How a College Student Made $500k with Cold Email (Exact Framework)

Cold email is responsible for some of the fastest client acquisition in the agency space, and it's even more powerful in 2026 if you know how to use AI right. So, to show you guys how I brought on Sav, who was able to generate over half a million dollars in sales opportunities in just 6 months as a full-time student with no sales background. So today, he's going to be sharing the word-for-word copy that he used to land his first clients through cold email. How he uses a simple four-step automation to personalize at scale. The zero-risk offer framework that gets strangers to actually respond to cold emails. And his full process for building lead lists using niche databases that most people don't even know exist. And like I said, he built all of this with his girlfriend Alexandra in six months. So, I hope that you guys enjoy and learn something new.

All right, Sav. So, you generated over half a million dollars in sales opportunities through only cold outreach. I'm really excited to have you here today and super excited to talk about how you were able to do that. It's great to meet you, man.

>> Great to meet you, too, Nick. Thanks for having me.

>> Absolutely. So, yeah, you've thrown together some resources here to basically be able to take someone from a complete beginner to understanding the theory of cold outreach, and I'm really excited to talk to you about it because I've never really done cold outreach, and it's not really something that I teach to my students too well, too much, because I don't really do it that much. So I'm excited to hear kind of like the insights, and I've heard that you've only really been doing this for like six to eight months. So that's really, really cool. So excited to dive into the slides you got here.

>> Yeah, perfect, man. I'm really excited to show you everything. I'm going to walk through the exact strategy I went through from zero to one. I'll show some copy. I'll even talk about like infrastructure, lead list building, basically the whole shebang so that everyone kind of knows exactly what to do going forward.

>> Absolutely. Yeah. And I see here that it says that you're also a full-time student. So, do you want to give a real quick intro about kind of like your background and what you're up to now with your business?

>> Yeah. So I started the business as a whole during the summer of 2025, and basically near the tail end is when it started generating traction, but obviously school started up again. I actually went to university for architecture, uh, landscape architecture. So literally no relation whatsoever. Um, and then during the school year, basically it was go to class and then after class, um, run to either a room, a cafe, or back to my place and then just, you know, grind out business for another couple of hours and things like that. Um, but right now, actually, uh, just to be candid, I am taking like a a gap semester, gap year, just since the business has gained some traction.

>> Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's just one of those things, you know, you only get this type of opportunity once in maybe a hundred years, if if that. So, um, I love that, and it's it's that kind of like energy and excitement that really makes businesses succeed because you were so excited to leave class and and sprint somewhere to go work on the business. So,

>> Awesome. Yeah, let me just jump right into it then. So, building an AI automation business as a full-time student. So, basically, how I actually got started, first steps was university summers. I needed cash. That was honestly the whole impetus. I don't have like some crazy origin story or anything like that. Um, and I did outbound lead gen. Basically, I learned AI and automation just by doing. And that's when I started getting requests from just friends and family. And originally, a lot of people, I think, are really apprehensive about doing free work um just for one reason or another, especially if you're a full-time student. But I definitely saw it as very strategic because I realized that if anyone else was going to trust me with their money, then they would need to see that I could actually bring a return. And it started off with like really small things, like nothing to even do with outbound lead gen. It was just like helping create um a website and like a booking automation for a salon for a family member. Um, it was like helping a person who was in like the medical field integrate some sort of AI research. And that sounds so much more fancy than it is. But at the time, people are not even familiar with how to use these tools like Perplexity or Claude. They only know ChatGPT. And so just sitting down with them and teaching them how to use those tools proved to be really, really beneficial for them. And once I could prove I could deliver, I could use them as a case study. And then I was able to like build trust from there.

>> Yeah. Yeah, that's huge. You know, the the thing that I've always thought about cold outreach and cold email is that it's kind of hard unless you have some sort of proof. You know, you have to say the person has to understand that they should work with you for a reason. And so, if you have never done any work before, you have no case studies, you have no social proof out there, I feel like it's really hard. But you can let me know if if I'm kind of off the mark there.

>> No. Yeah, you're absolutely right. The first question anyone's ever going to ask you, especially if you get them on a meeting, is where are your case studies? Where's the proof? And things like that. And so actually having a, I guess like a rolodex of case studies to actually fall back on, even if they're not necessarily one for one, because like I said, like I'm building like a salon website, I'm, you know, helping like medical research and things like that, but I'm reaching out to like video production companies and I'm reaching out on behalf of, on behalf of like lead gen and outbound. And so they ask me questions, but just the idea that you can even help other businesses and, you know, how to talk to other business owners, how to integrate your systems with other businesses, that reducing that level of friction for them is also going to be massive to actually have someone trust you and actually, you know, send you some cash along the way.

>> 100%. So, so just to be clear here, your kind of first couple case studies that you were able to do um or your first couple products you were able to turn into case studies were kind of like warm referrals, a bit, like friends and family. You did stuff for them, and then you were able to scale up with cold outreach once you had that under your belt.

>> Yeah, exactly. It's like um, I'm I'm sure everyone's seen that YouTube short of like Alex Hormozi talking about how to get your first customer and it's like text everyone, text all your friends, text all your family, and that's exactly what happened. Um, yeah, it's going to be a little bit weird, obviously, cuz I'm sure people feel some type of way about talking to friends and family about, you know, getting a business started and things like that. But there's so many ways that you can like really take those case studies and spin it and make it seem very, very valuable, and it can be very, very valuable. So like for the specific beauty salon um where I helped like create basically a digital presence for them and set their booking appointment, uh, this was like when they were first getting their start, right? And so once I actually was able to do that for them, they were actually able to scale like as a solo operator within a beauty salon, like just one person to like $10,000 monthly recurring revenue. And they still continue to do that today. And so having, even if it at the time it doesn't seem like massive leverage, doing things like that um have proven to be like really, really beneficial now because being able to say that in and of itself gets a lot of trust from people, right?

>> Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And trust is the greatest currency you can have right now.

>> For sure. Yeah. So, what actually worked when I was first starting out was not really endlessly building. I kind of assumed that there was never going to be like a perfect product and I wanted to build later. Um, so I would always sell the outcome first and only build after a commitment. And this also allowed me to test different offers. So, I think this, if anyone takes away one thing from this presentation, this is the biggest thing I would have them take away. And it's really just that classic like speed to execution kind of framework that a lot of entrepreneurs talk about. There's so much information out there, uh, like your channel and tons of other uh, AI and automation channels that allow you to build things out, that allow you to, you know, test cloud code, test Naden, test Make, all that great stuff. Um, but at the end of the day, I think a lot of people get really bogged down by the amount of things that they can actually build that they don't actually go out and talk to customers and try to sell what they build, right? And it sounds really harsh, but if you're trying to make a business out of it and all you're doing is, you know, building, you don't actually have a business yet. You kind of just have like a project or a, a, a portfolio of projects or kind of a hobby. And so what I would do is I would always like create offers and I knew outbound existed since then. Um, so I would, I knew this was like a really easy way to test them out and I would create offers around things that I knew I could build. So, let me like give like a very pragmatic example, or a practical example. So like on your channel, you have a bunch of videos talking about like, hey, like sell this XYZ system for XYZ dollars, right? And you've been in the industry for very long. You have tons of experience, and so you've sold these actual systems. And so it would behoove me to go out of my way and figure out or reinvent the wheel and find systems that I think are going to work instead of just trusting someone who's already sold them before for a bunch of money, right? And so if I know these systems can be built because you have the tutorials and the templates, and I know that these systems can be sold for money because you have the experience that tons of other people do, then why not just essentially put that out into the ether? And if people actually commit to the actual investment, they're like, "Okay, like that sounds interesting." Oh, like lead gen, outbound, CRM, hiring pipeline, whatever. Uh, sounds really interesting, proposal generator. Uh, let me, you know, like, let me pay you for that. Let me do that. And once they're in the door and they're willing to pay you for that, then you can always turn around and actually build those systems out. And we have, you know, galaxy brain intelligence at the tip of our fingers nowadays. And we have tons of people like you posting YouTube videos. And so I think it's really like the ability to build something is no longer the actual bottleneck for a lot of people. It's really just the ability to talk to customers and see if it's actually going to be something that they can sell.

Moving forward, um, I actually want to talk about like the exact offer I gave people. And I was really, really aggressive with it. Um, so my offer was literally, you don't have to pay me anything. You don't even have to sign me a sign a contract with me. It's going to be totally free and it's going to be zero risk. And once I started talking to companies that weren't just friends and family, because at the end of the day, like I did, I did do free work for them, but because of their friends and family, they're going to want to put some cash in your hand, right? I'm sure everyone's experienced that. When you're talking to cold companies and when I hop on the screen and they see like a 20-year-old college kid, there's already so much trust I have to build back up. And so, I would try to make it as little risk as possible. And, you know, with you and I being Asian, we look like 3 years younger than we really are as well. Um,

>> That is true.

So, what I would essentially say is like, "Hey, here's like a, here's like a snapshot. There's like a demonstration of me actually building the exact thing I want to build for you. You don't have to pay me. You don't have to, you don't have to sign a contract with me. And I could even build this entire thing out and you could just ghost me and I could waste hours of my time. The only thing I ask for is the permission to actually reference their company so I could reach out to other companies like them who are probably willing to pay me, right?" And so literally, one of my very first um people that I reached out to was a video agency, and this was like my very first client. And I reached out to them with this exact offer. And I'm going to be honest, like um, there is like some level of, I guess, luck in this game or opportunity in this game where they, I offered like this completely free offer for them. And eventually, they really grew to like me and they became like literally like my first paying client. They're like, "Hey, like we understand that you're willing to do this for free, but we like you. We want to actually pay you and we enjoy like the fact that you're actually willing to, you know, put your skin in the game." And that free client turned into a paid client, and they literally still work with me like today, even like 6 to 8 months later, even though I was like a complete beginner. And in tandem, and I'll talk about this later as well, is I was working with like another video agency who didn't want to pay me at the time, and I basically spent like 3-4 hours with them live demonstrating how the system works. They had no experience with AI and automation whatsoever, if not lead gen. And I would have to like literally be on Zoom and I would like tell them where to click their mouse and everything like that. It was a massive, uh, it was a massive, uh, investment on my own time. But at the end of it, they were so happy. Uh, they, they were like happy to give me the ability to say, "Hey, I helped this company do this exact outcome or deliver this exact system." And being able to literally just put that one extra line inside of my outbound messaging immediately like nearly double like my reply rates and it increased the amount of meetings I could get. And I think that that sole case study or that piece of free work alone probably got me to the point where I am today. And I don't think if I, I think if I didn't do that, I would have probably have to wait months, if not, you know, I would have never gotten there and I would still be in the same position today. But because I kind of just like, I guess ate that frog, I was able to kind of um leverage that as a case study and then get other people to actually be willing to pay me for it.

>> Yeah, no, it's super cool that the data actually shows the increase after you were able to put that that line in there. You know, I think a lot of people at the beginning, they don't think about it right, because they think they're hopping into this opportunity and if they don't see money by, you know, the end of month one, it's they're failing. But really, upfront, it's about how can you prioritize yourself to get reps, to get experience, to get proof rather than money. The money will come later on once you have all that. And it gets easier and easier once you have more and more. But it's just one of those things where it's like you could be the most skilled N workflow builder in the world, but with zero experience, that kind of just like evens out your your advantage there. You know, experience is is what you need. Experience obviously builds trust, and we just talked about for a long time how important trust is. So I love the zero-risk offer.

>> Yeah, no, dude, you're absolutely right. So like, like a lot of people who are probably watching this video, I'm part of like, you know, school communities that teach AI and automation like yours. And basically, there was like a point where I posted, and this is probably like, this is how the conversations are, right? Like I made a post where I was like, "Oh, like this is how I made half a million dollars in sales opportunities inside of Instantly." And I remember I would look at some of the systems that a lot of people in that community would build, and it was like I could barely even understand like how they actually put it all together, you know, like I felt so technically um, behind compared to them. But the weird thing was, a lot of them were reaching out to me because they couldn't get like the sales part or the marketing part, right? They couldn't generate interest from customers, but they could spend all day in front of a computer and build like these massive, massive systems on Naden and Make and use like these agentic workflows, but it was all kind of just sitting there collecting dust because they hadn't actually figured out the part where they could actually talk to customers and get their, you know, product or service out in front of customers.

>> Yeah, that that actually is something we've been seeing big time in in our communities as well about like sometimes, like it's it's very rare that you can be someone that's that's both. If you are, that's great. But if you're one or the other and you specialize in that, maybe just go look to partner with someone that can, you know, complement you really well. And then you guys are a super team. So, yeah, what's on the next slide for us?

>> So next, I kind of want to talk about like my actual outbound campaign playbook. Um, this is literally like everything I do from top to bottom when I'm actually creating an outbound campaign, not just for myself, but also for my clients as well. So this is not going to be just like a a zero to one game, but this is also something that I hope people can use for their fulfillment process as well. And hopefully, this is like something that they can immediately take action on today. So the first thing I do is I'll find niche databases. And I think this is something that people don't talk about, at least not enough. So nowadays, we have like, you know, GPT research, we have um Claude, which can also do research, and we also have like research-enabled models from the beginning like Perplexity or XAI. And a lot of people, when they think about like, hey, like what um, where do I look for like my leads, they immediately go to like the classic LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, or all these other like huge tools, right? But a lot of people don't um, aren't aware that there's a bunch of niche databases that actually hold the leads that you're looking for, and it's already pre-selected for you. Right? So, off the top of my head, the biggest one I know about is like, I think it's called AIA, American Institute of Architects, right? So, let's imagine you are doing an outbound campaign targeted towards architects, and your go-to gut feeling is to go into like Apollo or these massive lead-based directories and basically just try and play around with the filters and hope that a bunch, hope that the lead list that you scrape is actually going to be all architects, where you could have, if you just did a little bit of research on Perplexity, asked like, hey, like where are some niche databases that hold a bunch of architecture companies, it would probably tell you like AIA, American Institute of Architects, right? And the reason that's really important is because they've already done the filtering for. There's a 0% chance that inside that list there's a company that isn't an architecture firm, right? And so instead of playing that guessing game, you can just use AI, spend a couple minutes researching specific databases, find one that is already really easily scrapable, and then now from there, you already have like a perfect list of company domains that you can just have to pull decision makers from, which is like the third step, and basically you already have like a perfect lead list to start reaching out to. I think that's like a really big thing that's a really big unlock that I think a lot of people aren't taking advantage of nowadays as well. And then from there, it's really just setting up deliverability. So basically, just setting up multiple domains to ensure emails land. That basically means if you have one domain, you can set up a couple email accounts. You can't send a thousand emails from one account. I'm not going to go too deep into this because it's like a massive rabbit hole. But basically, instead of sending 3,000 emails from one account, just set up like a 100 emails and send 30 emails from each one of them, and none of them will be marked as spam, and you'll get the same volume out there. From there, it's crafting campaign and offers, which we'll talk about in depth a little bit later. This is really like the crux of the entire thing. If this falls flat, then it's going to be pretty hard. I always lead with value. So, I always send like a free video first, which I'll talk about a little bit more as well, just because people are nowadays a little bit more apprehensive to get on a meeting off the bat. And if you don't give them a little bit of like a lead magnet, per se, they're not going to be willing to want to talk to you. And then obviously, like with any sort of marketing strategy, you want to tweak as you go, right? Whether it's like a paid ad strategy, whether it's like a UGC strategy or outbound strategy, uh, you take the data that you've collected from what you did and then you want to iterate on a weekly, monthly, or bi-weekly basis or something like that.

>> Gotcha. Yeah. So on that last point, one thing that I want to ask you about is how should a beginner know how much to be doing? Because I know that cold email is is definitely a numbers game. And there's that story from Hormozi where he was putting out flyers on cars and he was doing like 100 a day, which he felt was like was a ton, but then his mentor was like, "Dude, you got to be doing like a,000, 2,000 a day." So, how did you get started? You know, what do those stats look like? How many are you sending out per day? And then how is that scaled up?

>> Yeah, that's a great, great question. So, when I first started, I literally bought one domain. And I wouldn't advise this, but I got like five email inboxes under each, cuz I was a broke college student, so I was just trying to make ends meet. And I think that means, so what is 30 divided, what is 30 times 5? Um, 150, right? And basically, I would send out 150 emails a day from these accounts once they were like fully warmed up and stuff. But I think I got very lucky to actually get traction from that level of volume. Maybe it was my email, maybe it was my offer, obviously, but I think there's a level of luck that played into that as well. But honestly, I think for a beginner starting out, buy three domains. Um, you'd have 15 inboxes in total. If you go like for the max amount, you could put like five dom inboxes underneath each domain. It's not advisable. People typically recommend like two or three, but if you're really on a budget and you're trying to get as much volume out there as possible, just try it out. Um, and that'll allow you to do basically triple the volume that I did. So, 450 emails. If you kind of multiply that out on like a, a monthly basis, I think that's like, uh, it's like nearly 9,000 emails or something like that. Yeah, like 9,000 emails on a monthly basis. And if you're reaching out to 9,000 leads, the way I think about it, I think about like in terms of numbers, and you have a decent campaign, let's say like 5% reply rates, uh, 5% of 9,000 is going to be like 450 people are going to reply back to you. If you have a decent offer, maybe half of them are actually interested in what you have to say. So you have 225 people reaching back out to you saying like, "Hey, that sounds kind of interesting. Let me hear more." And depending on how good you are with nurturing leads and booking them on a calendar, I'm sure that will elicit some amount of momentum. And you'll have some people on your calendar actually talk to. But nowadays, like obviously since I've scaled up, I probably have like, I want to say like 40 to 50 inboxes running at any given time. So obviously, it's a lot different now.

>> Nice. Nice. So like what is the, what's the golden standard? Like if you could have, I know there's lots of metrics and as the funnel gets smaller, as you go down each step, you significantly lose more people all the way down, but let's just say reply rate. What is like a really, really good percentage of reply?

>> Yeah. Yeah, that's a really great question. So, let me give, let me give people like the reply rates that I look at. So, typically, if there's anything under a 2% reply rate for me, I start wondering if my lead list or my deliverability is off, right? So, either the inboxes are not landing in the actual, the emails are not landing in the inbox, sellin' spam, or my lead list is totally wrong. So I'm aiming at architects, but I'm talking to a bunch of like contractors or something like that, right? Because that's going to fall on deaf ears.

Then if it's above 2% and below 5%, I'm usually just worried about copy because it probably means that you're you're landing inside the inbox, but people just are not responding because your copy is not, you know, interesting enough to actually respond to, and they're just ignoring it, right? And then if you have anything above a 5% reply rate, below a 10% reply rate, I would say that's like the golden zone. I'm not saying it's like a perfect reply rate. There's people out there getting, you know, 15%, 25% reply rates, which is fantastic and stuff like that. Yeah, it's insane. But with a meaningful amount of leads, like 3,000 leads, a 5 to 10% reply rate is more than enough to get you a meaningful amount of pipeline volume, right? Like enough leads that are interested in what you have to say so that you can eventually nurture a good chunk of them and get them on a meeting. And if you can get even 10 of those people on a meeting, and you have like basically little to no sales experience, I'm pretty confident that you'll be able to like close one of them, even if it's like for a really small deal, right? So, I would say below 2%, look back at your lead list, look back at your infrastructure. Above 2%, below 5%, look at your copy and your offer. Between 5 and 10%, you're probably good. But if you really care, then you know, keep looking at your copy and offer and basically just make everything a little bit better. And then if you're above 10%, then um, you know, send me an email. I'd love to work with you. Um, but yeah.

>> Hey guys, real quick. Just wanted to say that I know we're covering a lot of information in today's episode. So, I don't want you to worry about taking notes. I've compiled all of this into a resource guide that you can access for completely free. You can find that inside of my free school community. The link for that will be down in the description. So, hop in there, grab that guide, check out the other resources that we have available in there, once again, for free. And let's get back to the video.

>> My lead process, just to get a little bit more nitty-gritty, and I'll just kind of glean over this really quickly, is that I'll have AI find niche databases because we already talked about this. Uh, I'll have do do some level enrichment. So I'll still use Apollo to actually find the email addresses and decision maker names, and you can obviously use like Sales Navigator and Amplify, which is a massive platform that people use nowadays as well. I'll clean the data, which is really important. Uh, don't forget this step. Basically, just go on to a website called Million Verifier or any mailer, and basically just make sure those emails are real emails so that you don't bounce. And these this clean data is really crucial because you don't want to pay for all these domains and inboxes and then have them all be destroyed because you didn't send to a right the right lead list. And I actually personalize that scale. So I'll run an automation. And my automation is like stupid simple. It's literally just attached to a Google Sheet. That Google Sheet will feed Perplexity relevant data about that decision maker. So like their name, their company. Perplexity was prompted to create like a, a robust research report. It's pretty short research report, just like, uh, just the things that I really care about. It'll feed that into ChatGPT, which is obviously also prompted to make a really casual, personal-sounding icebreaker. Icebreaker is created, and then boom, it's popped back into the Google Sheet. It's literally, I think when I first started, I made it Make.com. It's four modules long, so you don't need anything crazy. And that's really what got me to like zero to one to like 10 and so on and so forth. Um, and then obviously, I would set up infrastructure. So like 30 emails from many domains instead of 300 from one, but that's like a more, I guess, like a closer look at all that stuff, but nothing really new there. Um, moving on though. So here's a little bit about like my copy and offer. And I'm going to actually show the exact copy I use as well. The, I always treat the subject and the first line as like the things that are going to get people to open the email, right? So like, okay, cool. What can you say in the subject line? I always try to treat the subject line as what would somebody inside their own team say to them, right? So like, you wouldn't want to reach out with them like, I wouldn't want to reach out to them and say like, "Hey, I want to create a cold email campaign for you." Because they immediately know like, "Oh, this guy's going to try and sell me something." Right?

>> Yeah. I immediately, I immediately mark those as unread or as read.

>> Exactly. Exactly. But what I did, what one of the things I did actually, and I'll show you later, is like I would create like these cliffhanger um, subject lines that make it sound like it's either from someone on their team or like a friend or a family member or something like that, and it's just kind of like a cliffhanger, so they want to open it. And then the personalized line goes to the very top because if it's just like a, a specific compliment like, "Hey, I saw that recent project you did with XYZ company. Really cool that you did this thing." They, there's like a bit of like curiosity, like, okay, they could be reaching out to me about a plethora of things. They could be reaching out to me about, you know, inquiring about my own business. Um, they could be reaching out to me because they have a question about this project I work on, all that great stuff. And they, it just gets them to open the email. And with that's all I want them to do because the offer is going to be the biggest part here. You want to make sure that there's an outcome, a time, and a catch. And the way I think about offers is literally like you have a desired outcome. So like, what's their desired reality within a specific time frame? And then basically a risk reversal or guarantee if you're not able to achieve that for them, right? So I will get you 10 meetings on the calendar in 30 days, and if not, you don't have to pay me a dime. Right? So the outcome is the meetings, the time is the 30 days, and the catch or the risk reversal is basically what happens if I don't do that, because that essentially makes them lower their guard down and it makes it a lot more likely for them to want to talk to you, right? And then I lead with the video. So the video is basically my low, low pressure ask instead of like asking them for 30 minutes on their calendar. Um, I'll just say like, "Hey, I have this video that actually explains everything that's necessary. And they can, I just send that over? It's gonna be five minutes." They're a lot more likely to say yes. And I think the reason the video works really well is because even though it takes longer for them to book a meeting with you, if they do book a meeting with you, especially once they watch the video, they basically know everything about you and your offer. And selling is so much easier.

Okay, so let me go ahead and talk about my copy from zero to one. This is literally the word-for-word verbatim copy I used to get like my first client and a handful of other clients after that as well. So, the very first one was, "Cute. Is company name taking on more clients or first name?" Cute. And basically, it's like a question. I'll be honest, it's a little bit of a bait and switch. I'm not going to, I'm not going to lie about that because it sounds like I'm inquiring about their business, but it, it ripped. Um, and basically, I would have the icebreaker and I would say something like, "Hey, saw you guys were just down the street because I was going local um location. Thought I'd reach out. Been getting an agency up and running, which I was. Recently helped scale a local business, Sarah's TNW, which is the beauty salon, um, to six figures with our AI-driven automations. Um, and basically, I was kind of intentionally ambiguous with the name as well because if I said it was like a beauty salon and stuff like that, they'd probably immediately disqualify themselves in their brain. And so I said, "Hey, I put together something, uh, I think you'd find interesting. It's basically an intent-based email scraping and outreach system. We use to book 23 discovery calls a month. Uh, would this be of interest? You wouldn't owe me anything unless it actually drives results. Let me know if I can send over a 90-second video showcasing how it works or if you want to just talk. Appreciate the time." And then I would sign off. And my second email was, "Q from your neighbor. First name Q from your neighbor," which again is kind of like that little bit of like that cliffhanger thing because it could literally be about anything, especially with the first line being personalized. Bit out there, but we put together an outbound tool that books over 20 meetings a month. No added headcount, and you don't pay till we deliver results. Recently worked with a small business near me and we built something similar to help them break through a 10K a month. Uh, would love to send over a two-minute Loom talking about how it's done. Thanks. PS, saw you were just down the street in location when I was looking into creative agency space because this was targeted video agencies. Uh, so I had to reach out. Would genuinely love your thoughts even if it isn't quite quite the fit. Right.

So I think, so let me just break it down, like, kind of like, dissect it a little bit. So obviously the top line is personalized, right? And then I get straight into my social proof, especially in the left-hand email here, which is Sarah's TNW, six figures. Basically, just saying like, I, I've worked with businesses before. And then I get into my offer. I try to explain it as coherently as possible. Where I use intent-based data. So like, at the time, what I would do is like, I would use like LinkedIn job boards where companies were hiring for video agencies, and I would scrape a bunch of leads from there for those companies because they're essentially raising their hand and they're saying like, hey, we need video work done, right? And then I would put my clients in front of them instead. Um, would this be of interest? You wouldn't owe me anything. And that's kind of the risk reversal, right? So I have the desired outcome, 23 book discovery calls, time frame is a month, um, and then the risk reversal is basically you don't pay us anything until it drives results. The whole point of this actually, from the very beginning, was to get people to uh, want to work with me, and I was going to do the work completely for free until I actually delivered results. Second one, very similar thing. I just get straight into the actual offer. 20 book meetings a month. Uh, no added headcount, and then I would, I get into the social proof. Would love to send over a two-minute Loom, which is like the actual video. And this is like literally the offer that I ran. And I think a big, uh, part of this offer that, or this copy that worked really well was this. We had, I think for like the last few years, we just came off the back end of people sending like these kind of like um, I don't know how to spell, like bro-y emails where they kind of act like, you know, like I'm the top dog, like they would like send like 10-word emails, and they would kind of just like, uh, it was kind of like this um, assumed close kind of email, right? It was like, I already know you want to work with me, type of thing. And I think just being honest and literally just literally even if it like discredits me saying like, hey, I'm just trying to get an agency up and running. I don't have that much experience. I would do this for free. Let me see, let me know if your thoughts are right. Like, kind of coming at it from more of a humility standpoint or a sincerity standpoint, it actually, I think it worked as like a pattern disrupt, and I think it was really refreshing to people as well. And so it was like, oh, okay, like,

>> Cool, like, let me, let me, you know, let me give this guy a chance. Let me talk to him.

And I think coming from that purview at the time worked really, really well. And so I know a lot of people out there when they talk about cold email copy, they talk about like writing in this really like stoic, super markety, super punchy tone. Um, which 100% works depending on your offer. But I would not stray too far away from writing emails that are kind of actually personal and make you actually sound like a normal human being and not just like this massive, faceless corporation that's sending like, you know, uh, 60-word emails and things like that. So let me go ahead and move on to basically stuff I wish I knew.

So firstly, I would say even if you don't have sales, just start a project and outbound will prove demand really, really quickly. So basically, don't try and overbuild or anything like that. Just use outbound because it's going to be like really good direct market feedback. And if people are not really listening to what you have to say, people read your email and they're like, "Okay, like they're not responding whatsoever," then either you're framing the email incorrectly or the offer itself is not that good, right? And so you need to get really, really good at that. If you go on an email and you say, "Hey, I built an 18-module NAD proposal system using Gamma and Slack and all these other things." Like, even though it is valuable, like business owners don't really care about that stuff.

>> Nobody cares. Yeah. Nobody knows what that means. Nobody cares.

>> Nobody cares except us, right? Like we're like in a bubble, basically.

>> But if you position in a very different way, like, "Hey, I think I have a system that's going to increase sales cycles by like 23%. I think it's, I have a system that I think can increase your sales closing rate by 15%. I plug it in for your business completely for free. And if it doesn't work out for you, then hey, you don't have to pay me a dime." Then they're going to be a lot more likely to actually be interested. And then you actually have proof of concept. And now you can start building this out. And now you can actually start putting in businesses, right? And we have, there's tons of infinite resources online to actually figure that out. I would say like the minimal setup is you just need a few tools to actually get meetings from now on, right? When once you get a meeting, then obviously you need to have the wherewithal to take the money that you got from that closed deal and then reinvest it into the setup because that's how you actually scale. Uh, talk to customers. That's the biggest thing. If anyone takes away one thing from this entire process, it's talk to customers first and then build once they actually tell you that they actually value what what you're actually putting in front of them. Um, that way you're not wasting time building things that nobody actually wants or nobody's actually going to sell or buy from you. Uh, and you don't have that sunk cost. And one really big thing is um, Aban's rough, right? Uh, people are going to say some crazy things to you. Expect harsh results, uh, swearing, insults, mockery. It's going to sting, but it's very, very normal. Um, and it doesn't mean your idea is bad, and it doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It's just part of the process, I would say. Um, even if you have a killer, killer campaign, there's going to be a lot of people that cuss you out. I've had campaigns that have almost like gotten 20% reply rates, and you know, half of them are positive, and there's some, there's still going to be replies within that exact campaign that are telling you like, screw off.

>> Yeah, man. I think that's why people, a lot of people that try to do cold outreach end up kind of quitting because it's such a numbers game and because you have to get through a lot of that stuff that doesn't really feel great. And at the end of the day, yeah, humans humans are humans. But um, what you talked about with like talking to customers, I, I couldn't like repeat that enough. If you think about like, we've all fallen victim to maybe a drop shipping ad or some sort of impulse buy, and it's all because these companies are doing research to understand what are the exact specific pain points that people have. So that way I can just chuck up an ad somewhere. They have no idea about my brand or me, but they're still going to buy because that pain point resonates with them so deeply. That's what it's all about.

>> Yeah, 100%. And the thing is, sometimes when you talk to customers, even if it's revealed that your specific offer is not that valuable to them, it's really easy to segue that conversation into finding a solution that is valuable to them. Like I've had conversations with people where I've positioned lead gen to them. I've had a conversation with them, they said it's not that valuable to them, and then I literally just, I just pose the question like, "Okay, like, is there anything else that you do need help with right now?" And they talk about it, and then boom, you're kind of back in the game. And now you can actually build something that they care about, right? Yeah. Starting from scratch, uh, from zero to one, I would do some free work. Don't build stuff nobody wants. I chat with customers all the time. That's going to be your most important. That's going to be your high, highest leverage task. And I would find a crowd by seeing who responds. Uh, that's like a big thing I also did. Basically, when I got positive responses, I would actually place them all in a Google Sheet and I would track the company size, the industry.

uh general description of who they are, uh who I actually spoke to. And what I would do is when I built a new a new lead list, I would use that as like my frame of reference because I knew like, okay, out of a thousand people I reached to, these 10 people were the most interested and they all have this, this, and this in common. And that's how I went from, you know, a 3% reply rate to a 5% to an 8% to a 10% and so on and so forth because I would keep just doubling down on basically the people that were actually interested in me.

Absolutely. I've got one final question to end us off here and it's about data. So earlier you talked a little bit about metrics, about how many emails you send, about what kind of, you know, KPIs you're looking at. What I wanted to ask you about to close off here is about when you see all these numbers, what do you actually do to let's just say your copy or to your strategy? Because I think the thing that really separates winners from losers is that everyone fails. Everyone goes through challenges, right? And so the winners are the ones that take those challenges and look at the data and take the learnings and fix something. And the losers are ones are the ones that don't change anything and just kind of expect the system to improve. So if you could give like one key takeaway of something that you always watch and make sure to, you know, optimize, what would that be?

Yeah, for sure. I would say data is super duper important when you're trying to iterate. And a lot of people only focus on positive data, right? They only focus on the positive responses as well or one or the other honestly, just negative or just positive. But I would say that data is basically just a compass towards the direction you want to move in. If you have positive data, positive replies, meetings, people who close deals, it's basically a signal from the market telling you, hey, this is the correct direction to move in, keep moving in this direction, right? And if you get negative data, negative like uninterested replies, people who aren't booking meetings with you, people who don't choose to close. It's not data that isn't valuable. It's actually just data telling you, hey, this is the opposite direction of where you want to go. Biggest point of data I always focus on is going to be reply rates. So, how many people are actually responding to your email? Then I would focus on positive responses. So, what percentage of that is positive? I would focus on what percentage of people are actually either looking at the video. If you do a video, like you can track it on Loom. So, I always track how many people are actually viewing the video compared to how many people I send it. And then I would track how many people are converting into a meeting.

Yeah. And and I I love how you broke it down because it's really important to think about the steps in between. You can't just think about a thousand emails resulted in one client because in there all the drop offs there's something different you have to do to improve each of those metrics. So it's really about dissecting and you know actually going through the journey of a customer and you know making changes based on that. So thanks so much for hopping in here today Savom. Um, you you gave us a lot of good information. So I think that someone now who's either starting out with cold outreach or maybe they haven't been doing it for a while has some really practical steps to scale up and get started there. So, where can people find you if they want to work with you, learn more about you?

Yeah, for sure. I really appreciate you giving me the chance to talk. Um, so the first thing I would tell people to look at is not even my company. Uh, I'll you have the gamma link, so they can actually watch this video that I actually broke down how I generated $500,000 with cold email. I posted in school, but it's on a Loom video, so hopefully a lot more people can watch it now. It talks about how I generate 700K plus in pipeline at this point. Uh, it's like a 1-hour step-by-step walkthrough. It includes the infrastructure list building and my exact script just like the ones I showed you. I also do like a quick community Q&A basically just as answering questions that people have. So hopefully it answers that as well. So at the first and foremost like I want people to get value from this. So hopefully this sauce helps. Um, and then if they're actually interested in what I specifically do, they can find me at flowamation.co. Uh, this is my website at the very bottom. You can also find me on LinkedIn flowation as well, Instagram. And then obviously you can always always email me and I'll be the one to respond at contact.co as well.

Awesome. Well, thanks again for taking the time to hop in and share all these insights with us. I really enjoyed getting to meet you and getting to hear about how you've been able to find so much success through the cold email game. So, thanks so much.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Nate.

So, I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode with Savon. If you're also interested in checking out some cold email techniques and growing an AI automation agency, then definitely check out my plus community. The link for that is down in the description. We've got an amazing community of over 3.5,000 members who are building businesses with AI automation. So, it's a great spot to be. Lots of other entrepreneurs in there and lots of other people who are just as obsessed with AI as you probably are. So, I hope to see you guys in that community. But, that's going to do it for today. So, if you enjoyed the video or you learned something new, please give it a like. It definitely helps me out a ton. And as always, I appreciate you guys making it to the end of the video. I'll see you on the next one.