Bengaluru techie shares how a cold email to Jeff Bezos at age 19 became a turning point in his career
A Bengaluru techie shared how a cold email he sent to Jeff Bezos helped him get noticed within Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem and eventually shaped his career path.
A Bengaluru-based techie has shared how a cold email he sent to Jeff Bezos at the age of 19 eventually helped him get noticed within Amazon and paved the way for him to work with the company’s developer ecosystem.
Taking to X, developer Ashish Jha recalled the incident from 2017, when he wrote to Bezos after feeling disappointed that his Alexa skill did not qualify for an Echo device reward in India, even though it had gained traction among users.
“Lore time, When I was 19, I cold emailed @JeffBezos, after I was pissed that my Alexa skill didn't win an echo device for getting a lot of users,” Jha said.
“Childish, I know, and the language ughhh. But this email led to Head Dev Marketing Manager for Alexa reach out to me personally, appreciate me for my work, got me contacts within Amazon, and in just a month, they also started giving out perks in the Indian market to all developers. And then, me, @alexadevs and the rest that followed over the next 5 years is history that you can google about,” he wrote while sharing the screenshot of the email he sent to Bezos.
What did the email say?
In the email, titled “Issue Regarding Alexa Promotion in India”, Jha had described how he built his first Alexa skill shortly after attending Alexa Dev Day. “Without any previous knowledge, I went on to make my first Alexa skill on the dev day learning from the Amazon experts. A couple of days later my skill got published and I have got around 220 unique customers in just 5 days of publishing the skill,” he wrote.
He also raised the disparity in developer rewards at the time, noting that US, UK and German developers received Echo devices after crossing user thresholds. Indian developers, however, were excluded from the promotion. “It would have been a quite motivating for me to get a dot to continue learning of Alexa. Anyways I will keep on building more skills. Hopefully, this funny sort of ‘discrimination’ will be taken care of Jeff, so that we Indian developers are not left behind the world,” the email read.
How did social media react?
Since being shared, Jha’s post has resonated widely online, with users applauding his initiative and persistence.
“A lot of people underestimate the power of cold emails. As long you are genuine and not trying to be too salesy, usually the person gets back,” one user wrote.
“This is amazing! That cold email hustle paid off big time. Shows the power of just *asking* and showing your work,” commented another.
“Getting rightfully pissed at things is such an under taught skill in the university of ‘be nice be kind,’” wrote a third user.
According to the Alexa Developers’ official website, Ashish Jha’s journey as a voice technologist began in November 2017 when Alexa first launched in India. Since then, he has created over 500 Alexa skills across multiple domains or businesses and has remained actively involved in the voice-first ecosystem. He currently works as a Solutions Engineer at DevRev.
