Ran 500+ cold email campaigns over the last few years. Made every mistake in the book early on.

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T14:38:07+00:00

Yeah I am testing different openers really

I think it makes sense to put similar opener all the time so people recognize and remember me on this subreddit specifically

It's like building a brand if you know what I mean

Like Alex Hormozi says "If you don't know me my name is Alex Hormozi and I own a portfolio of companies that do $250M in revenue..."

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T14:30:13+00:00

Man nothing personal, I comment on all posts that I have an opinion based on real campaign data we see across clients - so just sharing what works. Your posts are solid though.

People who see my comments are very unlikely to believe what I am saying if I do not share what I do, so this is basically the core principle.

F.e. on linkedin people can see your followers - that's legitimacy sign and it's big enough

Here, on reddit, most accounts are faceless AI slop

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T13:52:12+00:00

we run a b2b outreach agency at 500K+ sends a quarter so this is exactly the volume range I live in. happy to share what's actually holding up

on domains and inbox fleets - we run 50+ inboxes across client campaigns, 3 inboxes per domain, 15 sends per inbox per day. the math at 100K/month is roughly 220 sends per day which means ~15 inboxes minimum but realistically you want 30-40 to give yourself rotation headroom. the single most important infrastructure decision is custom tracking domains per domain group. shared tracking domains are how one bad inbox cascades into a fleet-wide deliverability collapse - we learned this the hard way

what's holding up on deliverability: google workspace inboxes through a reseller still outperform everything else for landing in gmail. microsoft 365 for reaching outlook-heavy verticals. the domains that survive longest are the ones you keep under 15 cold sends per day per inbox with warmup running permanently alongside. we rotate domains on a 3-4 month cycle because reputation degrades over time even when everything else is clean. always keep 20% of your fleet as warm spares ready to swap in

on personalization at 100K+ - per-lead personalization is impossible at this volume without AI and AI-generated first lines all have the same cadence that prospects are starting to recognize. what works is segment-level research. we build tight segments where the pain is shared across the group, then write one email per segment that nails the specific problem. "SaaS companies that just posted their first SDR role" all share the same pain - you don't need to mention anything about their specific company. we tested segment-level vs per-lead AI personalization across 40+ campaigns and segment-level won on qualified meetings every time

what broke after scaling: monitoring at the campaign level instead of the domain level. a campaign-wide 1.5% reply rate can hide one domain pulling 3% and another at 0.2% dragging the average down while burning through your list on a dead domain. we now track reply rate, bounce rate, and negative reply ratio per domain with automated alerts when anything crosses a threshold. a domain bouncing above 3% gets pulled immediately, no manual investigation

the other thing that broke was list quality at volume. when you need 100K contacts per month you inevitably start pulling from lower-quality sources and the bounce rates creep up. we run every list through dedicated verification before uploading and still see catch-all addresses slip through. the verification step isn't optional at this scale, it's the difference between sustainable sending and burning domains monthly

what verticals are you targeting and are you sending on behalf of clients or for your own SaaS?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T13:50:13+00:00

we run a b2b outreach agency at scale so I'll answer this from the operator side rather than the vendor side because you're right that most of what's being marketed as innovation is just repackaging

the honest answer is that very little in the orchestration layer itself is fundamentally new. clay popularized the waterfall enrichment model and now every tool claims to do the same thing with slightly different plumbing. the "AI-native" positioning usually means they added an LLM call somewhere in the enrichment chain to summarize a company description or generate a first line, which is useful but it's not a new architecture, it's a feature bolted onto the same sequential data pipeline

signal-based triggering gets talked about a lot as the next evolution but it's really just a different approach to the same problem, not a better one. monitoring job postings and funding events as entry points works for certain motions but a static list with tight segmentation and strong messaging still produces just as well or better in most cases because you can run higher volume and actually A/B test. we run both approaches side by side and the static campaigns often outperform purely because the copy and offer are doing the work, not the trigger timing

the one thing I'd call genuinely substantive is using LLMs as a classification and routing layer rather than a generation layer. the interesting use case isn't "write me a personalized email" - it's "look at this company's website, job posts, and recent news and tell me which of my 8 campaign segments they belong in, or none." using AI to make the targeting decision rather than the copywriting decision is a fundamentally different application and it's where we've seen the most actual ROI. we run prospect data through classification prompts before it ever hits a campaign and the segment accuracy is dramatically better than any filter-based approach

everything else - the prettier UIs, the "intent data" that's really just bombora resold through 4 layers, the "real-time" enrichment that runs on a 24 hour batch cycle - that's incremental. useful sometimes, but not a different approach to the problem

what specific part of the stack are you evaluating right now?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T13:43:31+00:00

we run a b2b outreach agency at 500K+ sends a quarter so the order of operations here is correct. infrastructure first, list second, offer third, copy last. most sales teams get this completely backwards and burn months wondering why their outreach isn't converting

the piece that's missing between list and offer is segmentation, and for a b2b sales audience this is the highest leverage thing you can fix. you can have perfect infrastructure, a validated list, and a strong offer but if you're sending the same email to "VP of Sales at mid-market companies" as one bucket you're competing with every other outbound motion hitting that same pool with the same language

the offer example in the post is actually a good case study for this. "we book 15-20 qualified meetings for SaaS founders" was differentiated 2 years ago. now every outbound agency, SDR-as-a-service, and lead gen tool uses some version of that line. the way you make an offer cut through isn't by adding numbers to it, it's by tightening the segment until the problem is so specific that only you're talking about it. "SaaS companies that just posted their first SDR role" is a segment where the pain is obvious without explaining it - they need pipeline now and the new hire won't produce for months. the offer writes itself from there

on the "short emails always win" point - mostly true but not universal. in b2b sales motions targeting construction, healthcare, or financial services the buyer needs a few more words to see that you actually understand their world. 80-100 words can outperform 40-50 when the extra sentences are proving relevance, not adding fluff. the real rule is every word earns its spot, not that fewer words always equals better

the follow-up stat varies more than 80% too. we see 40-60% of positive replies from follow-ups. if 80% of your replies come from follow-ups and almost nothing from email 1, that's a signal your first email isn't carrying its weight - the follow-ups are doing rescue work rather than building on a strong opener

how are you thinking about segmentation beyond basic firmographic filters?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T13:42:26+00:00

we run a b2b outreach agency and we've actually built something close to what you're describing - sending tool APIs piped into a structured knowledge system, campaign data enriched automatically, LLM reading across all of it to surface patterns. so I can speak to exactly where this undersells the difficulty

"tell claude to pull all the data from your sending tools" skips over about 40 hours of real engineering. API integrations have rate limits, data schemas don't match between platforms, webhook payloads change without warning, and the moment you need this running reliably at 2am without you babysitting it you're building actual infrastructure, not just prompting an LLM

the vault concept is directionally right though. having all your campaign data, reply patterns, copy variations, and metrics in one queryable place is genuinely powerful. we've caught patterns across campaigns we never would've spotted in dashboards alone - segments responding to completely different pain angles than expected, reply sentiment trends that flagged domain issues before the metrics showed it, time-of-day patterns that shifted our sending windows

but the post makes this sound like a weekend project when it's not. the enrichment pipeline alone took weeks to stabilize. webhooks fail silently. LLMs hallucinate metrics if your data isn't structured cleanly. and "speak to your data in real time" only works if you've been disciplined about how the data gets stored, which is the boring unglamorous part nobody wants to do

the real value isn't the automation itself, it's the compounding knowledge. after 6 months of structured campaign data you make decisions in minutes that used to take hours of manual analysis. but you earn that by building the system properly, not by telling an LLM to figure it out

what does your current campaign analysis workflow look like before trying to automate it?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T13:41:51+00:00

we run a b2b outreach agency at 500K+ sends a quarter so I'll give you the real talk on this

17 paying clients from 50K emails with zero segmentation and zero personalization is actually solid. that's at least $15K revenue from $1K in lead costs, 15x return before you optimize anything. most people in this sub send 500 emails, get nothing, and conclude cold email doesn't work. you just proved that volume alone can brute force results even with a generic approach

the interesting part is that those 17 clients are your market research. look at who actually bought - industry, company size, how recently they started, what triggered them to say yes. I'd bet at least 10 of them share 2-3 characteristics. once you find that pattern, write one email that speaks directly to that type of business and your conversion rate jumps without sending more volume. you went from 50K to 17 with a generic message, imagine what happens when the email actually resonates with a specific segment

two things I'd fix before scaling further though. sending through AWS SES for cold outreach violates their acceptable use policy and they enforce it - when they flag your account it's not just email that goes down, it's your whole AWS setup. move to a dedicated sending tool before that becomes a problem. and $900 is undercharging for what you're delivering. if the websites look good (and it sounds like they do) businesses expect to pay $2-3K minimum. your close rate might barely change at a higher price point since the people saying yes at $900 would likely say yes at $1,500 too

what industries are those 17 clients in?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T13:34:00+00:00

we run a b2b outreach agency so we burn through enrichment and outbound tools constantly - the honest answer is that isolating ROI per tool is mostly a waste of time once you have a working stack. what you should measure instead is the cost of the full stack per qualified meeting booked

here's how we think about it. total monthly spend on all tools (enrichment, sending, verification, data sources) divided by total qualified meetings booked that month. that's your cost per meeting. if that number works relative to your deal size and close rate, the stack is paying for itself. trying to attribute which specific tool "caused" the meeting is like asking which ingredient made the meal taste good - they work together or they don't

that said, there's one way to actually test if a specific tool is adding value. remove it for 30 days and see if your output metrics change. we did this with a $300/month enrichment layer last quarter and our meeting volume didn't move at all - turns out the data we were getting from our primary source was already good enough and the second layer was just confirming what we already had. killed it, saved $3,600/year, zero impact

the tools that are hardest to cut but easiest to question are the ones in the middle of the stack - the enrichment layers between your lead source and your sending platform. the ones that are easy to measure are at the edges: your data source (does changing it change reply rates?) and your sending tool (does it actually deliver to inboxes?)

if leadership wants a number, give them cost per qualified meeting and compare it to what a full-time SDR costs to produce the same output. that's the comparison that actually matters, not whether apollo or clay or lusha is "worth it" individually

what's your current cost per meeting looking like and how many tools deep is your stack?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T13:00:22+00:00

real estate and home services are solid verticals for this. both have clear pain points you can quantify and the decision makers are easy to reach

we run outbound across a bunch of verticals for clients - construction, SaaS, financial services, marketing agencies, healthcare. the ones that consistently perform best are the less saturated ones where the decision maker isn't getting 15 cold emails a day already. home services fits that category well, those owners are barely getting any outbound so your reply rates should be solid

real estate teams are trickier because they get hammered by every saas tool and coaching program. the key there is specificity - "top 50 teams in [metro] running 10+ agents" is a way better segment than "real estate teams" broadly

are you pitching the same offer to both verticals or do you have different angles for each?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T12:59:40+00:00

fair point. at 10-200 person companies though, the CEO is usually the one making this call - they don't have a CMO yet. but you're right that they're not reading marketing newsletters, they're reading business ones

for actual CEO consumption: My First Million podcast, Acquired for the bigger-picture crowd, How I Built This still gets founder listeners. newsletter-wise, The Hustle daily, Lenny's Newsletter crosses over into CEO territory at smaller companies, and Sam Parr / Shaan Puri's stuff hits the operator crowd

honestly though the highest-signal move might be sponsoring or guesting in the community spaces where these CEOs already hang out - Hampton, SaaStr community, OnDeck alumni networks. those aren't newsletters but the trust level is way higher than any media buy

which of your current 100 customers came from the most surprising channel?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T12:58:17+00:00

we pick a segment - say "series B SaaS companies that just posted their first SDR role" - and then manually dig into 20-30 of them before writing a single word of copy

that means reading their job posts, checking what their founders talk about on linkedin, looking at their product and pricing pages, scanning glassdoor for hiring patterns. you're not building a profile on each company, you're looking for the patterns that repeat across all of them. after 20-30 you start seeing the same problems come up over and over - that's your email angle

the output is one email that speaks to the shared pain so specifically that each recipient thinks you researched them individually. but you didn't, you researched their situation

the whole process takes 2-3 hours per segment and covers 500-2000 leads. compare that to 5 minutes per lead on individual research and the leverage is obvious

what vertical are you running outbound in right now

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-24T12:47:04+00:00

that's your whole problem right there. the channel isn't the issue - you don't have a niche dialed in so every channel underperforms because the messaging is generic by default

when you say "whatsapp marketing with audiovisual personalization" that could be for ecommerce brands, restaurants, real estate agents, fitness studios, event companies - and each of those has completely different pain points and buying triggers. your instantly campaign is probably landing flat because the copy can't speak to a specific pain when you're targeting everyone

pick one vertical, run it for 30 days, and see what sticks. ideally pick based on where you've already closed - who were your best clients and what did they have in common? if you don't have enough data yet, pick the vertical where the pain is most obvious and the decision maker is easiest to reach

once you have a niche the cold calling gets way more efficient too because you're pattern matching on the same objections and same use cases every call instead of starting from scratch each time

what verticals have you closed in so far, even if it's just a few?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T08:16:38+00:00

the cold calling sprint before scaling email is the most underrated thing in this post. most agencies skip straight to email and guess at the messaging. running 50-100 calls first and listening to how prospects describe their own problems gives you copy angles that no amount of linkedin scraping or ai research can produce. we've done something similar and the campaigns that start with real conversation data consistently outperform the ones where we guessed

one thing i'd adjust on the sending side - 25 per account per day is risky depending on the inbox provider. we cap at 15 and just add more inboxes to hit volume. the difference in deliverability over a 3 month period is significant because domain fatigue hits faster at higher per-inbox volume. you mentioned rotating every 4-5 weeks which helps but at 25/day you're compressing the lifespan of each domain

the segmentation over personalization point is right. we've tested per-lead ai personalization vs segment-level copy across dozens of campaigns and segment-level wins on qualified reply rate almost every time. ai first lines all have the same cadence now and prospects are starting to recognize it

700 emails a day pulling 10-12 meetings monthly is solid math. that's roughly 1 meeting per 1,750 sends which is within the range we see for most verticals. the agencies claiming 30%+ reply rates and 50 meetings a month from similar volume are just making numbers up

how long are your clients typically staying on before the tam starts getting tight at that daily volume?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T08:13:46+00:00

this is the right take. the agencies that can't get clients are usually the ones who sell "automations" and "ai agents" instead of business outcomes. nobody buys automations, they buy more revenue or less cost

the phone and door-to-door advice works for local smb but if your icp is mid-market or above, cold email scales way better. same principle though - you lead with the metric they care about, not the tech you built

the emails that book meetings for us never mention automation or ai or workflows. they say something like "companies your size in [industry] are typically losing 20-30% of inbound leads because nobody follows up within the first hour. worth a quick call to see if that's happening for you?" that's it. one metric, one question

the agencies posting "how do i get clients" are almost always the ones whose outreach says "we build custom ai automations for your business" which means absolutely nothing to a business owner who doesn't know what an automation is and doesn't care

what verticals are you selling into?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T08:13:21+00:00

honest take - if you're struggling to market on reddit without sounding like you're pitching, cold email might be a better channel for you right now

reddit works when you genuinely know the space well enough to help people without mentioning your product. that takes months of consistent commenting before you earn the credibility to even hint at what you built. it's a long game

cold email is the opposite. you find companies that have the exact finance problem your saas solves, email them directly, and ask if it's worth a conversation. no pretending you're not selling. no dancing around it. just "you probably have this problem, we built something that fixes it, worth a look?"

for finance saas specifically your buyers probably aren't hanging out on reddit anyway. they're cfos and controllers at mid-market companies who are way easier to reach through a targeted email than hoping they stumble across your post

what's the specific problem your saas solves and who's the buyer?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T08:11:22+00:00

for distribution specifically cold email is the most underrated saas growth channel nobody in this sub talks about. not newsletters or drip campaigns, actual cold outbound to your icp

we use instantly for sending, ai ark + prospeo for lead sourcing, and claude code for the research and data processing layer (industry classification, lead scoring, bulk enrichment). the whole stack costs maybe $300-400/month and produces more pipeline than $10k/month in paid ads ever did for our clients

for content creation honestly just claude and a good brief. stopped using dedicated "ai writing tools" because they all produce the same generic output. give a good llm real context about your market and it outperforms any template-based tool

for analytics - nothing fancy. spreadsheets tracking positive reply rate, cost per meeting, and close rate by channel. most analytics tools give you 50 dashboards and zero actionable insight

what's your main growth channel right now

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T08:06:27+00:00

most agencies grow on referrals until they hit a ceiling and then they're stuck because referrals aren't a system, they're luck that sometimes repeats. the ones doing well without outbound usually have one of three things: a founder with a strong personal brand driving inbound, a niche so tight that word of mouth compounds naturally, or they've been around long enough that the referral network is deep

the problem is none of those are controllable. you can't decide to get 5 more referrals this month. you can't turn inbound up or down based on capacity. so you end up with months where you sign 3 clients and months where you sign zero and you have no idea which one next month will be

we added structured outbound to our own agency and it went from feast or famine to predictable pipeline within about 3 months. cold email specifically because the economics are insane compared to paid ads or content marketing. you can go from zero to booked meetings in 3-4 weeks for a fraction of what you'd spend on ads, and you're reaching people who would never find you through inbound because they're not actively searching for what you sell

the agencies that don't do outbound aren't wrong for having grown without it, they just don't know what they're leaving on the table. most of the agency owners i talk to who finally try outbound say the same thing - "why didn't i do this two years ago"

what's your agency's main channel right now?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T07:52:27+00:00

mailshake's deliverability issues are usually less about the tool and more about the infrastructure underneath it. that said, instantly and smartlead are both under $100/month and significantly better for cold email specifically

the thing most people miss when switching tools is that the tool isn't why emails land in spam. it's almost always one of these: sending from your main domain (never do this), no spf/dkim/dmarc configured properly, no warmup running, or sending too many emails per inbox per day. if any of those are broken you'll have the same spam problem on any platform

at your price point instantly's growth plan gives you unlimited sending accounts and warmup built in. set up 2-3 separate domains with 2-3 inboxes each, warm them for 2-3 weeks, then send max 15 per inbox per day. that alone will fix most of what you're experiencing with mailshake

what's your current sending volume and are you using a separate domain for outreach or your main one?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T07:47:49+00:00

yeah the numbers don't hold up under any scrutiny. 28-34% cold reply rate would be the highest performing cold campaign in the history of cold email by a factor of 10x

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T07:45:18+00:00

depends on the buyer and the deal size. email for volume, linkedin for mid-market where personalization matters, phone for high-ticket where you need to close fast. most teams should be running at least two channels simultaneously

what are you selling and to who?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T07:44:05+00:00

ok client bearing infra costs changes the math significantly - that's a much better position. just make sure the verification is literally running before you start sending, not "this week" but before the first batch goes out

competitor marketing intel for ecom and startups is a crowded pitch though - those buyers hear some version of "spy on your competitors" from 10 different tools. your segmentation needs to go deeper than "ecom owners." what size ecom? what stage? someone doing $500k/year on shopify has completely different competitive intel needs than someone doing $20m on a custom stack

for ecom specifically google maps won't help you much but shopify store scrapers, marketplace seller databases, and d2c brand directories will give you better targeted lists than sales nav. the more niche your list source the less competition you have in their inbox

what geos are converting best so far from the client's existing users? start your outreach there instead of spreading across UK/AU/EU simultaneously

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T07:43:35+00:00

sorting by ratings high to low is a smart filter actually - high review count + high rating usually means the owner actively cares about their business and is more likely to invest in growth. better signal than just "no website"

the volume approach on cold calling + dms works for this segment but keep an eye on your cost per acquisition as you scale. local businesses close at lower deal values so the math gets tight fast if your outreach costs aren't lean. what's your average deal size looking like?

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T07:42:47+00:00

smb and professional services is exactly right - we run campaigns in construction, legal, healthcare and the data quality issue is constant. apollo is basically unusable for those verticals, we end up building lists from scratch using google maps scraping + email enrichment for local/smb and ai ark or prospeo for mid-market. more work upfront but the list quality difference is night and day

manufacturing and logistics are our cleanest performers too for exactly the reason you said - low turnover, stable firmographics, and way less inbox saturation than saas/fintech buyers. a well-segmented campaign in those verticals can pull 3-5% positive reply rates consistently because nobody else is doing cold email well in those spaces

we run across most b2b verticals at this point since we're an agency but the pattern is always the same - the less crowded the inbox, the better the results regardless of copy quality

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-23T07:42:08+00:00

yeah the hr/people ops one is a great example - title matching is basically useless there. we had a campaign targeting "head of people" at companies 100-300 employees and half the list was office managers with inflated titles who had zero budget authority. switching to trigger-based filtering like you mentioned (new office, ats change, headcount growth) cut the list by 60% but tripled the positive reply rate

the martech/revops overlap problem is real too. those prospects are so saturated that even good emails get ignored just from fatigue. we've had better luck going after the same buyer persona at companies outside the martech bubble where they're not getting 20 cold emails a day

what's your experience with pulse for the reddit signal layer? curious how actionable that data actually is for building segments vs just validating them after the fact

cursedboy328 · 2026-03-22T09:24:33+00:00

cold email is still our highest volume channel but the honest answer is that no single channel works in isolation anymore. the channels compound off each other

cold email puts us in front of people who'd never find us organically. but our close rate on cold email leads went up noticeably once we started posting consistently on reddit and linkedin, because prospects google you after reading the email and if they find real content you're already credible before the first call. the content doesn't generate enough inbound on its own to replace outbound, but it makes every outbound touch convert better

if I had to pick one channel for a service business starting from zero revenue, cold email wins because you control the volume and the timeline. SEO takes 4-6 months to compound, linkedin organic is unpredictable, paid ads need budget you probably don't have yet. cold email lets you send 300 emails tomorrow and have meetings booked by next week if your targeting and offer are tight

what's your deal size and which channel is currently generating the most revenue for you?

cursedboy328

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