i don't usually post these, but my business partner basically dared me to document what happened between January and March this year, so here it is.

quick background: i left a corporate BDR role at a series C company in late 2023 and haven't looked back. Not because everything went smoothly, but because even the worst months working for myself beat the best months pretending to care about quarterly OKRs. Anyway, I started a cold email agency with basically no clients, no reputation, and a very patient VA in the Philippines.

Before

January 2025, we had 2 clients. One was a buddy from my old job who gave us a shot, the other was a referral from a Slack community. combined MRR was around $4,200. that sounds okay until you factor in paying my VA $1,400 a month, spending about $800 on tools and infrastructure, and splitting a coworking desk with my ops guy. After all that, I was taking home maybe $1,500 and eating rice and beans four nights a week.

Our process was embarrassing. we built lists manually in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, copy-pasted into Google Sheets, then uploaded to Lemlist with virtually no verification. Bounce rates ran 6-8% on a good day and closer to 11% on a bad one. I remember one campaign in late January where we torched a client's domain because we sent 2,400 emails off a list that was maybe 60% valid. That was a rough phone call.

reply rates hovered around 0.8 to 1.1% across both accounts. if you've done this long enough, you know that's basically noise. We booked maybe 3-4 meetings a month total across both clients, and one was starting to get antsy about results. The other (my friend) was being patient, but I could tell he was losing faith.

Revenue in January: $4,200. February: $4,200 (same two clients, barely hanging on). tools spend: roughly $780 a month. My take-home: embarrassing.

The worst part wasn't the money. it was that i had no system. Every campaign was an one-off. I was reinventing the wheel each time, spending 4-5 hours building a list that should have taken 45 minutes, writing copy from scratch instead of iterating on what worked. I was busy all the time and productive almost none of it.

After

The turning point was a conversation with another agency owner i met at a meetup in early February. He wasn't even in cold email - he ran a paid ads shop - but he said something that stuck with me: "You don't have a sales problem, you have an operations problem. you can't sell more because you can't deliver more." That hit different because he was right. I was so focused on getting clients that I never built the machine to actually serve them.

So in mid-February i basically shut down new outreach for two weeks and rebuilt everything from scratch. Here's what changed and roughly when.

First, infrastructure. i had been using random Gmail accounts and it was a mess. switched to Inframail for dedicated sending domains and inboxes. cost went up a bit, but the deliverability difference was night and day. i set up 3 domains per client with 3 inboxes each - 9 inboxes per client - warmed them all for 21 days before sending a single cold email. Painful to wait, but it mattered. Inbox placement went from maybe 55-60% to consistently above 85% within the first month.

For list building, i moved to a proper stack: Clay for building and enriching lists with multiple data points, Prospeo for email finding, and NeverBounce for verification before anything goes into a sequence. The difference was immediate. bounce rates dropped from that 6-11% range down to 1.2-1.8%. that's not a small thing - that's the difference between keeping your domains healthy and burning them every six weeks.

For sending, we moved everything to Instantly. Some people prefer Saleshandy or Smartlead, but Instantly clicked for how we work - the campaign rotation, the built-in warmup, the analytics. My VA picked it up in about two days, which matters when you're a four-person team and can't afford a week of onboarding on every tool.

Here's where the numbers started changing. By early March we had the new system running for our two existing clients. reply rates jumped from that 0.8-1.1% range to 2.4% on one account and 3.1% on the other within the first three weeks. Meetings booked went from 3-4 a month to 11 in March alone. My buddy who was losing faith suddenly wanted to double his spend.

And this is the part i didn't expect. Once we had a system that actually worked, selling became easy. i started doing outbound for ourselves (eating our own cooking, i guess) and closed three new clients in March, then two more in April through referrals from existing ones, then two more in May from a combination of outbound and one inbound lead from a forum post (not this one, a different community).

By the end of April we were at 7 clients and $18,500 MRR. By the end of May, 9 clients and $26,200. right now in June we're at 11 clients and just crossed $31k, which still feels surreal to type.

The thing that made the biggest difference wasn't any single tool, though. It was building the process so my VA could run 80% of it without me. She builds the lists in Clay, runs verification, loads into Instantly, monitors bounces and replies, and flags anything that needs my attention. I write the copy and handle strategy calls with clients. My ops guy handles onboarding and reporting. That's it - that's the whole company.

some specific numbers people always ask about: we send between 35-50 emails per inbox per day depending on warmup age. Newer inboxes stay at 25-30 for the first week after warmup. Average reply rate across all clients right now is 2.7%, but ranges from 1.9% on harder verticals (cybersecurity, looking at you) to 4.3% on one client selling HR software to mid-market companies. cost per meeting varies wildly but averages around $85-110 across the book.

One mistake I made early on that cost us a client: I assumed more volume was always better. one of our first clients wanted us to send 500 emails a day and I said yes because i wanted to keep them happy. we burned through three domains in five weeks and the results were terrible. losing that client taught me that 150-200 emails per day per client with clean lists and good copy will outperform 500 of garbage every single time. expensive lesson.

The other thing: I spent months thinking copy was the main lever. Like if I could just write the perfect email, everything would work. turns out copy matters but it's maybe 20% of the equation. The other 80% is list quality and deliverability. You can write the best email ever crafted and it doesn't matter if it's landing in spam or going to the wrong person. Took me way too long to internalise that.

Anyway, that's basically the story. went from 2 clients and rice and beans to 11 clients and actually being able to pay myself a real salary in about 90 days. It's not some massive agency success story, but for a bootstrapped four-person team with zero funding, I feel pretty good about it. Still have a ton to figure out, especially around hiring and whether to niche down more, but that's a post for another day.