Of the many emails entrepreneurs send — and, if you want to be successful, you should be sending TONS — the trickiest are “cold emails.” Those are the emails entrepreneurs send to people they’ve never met in hopes of getting a positive response. The list includes prospective customers, investors, partners, employees, and just about anyone else critical to the eventual success of a startup.

Despite the importance of cold emails, as far as I can tell, the vast majority of cold emails entrepreneurs send are terrible. After all, I receive dozens of them every day… entrepreneurs wanting advice, entrepreneurs wanting investment, entrepreneurs wanting to sell me something, and so on.

Personally, as someone who teaches entrepreneurship, I don’t mind. In fact, I don’t expect perfection from the people talking with me, otherwise I wouldn’t have a job. However, I feel badly for the entrepreneurs. If they’re sending me bad emails, it means they’re surely sending bad emails in other, more critical parts of their businesses, like sales emails and fundraising emails.

Luckily, fixing your cold emails usually isn’t as hard a problem to solve as you might think. In fact, the majority of problems can be solved in the first few words.

Yes — you read that correctly. The first few words — 10 at most — is often the difference between a great cold email and a terrible cold email. That’s because most email clients preview the first few words before the reader opens the email, and they create the context for everything that comes after. If the preview text is great, your recipient will eagerly read the rest. If the preview text is bad, it’ll probably get deleted before being opened.

As an entrepreneur, you can’t afford to have people deleting your emails. To avoid that fate, here’s a list of the five worst email intros I regularly receive and why they’re terrible:

#1: The Basic Intro

Example:

“Hi Aaron! My name is…”