You’ve probably heard of Smartlead and Instantly. They’re tools you can use to send cold emails. If you search “Cold Email Platform” they’re one of the first options that comes up on Google. Lots of people use Smartlead and Instantly. Even I used them for a couple of years. It’s what I used to grow my cold outbound agency, Aurora. So what’s the catch? Good question. The catch is that, in my years using Smartlead and Instantly, I became so frustrated with the products that I ended up devoting $100,000s and more than a year of my life to building Za-zu. Smartlead and Instantly’s products are slow, stressful, and clunky to navigate. They do not excel at any particular thing. And it does not feel as though it was designed for smart growth people and GTM engineers. To be clear, Smartlead and Instantly work—it’s just that Za-zu works much better. Za-zu is clean and simple: it’s built purely for sending personalized cold emails at scale. With Za-zu, you:
  • Connect your email accounts.
  • Warm them up so they’re ready to send.
  • Write campaigns you can automatically personalize (with smart variables and easy if/then logic).
  • Send those emails and make sure they hit primary inboxes.
  • Reply to those emails and book meetings from one simple inbox.
  • Get high performance: we’ve already figured out what works, so you don’t have tweak settings or becoming a deliverability expert
Speaking of not becoming a deliverability expert—here’s something that’ll blow your mind. With Smartlead and Instantly, you’re constantly babysitting your setup. You have to manually configure how many warming emails to send relative to cold emails. You’re responsible for noticing when inboxes start performing poorly and swapping them out for fresh ones. You have to build custom automations just to keep your campaigns healthy. Za-zu does all this automatically. We monitor your email health in real-time and increase the warm-to-cold ratio whenever there’s a dip. When an inbox gets beat up, we automatically pull it and swap in a fresh, warmed-up one from your reserve. No dashboards to check, no ratios to calculate, no custom automations to build. It just works. And here’s where things get messy. To avoid sending identical emails (which kills deliverability), you need to create variations. But look at how SmartLead and Instantly make you do it: you have to manually write out word shuffling and conditional logic using Liquid syntax like
{hey|hi|hello} and {% if company_size > 100 %} 5-figures and up {% else %} way too much {% endif %}. The result? Hard to read campaigns that look like this: Smartlead Instantly campaign builder showing complex Liquid syntax code making cold email campaigns difficult to read and edit - demonstrates why users switch to Za-zu's visual interface This Liquid syntax approach creates campaigns that are hard to read, debug, and learn from. You’re essentially writing code instead of focusing on your message. Za-zu takes a completely different approach. Instead of forcing you to learn a programming language, we give you simple, visual tools. Here’s what it looks like to build an in za-zu. Za-zu visual conditional logic builder for cold email personalization - no-code alternative to Smartlead Instantly Liquid syntax programming making email campaigns easier to create and manage And here’s what it looks like to add to a campaign in za-zu. Sending the exact same email hundreds (or thousands) of times triggers alarm bells for ESPs like Google. Fair enough, normal humans rarely type identical emails on repeat. Enter Word Shuffling: a smart way to automatically vary the wording in each email. Just add synonym alternatives inside your text, and Za-zu randomly picks a different one every time your message sends.

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Why Za-zu is more powerful and easy to use

There’s a sad thing that happens to many companies as they grow: they turn a simple product into a bloated one, losing sight of one specific end user in favor of a mass market. That can be fine. But at Za-zu we believe in the power of products with clearly defined scopes, with great defaults, built for specific people. Za-zu is the platform for sending personalized cold email at scale. And it’s built for smart growth people and GTM engineers who view cold email as more of a science than an art. So, if you:
  • Want a thousand add-on features
  • Want a jack-of-all-trades, master of none product
  • Want a tool where you can collect lead data and send outbound in the same place
  • Want a tool that builds for the mass market rather than for a specific audience
You won’t find those things on Za-zu. As for what you will find…

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Za-zu v. others features comparison

One of the biggest tricks marketers pull is designing features tables that are presented as objective comparisons but are in reality cherry-picked and based on subjective framing. Never trust the feature comparison table that was written by someone who wants to sell one of the products to you. So we aren’t going to pretend to be objective. Instead let’s compare the things you may care about. Za-zu vs Smartlead vs Instantly feature comparison chart showing Za-zu being great at sending emails, a clean, simple interface, being fast and powerful, and having a support team that cares. You can send effective, personalized cold emails at scale from Za-zu. You can do it from a clean, simple interface that moves just as fast as you do. And, if you ever run into an issue, you can reach out directly to us. Someone who actually knows the product (like myself, or an engineer) will reply and help you out. Want to give Za-zu a try? Give it a twirl here.