy Checker is a quick way to find out… or work with Matthew on the email and messaging habits that shape how you are perceived.

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