There are some truths about growing a company that are hard to say because they sound absurd. Here is one: If you are serious about growing your (B2B) company as fast as possible, you should be sending 1,000 emails per day. This only sounds crazy, by the way, because most companies that would claim to be serious about growth are not sending 1,000 emails per day. I’d argue that those companies are not growing as effectively or quickly as they should, and that they should be sending 1,000 emails a day. If you aren’t sending this volume of emails now, here is why I think you should and how to do it. First, why outbound? Why are you disqualified from being serious about growing your company if you aren’t sending a lot of it? Three clear reasons.
  1. Cold email is the best way to reach all of your TAM quickly. Most startups don’t even talk to 10% of their potential customers in a year. 30k sends a month gets you there fast.
  2. Cold email is one of the most statistically predictable ways to grow pipeline. You can literally boil it down to a reliable formula, which I will share below.
  3. Cold email may have the most asymmetric upside of any way to grow your company. In the worst case, you listen to my advice below, burn 15 hours, and spend $300 on domains. You don’t need to hire more people or spend money on ads or do any of that stuff. In the best case, with just a few days of work, you could add millions of ARR to your company.
If you send 1,000 emails for even one month, I am reasonably confident1 you will add new revenue. Maybe a little. Maybe a lot. I have seen companies add more than $1M in pipeline in a month this way. There are other benefits, too. Sending outbound at scale also amplifies your experimentation capacity. 30,000 sends in a month gives you statistically significant data about 100 subject lines, or 100 different ways of pitching your company. At 100 sends a month, you’d need to wait a year for that data. If this isn’t convincing, here is some math estimating how many new sales meetings you could book over the next 30 days with some standard (i.e. median) assumptions based on years of cold email sending.
20,000 x 0.03 x 0.2 = 120 meetings.
In this math I am assuming:
  • You email 20,000 leads over the month (sending ~1.5 emails to each2).
  • You get a 3% reply rate.
  • You book meetings from 20% of those replies.
These are median-ish numbers based on what I’ve seen over at Aurora. Some campaigns perform far better. Some perform worse. 60 meetings a month is not a ceiling unless you want it to be. I doubt it would take you more than ~15 total hours to set this up, at which point it could run automatically for as long as you wanted it to. An outbound machine in perpetuity. Is it worth 15 hours of your time to book 120 meetings a month for many months on end? You are the only one who can answer that. To be clear, this is not just an argument for cold email. You know that cold email works. You may be sending outbound already. This is an argument for sending good emails at inhuman volume; for reaching out to every single person in your TAM as quickly as possible with a valuable message for them. It’s worth asking how you can do this—and why everyone isn’t doing it already. * * * Setting up an automated system to send 1,000 emails a day used to be basically impossible. And because it was impossible, we built other habits.
  • We learned to hire SDRs linearly to increase email volume as our companies grew.
  • We learned to do prospect research one-by-one and write every email manually.
  • We discarded cold outbound at scale as something that was not really an option.
So now, suggesting that people automate 1,000 emails a day to their TAM feels like someone at a failed rocket launch asking if perhaps Earth’s gravitational pull might have changed since the rocket was designed. It’s an absurd thing to say—you’d be dismissed. But what if it actually had changed? For cold outbound, the laws of the universe have changed indeed. New technology, much of it powered by AI, means that a single person can now send 1,000 emails a day. And if you want to grow your company, I suggest you try sending that many emails3. Let me show you exactly how you could start sending 1,000 emails a day to people who want your product. In my view, this is what you should be doing if you are serious about growing your business fast.
  1. You would build a huge list of everyone who might want your product. You could use a tool like Clay or Apollo to build this list automatically.
  2. You would buy a bunch of adjacent domains, because you won’t be sending from your company’s main one. For Za-zu, my company, that might be helloza-zu.com, za-zusales.com, hiza-zu.com, goza-zu.com—you get the idea. For 1,000 emails a day, you’d want ~18 domains.
  3. You would get set up with a tool that handles the email warming, deliverability, and sending. So you can manage everything from one clean inbox without getting sent to spam. Za-zu is the tool I built to help me do this. There are others, but Za-zu is the best and the simplest.
  4. You would write good, personalized email templates, leveraging a bunch of data about each lead that you could pull automatically with a tool like Clay or Apollo. You’d send 1,000 a day.
  5. You would book meetings and hopefully make a lot of money.
If you are focused, it is hard to see how this would take you more than 15 or 20 hours. And, I don’t know about you, but a 15-hour bet for something that may add millions of dollars to your company’s revenue feels like a good one to me. If you are serious about growing your company quickly, I wrote a 10,000+ word handbook about sending good cold email. And when it’s time to send, I think you should give Za-zu a try. It’s a clean, fast, useful outbound sequencer that lets you run everything from one inbox and gets you maximum deliverability. Best of luck. If you ever have specific questions, you can always reach out to me at matt@za-zu.com and I will do my best to respond with an answer. * * * Thanks to Elvis and Nick on X for inspiring some of the framing for this essay.
1 I am confident you will grow your revenue if you 1) have a good product, 2) email the right people, 3) write good emails, and 4) have a good conversion funnel (i.e. your sales calls or self-serve signup actually work). It’s also true that you can very possibly book new revenue without having some or even all of these pieces. 2 You’re not literally sending 1.5 emails per lead, but you might average 1.5 emails sent per lead. That’s because I am assuming you are sending follow-ups. If you are sending more follow-ups and more often, then you may contact fewer than 20k leads a month. You could also send 1 email to 30,000 new leads in a month. 3 1,000 emails a day is catchy and may actually be the right volume for some products with a large TAM (like Za-zu). But some companies—imagine you’re pitching pharmaceutical execs—will probably want to find their own version of what 1,000 emails a day means. Maybe it’s 100. Maybe it’s 50. Up to you.