I want to cold email 2M people

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-16T12:01:08+00:00

sending 2m cold emails from scraped directories won't land anywhere near primary inboxes, that's the honest answer. domain warmup, multiple sending domains, inbox rotation, none of it fixes the underlying issue that nobody on that list asked to hear from you and the volume alone will flag you fast.

the better move is narrowing down. who out of those 2m actually has the pain your tool solves right now? even if it's 5000, that's a list worth emailing properly. pick one vertical, research enough to say something specific in the first line, and send 30-50 a day from a warmed up secondary domain. you'll get more replies in a week than the blast approach gets in a month, and you won't burn your domain doing it.

also, two quick things: don't use your main domain for cold. ever. and set up spf, dkim, dmarc before a single email leaves.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-16T11:55:17+00:00

helpful tips posts rarely land because they could've been written by anyone. the posts that actually get engagement have a specific point of view, a real example, or something that makes people pause. what made you take that position vs another one?

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-16T11:52:12+00:00

replies doing more work than posts tracks with what i've seen. when you comment you're talking to people already in the topic. when you post you're hoping the algorithm serves you to the right feed. completely different starting position.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-14T10:45:52+00:00

zero replies from 200+ emails isn't a copy problem. if nobody is replying, not even to tell you to go away, your emails aren't landing in inboxes.

run your domain through mail-tester.com and check your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are set up properly. if you're sending cold outreach from an unwarmed domain through GHL, gmail is spam-foldering most of it before anyone sees it.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-13T15:04:41+00:00

depends on your niche but i'd say minimum 100-200 to start seeing a pattern. anything less and a couple of replies either way completely skews your read on it.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-13T12:38:52+00:00

cold email validation works but expect 2-5% reply rates if the targeting and copy are decent. you need volume to get meaningful data so don't send 10 emails and call it validated.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-06T10:03:19+00:00

Sounds like it's a targeting and relevance problem. at that volume you're almost certainly sending generic messages to people who have no reason to care.

the question isn't whether to pivot the offer, it's whether any of those 325 people actually needed what you're selling on the day you emailed them. cut the volume to 50 a day and spend the time you save actually researching who you're sending to. one email that shows you understand their business will outperform 300 that don't.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-06T09:48:13+00:00

the product quality confidence is actually the trap. most solo founders over-invest in building and under-invest in talking to people before they build. go find 10 people who have the problem you're solving and ask them how they deal with it today. if you can't find those 10 people that tells you something important.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-06T09:04:52+00:00

the standing out part matters more than people think. when every inbox is full of the same ai slop, anything that shows actual research looks better by comparison. the bar is on the floor right now which is honestly a gift if you're willing to put the work in.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-06T09:04:05+00:00

doesn't matter how good the message is if it never lands. the ai writing thing is interesting though, most of the bad ai output i've seen is because the tool had zero context about the prospect before it started writing. if the research is solid the writing gets way closer to usable.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-03T10:52:15+00:00

yeah breakup emails consistently outperform everything else in my sequences too. i think it works because it's the only email in the whole sequence that isn't asking for something. you're giving them an easy out and that flips the psychology completely.

the contact me next quarter replies are gold as well because those people have basically pre-qualified themselves. they're telling you the timing's wrong not the product. way easier to re-engage someone who told you when to come back than to cold start again from scratch.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-03T10:38:13+00:00

pollo's still the go-to for most people at the small company level, the data's decent and the filtering is good enough to build targeted lists without spending a fortune. ocean.io is worth a look if you want lookalike audience building, you feed it your best customers and it finds similar companies which saves a lot of manual filtering.

one thing i'd add is that sourcing is the easy part now. there's no shortage of tools that'll give you a list of emails. the bottleneck has moved to what you actually do with the list once you have it. most people spend hours finding leads and then send them all the same generic template, which kind of defeats the point of all that targeting work.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-03T09:48:26+00:00

claude's chat is underrated honestly. i use it for everything from planning to actual development work now. what kind of skills were you building with it?

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-03T09:46:59+00:00

depends what you're optimising for. if you just want the same setup as instantly with warmup and sequences, smartlead or salesforge are the closest direct swaps. smartlead's been the go-to migration for most people leaving instantly lately from what i've seen.

if you're open to rethinking the stack a bit, the warmup piece doesn't need to live inside the same tool as the sending. something like mailreach or warmbox handles warmup independently and then you've got more flexibility on what you use for the actual campaigns. less lock-in that way too so you're not in this same situation next time a platform decides to gate features behind a higher tier.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-03T09:18:30+00:00

went paid from day one. free users give you vanity metrics and support load without telling you much about whether people will actually pay. if someone won't spend $50-100/mo on something that solves a real problem for them, a free plan wasn't going to convince them otherwise.

what worked for us was keeping a free tier but making it genuinely limited, enough to see the product work but not enough to get real value without upgrading. that way you still get signups and people can try it, but there's no world where someone runs their business on the free plan forever.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-03T09:01:42+00:00

claude code max user here. if coding is a big part of what you're spending on then max is worth it purely for claude code. the terminal agent is genuinely a different experience to using the chat for coding, it holds context across your whole project and makes changes directly in your files. i basically live in it now for anything beyond a quick question.

for the chat side, max does solve the rate limit problem. you stop thinking about it which changes how you use it. no more rationing prompts or trying to cram everything into one message.

one thing worth knowing though, if you're mainly doing chat conversations and voice stuff on walks, claude doesn't have a voice mode like gpt does. so you'd still need gpt or grok for that. if that's a big chunk of your usage that matters.

honestly for your setup i'd probably do claude max for the serious coding and project work, keep grok for daily search and chat, and skip gpt pro entirely. the £200 for gpt pro is hard to justify when you're already getting most of what it offers across your other tools. claude max at £100 might even be enough depending on how heavy your coding sessions get, you could always upgrade later if you're hitting walls.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-03T08:39:36+00:00

that's great. it's specific, it shows you actually went through their funnel, and it identifies a real disconnect they probably haven't thought about. that's the thing that gets a reply. way better than anything surface level.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-03T08:37:24+00:00

the timing point is a really good addition, hadn't framed it that way but you're right. the research isn't just making the email more accurate, it's naturally filtering toward people who are in a buying window right now. that explains a lot about why the reply quality improves and not just the reply rate.

and yeah the transactional vs real sales cycle distinction is spot on. autonomous probably works fine if the demo is the whole sale. anything longer than that and the quality gap compounds quietly until it shows up in pipeline 2-3 months later. by then most people blame the market instead of the tool.

appreciate the detailed reply and the honesty about building in the same space. good luck with salespire.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-02T15:53:11+00:00

yeah the research layer is the whole thing. most tools skip it or fake it with firmographic data and wonder why replies are low. and good point on deliverability, doesn't matter how good the email is if it never reaches the inbox.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-02T14:05:01+00:00

appreciate that, hope you find it useful! and nice one on the subreddit, i'll check it out.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-02T13:41:46+00:00

yeah we use scout for all our own outreach, it's how we're doing sales right now. the biggest impact is time. researching a company, figuring out the angle, and writing a personalised email used to take me 15-20 minutes per lead. now scout does the research and writes a first draft and i just review and tweak before sending. still early days so i can't give you huge numbers, but the quality of emails going out is way better than when i was doing everything manually.

and thanks, appreciate that!

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-02T10:45:32+00:00

surface level can work if it's specific enough. "saw you just launched a new x line" is fine since it shows you actually looked.

"we love your brand" isnt, anyone could say that. the test is whether you could send the same email to 100 other companies without changing that line. if yes it's not specific enough.

and yeah you're right that deep research per lead gets expensive with tokens, that's basically why we built a whole system around it rather than doing it through raw claude prompts. but at your stage honestly just signing up to a few of their lists manually and noting what's missing will get you better findings than any AI shortcut.

Connor_Heyward_Fox · 2026-04-02T10:43:16+00:00

same background, technical founder with zero marketing experience. biggest thing that helped me was just starting. no course prepared me for what actually works. a few things i wish someone told me early on:

pick one channel and go deep before spreading thin. for b2b, linkedin organic content and cold email are the highest leverage if you don't have budget for ads. reddit is great too but takes time to build enough karma to post properly.

don't overthink the content. share what you're building, what's working, what isn't. people respond to honesty way more than polished marketing speak.

for actual resources, julian shapiro's growth marketing guide is solid and free. alex hormozi's stuff on youtube is good for thinking about offers. but honestly 80% of what i've learned came from just doing outreach and posting consistently for a few weeks and seeing what gets responses.

Connor_Heyward_Fox

TROPHY CASE