So B2B founders, what cold emailing stack are you working with?

You could find some value here https://medium.com/@marketinflow/10-email-marketing-sequences-every-e-commerce-business-needs-to-boost-sale-c76f5f7e7ee8

@mcolley amazing question! I too was asking that same question a few years ago when I started my indie hacker journey. Not sure how much you know about this, so I'm going to try to explain every small detail.

Here is what you are going to need.
1.* A way to send emails in a sequence.* A sequence is a series of emails you send to a prospect. You could do this manually, but it is terrible. A tool lets you drop a list of prospects in and automatically sends out emails. Stops sending if people reply. And a few other cool features.
2. Someway to find people. You need a lot of people to make cold email work and you need a place to reliably find names.
3. Someway to find people's email address. Once you find someone, you need to figure out their email. Rarely is this posted on a website.

This is how I do those things:

To find people I use LinkedIn. You can use the free version of LinkedIn for a while, but eventually you will do enough searches that you have to upgrade. You do not really need Sales Navigator. I would recommend the lower version, Premium Career, which is $39.99. Sales Navigator starts at $99. The nice part about that is being able to filter very easily by anything. Might be worth it, but I would start with the cheaper one.

To find people's email address I use a little tool called Email List Verify. Amazing tool! All it does is verify emails. It is VERY inexpensive... 5k emails costs $15. Not bad at all.

Lets say your prospect is named Bill Smith and works at a startup called Takeaways.io. What I do is guess around 5 different email combinations in order:

1. bill@takeaways.io
2. bill.smith@takeaways.io
3. bsmith@takeaways.io
4. bills@takeaways
5. bill.s@takeaways.io

For each of these guesses, I put it inside of Email List Verify. You want to find one that is VERIFIED. If it is "Not Found" or anything other than verified, I don't send it.

Put this information in a spreadsheet, along with their name, company name, and maybe a custom paragraph you write for each person.

To send a sequence, right now can't make a great recommendation. Most of the tools are very overpriced for the features they use and are not catered to small teams or Indie Hackers. That being said, I am launching a new tool to solve this problem. It is called Sales Software Co. We are currently awaiting approval by Gmail and once that happens, that will be my recommendation.

However, for the time being, I can recommend one called PersistIQ. Fairly easy to use but quite expensive. $75 per month, which adds up big time for most Indie Hackers. Our tool will be $20 per month, less if you buy an annual plan. Stoked!

Anyway, that is the stack I use.

There is another way you can do it. You could get a list of prospects from Fiverr. Maybe 1k emails for $200. However, make sure you vet each person and don't just send out a mass email to everyone.

There is a ton more that I would love to talk about here. Cold email is part art, part science, and COMPLICATED. But if you can get it right, especially as an Indie Hacker, I don't think there is a more scaleable channel. Plus VERY affordable compared to ads. Not at scale usually, but in the beginning 100%.

The hard part isn't really the tools. It is what you write and do for your prospect to get them to reach back out. More than happy to help with that as well if it would be helpful. What do you think?