i never planned to do cold email as a career. Two years ago I was sitting in a cubicle at a mid-size insurance company doing 'business development' - basically cold calling from a list someone bought in 2019 and hoping for the best. The leads were terrible, management wanted 80 dials a day, and I was making mid five figures with a bonus structure designed so nobody ever hit it. i quit in March 2023 and told myself I'd figure something out. Never looked back, and honestly the scariest part wasn't leaving, it was realising how long I'd stayed.
The first few months were rough. i had a bit over ten grand saved and zero clients. Started doing cold email for myself, trying to sell marketing consulting to local businesses because that's what i knew. i was using Lemlist on the $59 plan, scraping leads manually from Google Maps and LinkedIn. No system at all. Spending 3 hours building a list of 200 people, sending them all basically the same email with their first name swapped in, wondering why I got like a 0.4% reply rate. Booked maybe 2 meetings in the first 6 weeks and one ghosted me.
the turning point came around month 3 when a mate who runs a landscaping company asked if I could 'do that email thing' for him. He offered me a few hundred a month to reach property managers. Not life-changing money, but it forced me to get organised. set up a proper domain, did 3 weeks of warmup (felt like forever - now I tell clients 3-4 weeks minimum), and wrote sequences that were actually personalised. Used LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find the property managers and Prospeo for email finding - got valid emails for about 80% of the list, then verified everything through MillionVerifier. That first real campaign did nearly 4% reply rate, which felt incredible. He got 4 meetings in the first month and closed one for about $14k annual revenue. That's when I realised this could be a business.
By month 4 i had 3 clients - the landscaper, a commercial cleaning company, and a local IT services firm. Revenue was around two thousand a month, barely covering rent and tools but the trajectory felt right. Working 60-hour weeks, burning out fast. The IT client was hardest because their ICP was so specific (companies with 20-100 employees in certain industries without a MSP) and I kept sending to the wrong people. took me 6 weeks to figure out list building was the bottleneck, not my copy. I'd been blaming subject lines when the real problem was emailing office managers instead of CTOs.
Month 5 i hired my first VA - found her on onlinejobs.ph, $6/hr, and she was better at list building within 2 weeks. Freed me up to focus on copy and client acquisition. Switched from Lemlist to Smartlead around then because i needed to manage multiple clients without losing my mind. Smartlead's not perfect - the UI is clunky and campaign organisation still confuses me sometimes - but multi-client inbox management is way better than logging in and out of different Lemlist accounts.
By month 6 i had 7 clients and was at over six thousand a month. That's also when I almost blew everything up. Got lazy with verification on one campaign, sent about 1,400 emails without running them through MillionVerifier first, and my bounce rate hit 11.2%. One domain got flagged and i had to retire it. A $200 lesson plus time to warm up a replacement. After that I built a checklist that my VA runs through before any campaign goes live - never had a bounce rate above 2.8% since. Dead simple: verify every list through MillionVerifier, check for catch-alls separately with Scrubby, never ever skip it.
One thing that took me way too long: inbox infrastructure. for 8 months I was buying Google Workspace accounts one at a time, setting them up manually, messing up DNS records half the time. Around month 9 I switched to Maildoso for inbox provisioning - saved so much time. Not the cheapest, but everything comes preconfigured with SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and i don't have to think about it. We run about 45 inboxes across clients now. Before that I was spending 4-5 hours a month on setup and troubleshooting deliverability issues that turned out to be my own DNS misconfigurations.
growth from month 6 to 12 got real. Brought on a part-time copywriter I found through a cold email subreddit (ironic, I know), and referrals started coming. the landscaping client told two other service companies about us, the IT firm referred a cybersecurity company. by month 10 I had 14 clients and about $11k a month. Not getting rich, but paying myself a real salary for the first time since leaving corporate. I remember the exact moment it clicked - checked my dashboard and saw we'd booked 23 meetings across all clients that month. 23 meetings from cold email for businesses that had never done outbound before.
Our current workflow: client onboarding takes a week - nail down ICP, build the initial list using Sales Navigator and sometimes Apollo for certain verticals, run through Prospeo for enrichment then MillionVerifier plus Scrubby for verification. copy goes through 2-3 rounds of revision with the client. We set up 2-3 sending domains per client with 2 inboxes each on Maildoso, warm them for 21-25 days on Smartlead's built-in warmup, then launch with 25-30 sends per inbox per day. ramp up to 35-40 after a few weeks if deliverability looks good. prospeo handles email finding for most clients, supplemented with Hunter for European contacts.
Right now we're at 22 clients, $18k a month, 4 people including me. book between 30-38 meetings per month across all clients - about 1.5 per client per month. Best performer is a commercial roofing company getting 6-8 meetings a month because nobody in that space is doing cold email and decision makers actually read their inbox. Tougher ones like the cybersecurity firm get maybe 1 meeting a month because every CISO is hammered with cold emails already.
the thing nobody told me: client management is harder than the cold email itself. Writing copy, building lists, managing deliverability - all learnable. But managing expectations when a client is paying you $800 a month and wants 20 meetings in month one? That's the part that makes you want to go back to a cubicle. (Almost.) I lost 3 clients in the first year because I oversold what cold email could do and they churned after 2 months when they didn't see immediate ROI. now i tell every prospect upfront: month one is infrastructure and testing, month two is optimisation, month three is when you should start judging results. If they can't handle that timeline, they're not a good fit.
Monthly tool costs run about $1,800-2,100 depending on volume. smartlead is the biggest chunk at about $94. maildoso runs about $160 for all inboxes. sales Navigator is $99. MillionVerifier and Scrubby together maybe $80-90. The rest is smaller stuff. Not nothing, but when you're doing $18k revenue the margins are decent, especially since most labor cost is my VA at roughly $960 a month.
Anyway, that's the story. Two years from cubicle to running a tiny agency that pays the bills and lets me work from wherever. Not glamorous - half the time troubleshooting why a client's open rates dropped from 62% to 31% overnight or explaining that no, you can't email 10,000 people from 2 inboxes. But I wouldn't trade it. If you're thinking of starting something similar, just know the first 3 months are going to suck, and that's normal 😊
