The cold outbound playbook

There are few growth levers that could allow a single indie hacker to grow a business from $0 to $1M ARR in a matter of months. There are even fewer that could be done with nothing but an internet connection and a laptop—and virtually no budget.

Cold outbound is one such lever.

Within seconds of this very moment, you could send an email to your dream investor. Or a potential customer. Or Patrick Collison. A few minutes from now, that person could reply. And a week from now, you could be on the phone having a conversation that will change the course of your company and your life. It’s almost unbelievable how powerful cold outbound is: in business, you can get almost anything you want with a damn good email.

If we can be honest for a moment, though? You’ve already heard this.

You know cold outbound works. Companies have been built on the backs of cold outbound. There are millions of words already published on the internet that claim to teach you how to do it well. There are agencies and tools and services that want to be your golden goose, your silver bullet, the thing that makes cold outbound finally easy.

So let’s agree on one thing: there is no silver bullet. Cold outbound is not easy. It is not easy to generate millions of dollars in pipeline, and to then turn that pipeline into revenue. It is not easy to send emails that strangers answer. It is not easy for one or two smart growth people to drive sales like they were a team of 50 SDRs. It is not easy to email people right when they’re facing the problem you solve, and to write messaging that convinces them you can solve their problem.

It is, however, possible.

This playbook will show you how to run outbound like the smartest growth people in the world. Do it right, and you and your team will be able to build personalized cold outbound campaigns, run them at scale, and make millions. The path to get there won’t be easy. But, by the time you finish reading this, it will be clear.

Why you may consider listening to me

I bootstrapped a cold outbound agency called Aurora: we’re on track to generate $500M in pipeline for our clients in 2024, and we hit $1M in ARR in less than 12 months—all using the tactics you’ll find below. We have sent millions of emails and booked thousands of meetings, for companies in industries from podcasting to customer loyalty to edtech. If we hadn’t figured out how to run effective cold outbound at scale then we would not exist, and I would not be writing this playbook. Now I’m building Za-zu, the cold email sequencer built for personalized outbound at scale.

I started Aurora after spending years raising millions of VC money, trying to build a unicorn. If I were to go that route again, cold outbound is the first thing I’d do to generate a ton of traction and revenue for my business. Because it works.

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1. Why cold outbound works so well

The internet sucks on a very regular basis. Spam, noise, content you don’t care about, ragebait, fighting, ads for questionable cryptocurrencies. And while ads work, especially for specific kinds of products, they are an impersonal and expensive way to grow. You couldn’t hand $10k to a smart growth person and expect them to 10X or 100X that money by buying ads on Twitter or Meta.

The inbox, though, is still at least a little bit sacred.

Email is where important conversations happen. It’s where you make sales, where you get hired for jobs, where you have important conversations with people in your company, where you read the news you’re interested in, and so on. Email is still your own little corner of the internet.

This intimacy is what makes cold outbound such a powerful channel. While most advertising involves you renting space somewhere—the digital equivalent of a billboard—cold email is a direct line into the inbox of the person you want to sell to. And when someone sees a cold email that’s interesting, they don’t need to click on an ad, then go to a website, then click on a CTA, then book a demo. All they need to do is reply.

Cold emails don’t work all the time, though. To be specific, cold emails work when 1. They land in your recipient’s inbox, and not in their spam folder, and 2. The recipient thinks that you can do one of the following for them:

• Make money

• Save money

• Save time

If you can convince people that you can do any of these things for them, you can make a lot of money. At my agency Aurora, in just the past year with cold outbound:

• A podcast production company generated $46.5M in pipeline in 14 months. 

• A small business marketplace has generated $3.6M of pipeline in 5 weeks of sending—and hired a new salesperson to keep up with the demand.

• A cap table management platform booked 23 meetings (~$230k in pipeline) in 4 weeks.

• A financial underwriting company secured 20 meetings with Fintech buyers in just 20 days.

I say these things not to convince you that I am especially great, or that my agency is great, or that you should work with us. I share these metrics because they are achievable, as long as you can send thoughtful and personal cold outbound campaigns at scale. Behind every metric like the ones above, you won’t find a generic, spammy cold outbound campaign. Instead, you’ll find ideas like:

What if we identified all the visitors to our job board site, figured out which open positions their company has, and then sent them a cold email offering to help fill those specific positions?

What if we reached out to business owners and told them we knew buyers that were looking for the exact same business location, industry, and revenue as theirs?

What if we scraped the Meta Ads Library for every company we email about our loyalty program software, and called out one of their specific ads as the hook for the email?

Later, we’ll cover how to come up with ideas for campaigns that work, write great emails, and get results like the ones above (I’ll show you some of the exact emails we used).

At this point, though, you may be wondering: why isn’t everyone doing this? Why doesn’t every company just pick up an extra few million dollars by running some cold outbound? And the truth is that it’s because cold outbound is very hard. While you can set up an outbound campaign in an hour or two, that outbound campaign probably isn’t going to be good; so many campaigns end up as failures, 1000s of emails sent with hardly anything to show for it. Many of the clients that originally came to Aurora came to us because they’d spent tens of thousands of dollars working on outbound internally, hadn’t seen many results, and were frustrated.

The good news is, the two reasons why cold outbound is hard are both solvable:

1. It’s hard to write a good cold email.

2. It’s hard to scale good cold emails beyond what you can send manually.

The rest of this playbook (available here) will help you write great cold emails, then use AI to send those great cold emails at a scale you’d have to hire an army to reach manually. So you can saturate your entire available customer space rapidly, and get whatever it is you want to get—with email.