How to Reach Shaan Puri and Sam Parr

Founders waste weeks crafting the perfect cold email only to get zero replies. The problem isn’t your deck or your valuation. It’s that you sound exactly like the 200 other people who hit their inbox that morning. When the people you’re trying to reach are Shaan Puri and Sam Parr, hosts of the My First Million podcast and two of the most recognizable voices in the startup ecosystem, that problem magnifies. They aren’t just hard to reach because they’re busy. They’re hard to reach because their entire personal brand is built on cutting through noise, and they’ve seen every generic outreach play in the book.

This guide doesn’t deal in platitudes. It walks through the concrete steps you can take right now to get their attention, whether you want to pitch a story, discuss a market thesis, or just earn a signal boost for your fundraise. The same tactics apply to reaching other high-profile investors and media figures, so treat this as a repeatable outreach framework, not a one-off script.

Prerequisites: What You Need Before You Reach Out

Before you send a single message, you need to have a few things in order.

• A clear reason for contacting them that has nothing to do with “I’d love 10 minutes of your time.” Shaan and Sam get hundreds of vague requests. If you can’t articulate why this matters to them in two sentences, you aren’t ready.
• A track record of actually building something. It doesn’t have to be a unicorn, but you should be able to point to momentum-revenue, a growing user base, a dataset they haven’t seen-that signals you’re more than a deck.
• A system to track the conversation. When you’re running multiple outreach strands, things fall apart fast. Platforms like Capitaly give you a central inbox that ties every investor and influencer message into one workspace, so a reply from Sam doesn’t get buried under demo requests. If you’re actively raising, the investor CRM keeps your target list enriched and ranked, which means you always know who to reach next and what stage of the conversation you’re in.
• A strong understanding of their content. Listen to at least 20 episodes of My First Million, follow Shaan’s personal site and Sam on X, and study the kinds of businesses they actually get excited about.

Step 1: Understand Their Content and What They Actually Respond To

You won’t reach Shaan and Sam by pitching your startup as a guest feature-at least not as the first move. The podcast thrives on business ideas, market breakdowns, and the mechanics of building wealth. If you listen to enough episodes, you’ll notice patterns: they love companies with recurring revenue, simple distribution models, and founder stories with a twist. They lean into ideas that sound a “little crazy” but come with numbers that make them plausible.

What they rarely do is a straight interview with a founder pitching a round. The episodes that resonate most are built around a specific problem or insight. So your goal isn’t to get booked; it’s to supply an insight that’s so good they’d bring it up on air with or without you.

Pro tip: Listen to episodes where they react to listener emails or business suggestions. That tells you the bar. The emails that get read are always short, specific, and often start with a surprising number.

To make sure your outreach doesn’t fall flat, treat your research like an investor funnel. With a tool like the Capitaly CRM, you can score potential contacts based on how well they match your stage and sector, and apply the same logic to influencers: rank them by relevance, past mentions, and engagement. That way you’re not spraying messages at anyone with a big following; you’re prioritizing the ones where your content has the highest chance of landing.

Step 2: Build a Connection Before the Pitch

Direct cold messages to Sam or Shaan have a low success rate unless you’re already on their radar. So build a paper trail first.

• Engage publicly on X and LinkedIn. Reply to their posts with genuine questions or data points that add to the conversation. Avoid the “great take” replies. If Sam posts about a DTC brand, mention a specific metric from your own experience in that space. Over a few weeks, your name becomes familiar.
• Contribute to their communities. Both Shaan and Sam run paid communities (like Shaan’s Milk Road or Sam’s Hampton). Join, post thoughtful breakdowns, and become a known entity inside those walls.
• Comment on YouTube. The My First Million YouTube channel often sees the hosts replying to comments. Leave comments that go deeper than “Loved this episode.” Provide a counterpoint or an additional data source, and they’ll occasionally engage directly.

This upfront work does more than earn a reply later. It signals that you understand the unwritten rule of raising capital: relationships drive outcomes. Investors, like influencers, back people who show up consistently. When you’re ready to run a process, a platform like Capitaly for funds and VCs works the same way for LPs-tracking every touchpoint and document engagement so you know exactly when a lead warms up.

Step 3: Crafting a Personalized, High-Impact Message

Now the message itself. Most founders screw this up by leading with who they are instead of what they found.

Start with a sharp insight, not an introduction. Shaan has said on the pod that the best cold emails start with a number he didn’t know. Something like: “You mentioned on episode 224 that vertical SaaS tops out at $100M. I run a vertical SaaS business in HVAC that’s doing $22M ARR growing 80% year-over-year, and I’d add one nuance.” That’s a hook.

Keep it under six sentences. The entire body should be scannable on a phone. If you need more space, link to a one-page memo or a deal room where they can explore the numbers themselves. A secure, tracked data room-like the one Capitaly provides-gives you the same kind of analytics VCs expect: who viewed what, for how long, and which pages got the most attention. That feedback loop tells you if your data landed.

Frame the ask as a question, not a request. Instead of “Would you have me on the pod?” try: “Does this match the kind of idea you’d cover, or am I off base?” That invites a quick yes/no and respects their taste.

Warning: Don’t attach a 20-slide deck in the first message. You’ll trigger spam filters and kill the thread. If you’ve got a deck, upload it to a deal room and share a link after they express interest. That way you also see how deeply they engage.

Step 4: Utilize the Right Channels for Outreach

Not all channels are equal. Here’s the priority order based on what has worked for founders who’ve gotten through to the MFM team.

1. Email with a known introduction. Warm intros via a mutual connection crush all other methods. Use your network. If you don’t have one, go back to Step 2 and build it.
2. Direct email to the correct address. Shaan and Sam receive pitches through their production team. The official show page and Muck Rack profile list the best contact routes. The podcast’s Apple Podcasts page and Spotify page also include contact details at the bottom of the description. Never guess an email; a bounced message burns credibility.
3. X DM only after a public interaction. If you’ve had a meaningful exchange on a post, a DM that references that thread can work. Sam is more responsive here, but the bar is still high.
4. LinkedIn InMail. Lower response rate, but an InMail that ties to a specific episode or a mutual interest can break through. Keep it short and reference your previous engagement on other platforms.

For founders who are also running an active fundraise, this outreach needs to sit alongside 50 other conversations. A tool like the Capitaly Central Inbox connects your team’s email and pulls every investor and influencer thread into one place, so when Sam replies, you don’t miss it because it landed in your co-founder’s spam folder. AI drafts that are grounded in your deck and metrics help you reply fast, which matters when someone’s attention window is small.

Step 5: Timing and Follow-Up Tactics

Timing isn’t just about day of week; it’s about the podcast’s editorial rhythm.

• Send right after a related episode drops. If they just covered a topic adjacent to your wheelhouse, reference that episode and add a fresh angle. They’re most receptive when the subject is top of mind.
• Tuesday through Thursday mornings. Avoid Monday inbox overload and Friday fade. But again, relevance beats timing.
• Give the first follow-up at least a week. One follow-up is expected; two is acceptable if you’re adding new value. Never send a third. If they haven’t replied after two messages and some social engagement, pivot to other channels or let the thread go cold until you have a bigger milestone to share.

When you’re running a fundraise, the same discipline applies to investor updates. Consistency wins. Founders who send monthly updates to their target list close rounds faster, and Capitaly automates that: the platform tracks who opened the update, which links they clicked, and surfaces the leads who are warming up. The same principle works for media outreach-treat your update to Shaan and Sam like an investor update, not a press release.

Step 6: Leverage Mutual Connections and Social Proof

If you can name-drop someone they respect, do it early-but only with permission.

• Find common ground. Search “Sam Parr angel investment” or “Shaan Puri portfolio” to see what companies they’ve backed. If you’ve worked with someone they know, your business school classmate who now runs a fund they’ve co-invested with can make the intro.
• Use podcast guests as a bridge. Many MFM guests are accessible on X. Drop them a note, learn something, and if the relationship clicks, ask if they’d be open to introducing you to the hosts.
• Reference your existing traction. When you have real numbers, VCs and podcasters both pay attention. The same metrics that make a fund say yes-retention, payback period, organic growth-make Shaan’s ears perk up. Just state them plainly without hype.

This is no different from raising a round: warm intros are 10x more effective than cold. The Capitaly platform was built for exactly this. The investor CRM doesn’t just store names; it ranks thousands of investors by how well they match your deal, and the deal room lets you share your narrative with live analytics, so you always know who’s leaning in.

Step 7: Offer Genuine Value Beyond a Feature Request

One of the biggest mistakes founders make is treating their outreach like a transaction. If you approach Shaan or Sam with an ask only, you’re dead on arrival.

Instead, flip the dynamic:

• Share exclusive data they can’t get elsewhere. Maybe you’ve scraped a dataset on franchise royalties or you’ve run a customer survey with surprising results. Send that first without any pitch.
• Introduce them to a founder with a wild story. Be the connector. If you bring a great guest to their attention, you become valuable.
• Offer to pressure test a business idea they’re kicking around. They often throw out business ideas on the show. If you have operational expertise in that niche, give them free, detailed feedback. It’s a natural conversation starter.

The best outreach reads like a favor to them, not a favor from them. That’s the same mindset that gets investor meetings. When you demonstrate that you can add value before you ask for capital, you’re a operating like a pro. And if you’re raising, your data room should reflect that. With Capitaly’s deal room, you can see exactly how investors interact with your materials, so you follow up with the ones who spent 20 minutes on your model, not the ones who never opened it.

Pro Tips and Warnings

• Don’t send the same email to both hosts. They talk constantly. If you copy-paste, they will notice and it will get shared among their team as “the founder who didn’t bother to personalize.”
• Don’t pitch your startup for investment unless they’ve explicitly invited that. Sam occasionally invests personally through Hampton and other channels, but cold investment pitches rarely convert and burn the relationship.
• Do use their first names, but don’t fake familiarity. “Shaan, I heard your take on SaaS multiples and it got me thinking about a quirk in my own business” is good. “Hey bro, love the pod” is not.
• Monitor their social mentions. When they ask the audience a question, that’s an open door. Respond with something useful and you’ll often get a direct reply.
• Keep a log. Every interaction-every tweet reply, email, and comment-should live in one place. The Capitaly CRM works for this, but even a simple spreadsheet is better than memory. Know when you last reached out and what the context was.

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Reaching Shaan Puri and Sam Parr is a test of whether you can do enterprise sales on yourself. The same playbook that gets you into top VC funds-research, warm connection, high-signal pitch, persistent but polite follow-up-works for the people who shape startup culture.

Key takeaways:

• Start with a surprising insight, not an introduction.
• Build public engagement on their channels before you ever send a DM.
• Use the right channel, with a clear, scannable message under six sentences.
• Offer value first: data, introductions, or detailed feedback on their business ideas.
• Track everything. A central system like Capitaly turns scattered outreach into a measurable pipeline.

If you’re raising capital right now, the same framework will get you meetings with the investors on your target list. And when you’re ready to run that raise with precision, Capitaly gives you one workspace for your CRM, deal room, document intelligence, and always-on AI agents that handle outreach and updates-so you can spend more time building and less time chasing. Join the waitlist for early access at capitaly.vc and subscribe to the Capitaly newsletter on Substack for daily insights on venture and fundraising.