With my first startup, Bridgecard, we grew to $25K MRR almost entirely through inbound. We had just finished YC, so we got enough early buzz to win our first batch of customers without needing to know anything about sales.
But after two months stuck at that number, I hit the question every founder eventually asks:
“Okay… how do I actually go get customers?”
That’s when I discovered outbound and the phrase founder-led sales.
How I accidentally fell in love with sales
I read Predictable Revenue, binged SaaStr talks, and slowly stopped writing code every day. I went from competing with my co-founder and CTO on who had the most commits every month to mostly coding on weekends, because I was doing sales.
I actually started dreading the weekend because no one replies to emails then, and I’d have to just wait for Monday to see if any prospect “got back to me.”
But the system worked.
We built our first outbound motion from scratch:
Defined our ICP based on our best customers
Fired 80% of our customer base because they weren’t profitable, pushing some to self-serve
Wrote our first drip campaigns
Set up our pipeline and CRM
Hacked together HubSpot automation… realized it cost $1,500/month, then rebuilt myself on Zapier
By month three, we were running 10+ demos a week and closing deals
Soon, we crossed $1M ARR, and I hired two SDRs and made them compete for one spot.
Honestly, sales humbled me in the best way. Every closed deal felt like fixing a bug you’d been stuck on for three days when you were just learning how to code.
After we grew past $1M ARR and did an asset transfer, I moved to the U.S., excited to run the same playbook again.
Then I tried it in the U.S., and fell flat
I built an ICP, scraped 500 contacts, and wrote my best outbound sequence, then I sent them all…
Zero replies.
I pivoted to another email strategy, rebuilt the outbound machine, and sent a new batch of 500 emails.
Zero replies… again.
It was shocking.
The exact same system that helped us get into boardrooms of commercial banks in Africa didn’t even move the needle here. And here are the biggest lessons that hit me hard:
1. Breakup emails don’t work here
At my previous company, the breakup email (that “last email” in your sequence) had the highest conversion rate.
In the U.S., people don’t flinch. Honestly, they prefer it’s your last email. The psychology is different.
2. You can’t play the volume game.
Looking back at our email marketing, I see how getting it to work at first wasn’t as hard as it is here in the U.S. If you blast 1,000 emails, someone will at least reply, and you can then iterate forward.
But here, the more volume you send, the worse your deliverability and results become. Mass email is a penalty, not a funnel.
3. The channel is insanely noisy here
Reply rates were unbelievably low. And when you zoom out, it makes sense because the number of SDRs in the U.S. is insane. Salesforce alone has 2,400 SDRs. If you’re walking through the same door as them, you’re not getting through.
So what does a good outbound look like?
One simple rule:
A good outbound channel must be a backdoor.
If you’re using the same front door as everyone else, especially big sales teams, you’ll get ignored. You need an angle that stands out.
That means:
• Less volume, more personalization
Try emailing 15 people a week first, and not 150. Research them, understand their stack, pain, and timing.
• Build custom experiences that show you did the work
Create a landing page just for them.
Use tools like Leadfeeder to personalize your site when someone from their company visits.
The goal isn’t even a reply at the early stages; it’s curiosity.
• Treat it like dating, not fishing
You wouldn’t blast 500 identical DMs to find a partner. You’d research, show intent, and try to stand out. Outbound is the same.
• Timing and qualification matter more than anything
This is the part we mostly underestimate. You need multiple things to align:
Are they on a tool that signals your product fits?
Did they recently hire for a relevant role?
Did they just get hit by a major downtime that your product could have solved?
Did they mention a pain point publicly?
Most generic outbound ignores these signals, which is why most cold emails feel like spam.
Example:
I constantly get emails from dev shops offering to “build our MVP in 3 weeks.” but I’m a technical founder who loves writing code, so that’s not a great proposition to me. Five minutes of research would tell them that.
A small thing I use to sanity-check cold emails
One thing that helped me avoid sending obviously bad emails was having a way to pressure-test them before hitting send.
So I built a tiny internal tool I use to score cold emails using a few rules I personally care about: relevance, conciseness, whether it sounds human, whether it creates curiosity without pitching, etc.
Nothing fancy. You paste your email, and it scores it.
The useful part for me isn’t the score itself, but being forced to ask:
Is this actually relevant to this person?
Did I do more than 60 seconds of research?
Would I reply to this if I got it?
You can also turn rules on/off or add your own, depending on what you’re testing.
If that sounds useful, I left it public here:
👉 https://cold-email-scorer.netlify.app/
The main takeaway
Your outbound strategy can’t be the same door everyone else is using.
It has to be a backdoor.
Something unique, handcrafted, that signals “I didn’t blast this to 500 people.” That’s the only way to stand out in a market where everyone is selling.