Sabo

i send millions of cold emails/day, still hitting the inbox.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

you deserve to scale your business without wasting time on useless tips from gurus

we sent 270M cold emails in the last 6 months and broke every myth about outbound that you still believe in

spent 2 weeks putting together a 50+ page doc with everything I know about cold email that works TODAY

dropping this publicly would be a federal crime

but if you want it, DM me 'DOC' and I'll send it over

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

The dirtiest open secret in cold email right now is that the biggest "AI personalization" tools on the market are pulling your prospect's nudes off old leaked databases and using them as "behavioral signals"...

Sounds insane.

There are 14 known breached databases that contain the email-to-explicit-content link map. Ashley Madison. Adult Friend Finder. Brazzers. Several smaller cam site dumps. These databases are passed around on dark forums for $200 to $4,000 each.

A wave of "AI cold email" tools quietly cross-references your B2B target list against these breach databases. Not to blackmail. To score.

The logic the founders won't say out loud:

A man whose work email appears in an Ashley Madison breach has a different psychological profile than a man whose email doesn't. He's hiding something. He responds faster to messages framed around discretion, control, or status. He converts at higher rates on outbound that uses emotional language. He's less likely to forward your email to his team.

So the AI tool routes him into a different sequence variant. Faster cadence. More urgent framing. Higher price anchors. He converts 3-4x better than the prospects with clean breach profiles.

The B2B founder on the receiving end has no idea his cold email reply rate is being optimized against his own adultery profile.

There are 11 cold email "personalization" companies on Twitter right now whose actual moat is access to these breach databases. They market it as "advanced intent signals" or "psychographic enrichment." The investors don't ask what's inside the data pipeline because the conversion numbers look too good to interrogate.

The cold email industry is selling you Apollo at $48k/yr. The real operators are running outbound enriched with your prospect's worst secret.

Honestly probably regret posting this.

Few.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

There's a network of OnlyFans models in Miami quietly making more money selling their subscriber lists to dating apps than they make selling content...

A girl gets 8,000 paying subscribers. She knows every one of them paid $14.99/mo to watch her, which means every one of them is a verified credit card, a real name, a real phone number, and a man who pays to be near attention.

Dating apps will pay $4 to $9 per name for that list because it's the highest-converting cold lead they can buy. Lonely. Solvent. Already comfortable paying for parasocial relationships.

She doesn't sell the list directly because OnlyFans terms ban it.

Instead she runs the list through a "marketing agency" she registered in Delaware for $200. The agency invoices the dating app. The dating app pays the agency. The agency pays her as a "consultant."

8,000 names at $6/name is $48,000. One sale. Same Tuesday.

She does this every quarter as her list refreshes and the new subscribers cycle in. Plus the content money. Plus the chatter team upselling DMs.

The funny part is she's never met the dating app marketing director. The entire deal happens over WhatsApp with a guy named Erik in Tallinn who runs the agency-to-agency middleman layer that everyone in this industry uses because nobody wants their name on the paperwork.

Cold email operators are out here begging Apollo for fake B2B contacts at $0.40 each. A 24-year-old in Brickell is selling lonely men to Bumble for $6 a head and paying her rent in cash.

Few.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

went through 20+ verification tools and most of them came back inaccurate in ways that actually matter

the specific names and results are all in the video. but the main issue is catch-all categorization which is unreliable across most of the major tools.

and considering roughly 70% of B2B lists are Outlook heavy that is not a small problem. they handle Gmail fine but Outlook is where almost everything breaks down.

#ColdEmail #EmailMarketing #LeadGeneration #OutboundSales #B2BSales

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

Every $200/mo "AI personalization" tool in cold email is literally a 47-line ChatGPT wrapper. The actual API call costs $0.04. The margin on $4 of OpenAI spend resold to you at $200 is a 4,900% markup...

There's a wave of cold email "AI personalization" startups that all do the same exact thing. Pull a LinkedIn URL, scrape the bio, hit OpenAI's API with a templated prompt, return a one-line "personalized" opener for the cold email.

The entire product is one HTTP request to https://t.co/x2sND5fDwS. The code is 47 lines of Python. Any moderately competent developer can build it in an afternoon. The OpenAI API call costs $0.04 to $0.16 per email depending on which model and how many tokens.

These products are being sold to cold email operators at $200 to $800 per month for "unlimited personalization."

Numbers behind the racket:

47 lines of Python plus one OpenAI key plus a Stripe checkout equals $200/mo SaaS valued at $40 million in seed pitch decks.

The reason every cold email founder is launching one of these is because the unit economics are absurd. 4,900% margin on each request. $20,000 MRR achievable in 90 days from one Twitter audience. No defensible technology since anyone can copy you in a weekend. The buyer doesn't know how easy the underlying API call is.

The buyers are cold email operators who've been told by Twitter that "AI personalization" is the future. The product is a $200/mo subscription resold from a $4 API call. The actual personalization output is no better than what your sequencer's built-in AI feature does for free.

The entire layer is going to collapse within 18 months once OpenAI launches their own bulk B2B API tier, someone open-sources the 47-line script, or cold email operators realize they're paying SaaS prices for what should be a $14 GitHub repo.

Honestly wouldn't be surprised if 80% of the "AI cold email" companies on Twitter right now are gone by Q4 2027.

Interesting times.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

Cold email verification is the step that feels optional until it costs you everything

most beginners skip it and pay for it later in burned domains and broken infrastructure. and even the ones who do verify forget that lists go stale.

a million emails cleaned today are not all valid two months from now. retargeting old leads without recleaning them is one of the fastest ways to wreck a sending setup

unverified list means 15 to 20 percent bounce rate. verified properly means 1 percent or below, skip one step in cold email and it can take down the whole operation.

#ColdEmail #EmailMarketing #LeadGeneration #OutboundSales #B2BSales

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

Apollo charges you $48,000/yr, ZoomInfo charges you $80,000/yr, and Clay charges you $349/mo for what is mathematically the same dataset. All 3 source roughly 70% of their data from one upstream supplier you've never heard of...

The supplier is called People Data Labs. They license raw B2B contact data to dozens of downstream "competitors" who wrap the same data in different UIs and resell to you at 30-100x markup.

People Data Labs API pricing starts at $98/mo. Apollo pays them for the data and charges you 50x. ZoomInfo pays them and charges you 80x. Clay pipes them through a spreadsheet interface and charges you whatever your CFO will tolerate.

There are 3 to 5 upstream suppliers like People Data Labs that quietly power the entire B2B data category. Every "proprietary database" claim from every B2B data platform is marketing. When People Data Labs has a scraping outage, Apollo, ZoomInfo, and Clay all degrade simultaneously. Inside the industry it's an open secret. Outside, every cold email operator pays retail thinking they're buying something unique.

Numbers nobody runs:

Apollo Plus is $48,000/yr per seat for "advanced enrichment." ZoomInfo Advanced is $79,000/yr for the same dataset wrapped in better UI. Clay Pro is $349/mo plus credits, same dataset, you pay per call. People Data Labs direct API costs $98/mo to $4,800/mo depending on volume.

A typical cold email operator running 5,000 enrichments a week pays Apollo around $4,000/mo. Same volume hitting People Data Labs direct costs roughly $89/mo. That's $3,911/mo of pure markup on every cold email operator who doesn't know the upstream supplier exists.

The cold email gurus telling you "Apollo is the industry standard" are usually Apollo affiliates collecting $200 per signup. The actual operators running scale stopped paying Apollo 18 months ago and built 14-line Python scripts that hit People Data Labs direct.

Honestly wouldn't be surprised if Apollo's valuation drops 60% within 24 months once this becomes common knowledge.

Run it up.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

There's a Telegram channel where every cold email operator running real volume secretly sources aged Microsoft tenants for $300 to $800 each. The entire "email warmup" industry is the $99/mo placebo sold to people who don't know the channel exists...

Microsoft's spam filter has an undocumented internal rule that routes 100% of new sender tenants to the junk folder for the first 30 days no matter what you do. The rule exists because they noticed cold email operators were warming up domains aggressively in the first 2 weeks then dumping volume, so they pushed the trust-earn window past where most operators give up.

Warmup tool companies know this. They sell you the placebo anyway.

The actual fix is what the operators doing real volume have been quietly doing since 2023. Buying aged Microsoft tenants from underground markets for $300 to $800 each. A 6-month-aged tenant lands in the inbox on day one. A freshly warmed tenant gets junked for the first 30 days regardless of how much $99/mo you spent on Lemwarm or Mailwarm.

There's an entire shadow economy of aged Microsoft tenants. Most cold email operators have never heard of it because the warmup tool affiliate machine doesn't link to Telegram channels.

Numbers nobody wants to run publicly:

$99/mo warmup tool x 200 inboxes = $19,800/mo on a placebo. Same operator could spend $40,000 once on aged tenants and reach the same inbox placement on day one. $19,800/mo recurring vs $40,000 one time. The warmup tool industry is a subscription business that depends on you not knowing Microsoft's actual filter rules.

The "best in space" operators all source aged tenants. The ones still buying warmup tools are funding affiliate kickbacks while their domains die at day 28.

Honestly wouldn't be surprised if 70% of the warmup tool market collapses within 18 months once this becomes common knowledge.

Few.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

It's actually insane that the entire cold email industry has been A/B testing against an "open rate" metric that's been mathematically fake since September 2021...

Apple shipped Mail Privacy Protection in iOS 15. It pre-loads every remote image in every email, including your tracking pixel, the second the email lands in the iPhone inbox.

If your prospect uses iPhone Mail, Apple's servers download the pixel before he ever sees the subject line. Your sequencer logs an "open." The prospect was asleep.

Per Apple's own usage data, 53% of US email opens happen on Apple devices.

So the "30% open rate" your guru posted on Twitter last week is mathematically closer to 14%. The "we're crushing it at 42%" agency case study is hovering around 19%. The "we doubled our open rate with this subject line" tweet was a $99/mo sequencer measuring an Apple server in Iowa.

For 5 years the entire cold email industry has been optimizing against a metric that doesn't measure what anyone thinks it measures. Operators are paying $4,000 a month to "optimize" for opens that aren't opens. Agencies are pricing retainers based on inflated numbers. Course gurus are selling subject line frameworks built on statistical fan fiction.

Every "best cold email subject lines of 2024" thread is hallucinated math.

The fix is brutally simple. Ignore open rates entirely. Optimize only for reply rate and click rate, both of which require an actual human interaction. The operators who switched to reply-only optimization in late 2022 have been quietly outperforming the open-rate obsessed crowd by 4-7x for years and most of them are too polite to say why.

Honestly wouldn't be surprised if 60% of cold email "case studies" published since 2022 are statistically meaningless.

Few.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

Honestly the funniest scam in modern business history is Google owning both the inbox that decides if your email lands AND the $400-a-click ad you're forced to buy when it doesn't...

Gmail blocks 27% of legitimate B2B emails. That number isn't a glitch. It's been climbing every year since 2019 with the consistency of a tax policy.

Every cold email Gmail kills is a buyer that now has to find your competitor through a $4 to $400 sponsored Google search result. Google made $237 billion in advertising revenue last year. Gmail is "free."

There is no version of this where the company that owns the inbox AND the ad auction wants the free distribution channel competing with its $237B revenue line to keep working. The conflict of interest is the size of a small country.

You've been told for 5 years that "deliverability is getting harder." Every blog post and Twitter guru blames warmup pools, sender reputation, copy quality, spam triggers. None of them mention the part where the world's largest advertising company gets richer every time your free email channel dies.

Numbers nobody wants to run out loud:

Gmail handles 1.8 billion users worldwide. B2B email gets routed to spam at a rate roughly 3x higher than B2C email per public Litmus data. The average B2B keyword on Google Ads runs $4.85 to $87 per click depending on category. Google's ad revenue has grown an average of 18% year over year since 2019, the same period cold email deliverability has gotten dramatically harder.

That's not a correlation. That's a strategy.

The cold email industry has spent 5 years telling itself the problem is technical. The actual problem is that Mountain View has been quietly tuning a knob on the spam filter while collecting $237 billion from the ad market that benefits when free outreach dies.

You're not losing emails to spam. You're being taxed.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

the barrier to starting a cold email agency right now is basically nothing compared to what it used to be

used to mean either paying $8 per inbox through Google and Microsoft or spending entire days manually creating free accounts, watching them get banned and starting over. did that every single day just to build up 1000 accounts.

now you can grab 100 Outlook inboxes for $30 on Maildeck and be sending the same day. the game has completely changed

#ColdEmail #EmailMarketing #LeadGeneration #OutboundSales #B2BSales

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

everyone running a cold email agency asks the same question at some point. how many inboxes do I actually need

not going off vibes here. actual data broken down by operation size. answer a few quick questions about your setup and the number becomes obvious.

https://t.co/6e1D0mfEoU

#ColdEmail #EmailMarketing #LeadGeneration #OutboundSales #B2BSales

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

Companies that just LOST government contracts are better leads than the companies that won.

The winner is busy celebrating.

The loser has a hole in the forecast, a pissed off sales director, a proposal team that wasted 6 weeks, and a founder quietly asking why they keep losing bids they thought were qualified.

That emotional state sells.

Most public agencies publish bid tabs after awards.

Winner.
Losers.
Bid amounts.
Contract scope.
Sometimes the procurement officer.
Sometimes the exact scorecard.

Everyone looks at the winner.

The money is in the losers...

A company losing a $286,000 janitorial contract, a $912,000 IT support deal, or a $138,500 fleet maintenance bid has already proven a few things.

They sell the service.
They can handle government work.
They had enough interest to submit.
They have staff working on growth.
They just got punched in the mouth.

So you don’t pitch them “lead gen.”

You pitch replacement revenue.

“Saw [company] came in second on the [agency] bid for [contract name]. Losing a deal that size usually leaves a hole in the quarter. We help vendors find similar buyers before the RFP goes public, then build the outbound around the same contract language. Want me to send the 12 closest lookalike accounts?”

That line is evil because it uses the loss while it’s still fresh.

You’re not selling hope.

You’re selling a way to make the loss useful.

The public doc already gave you everything you need:

What they sell.
What they bid.
Who they lost to.
How much they thought the work was worth.
Which buyer category they’re chasing.

Now you pull 40 similar agencies, municipalities, school districts, manufacturers, property groups, whatever matches the contract type, and send them as the first artifact.

A loser who just spent 6 weeks writing a proposal will absolutely read a list of 40 similar buyers.

Their ego needs the next shot.

Bid tabs look like boring government paperwork.

They are actually public lists of companies with fresh rejection, proven capacity, and immediate need for pipeline.

Beautiful little pain feed.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

$500 to start a real business is kind of insane when you think about it

that gets you infrastructure, a sequencer, good leads and enough volume to actually fulfill for clients.

if you do not have $500 right now just get a job and save it first. trying to start with free inboxes, free leads and the cheapest sequencer on the market does not work. it just burns time and ruins domains.
invest properly or wait until you can.

#ColdEmail #B2BSales #AgencyGrowth #LeadGeneration #Outbound

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

A guy is making stupid money running “jealousy outbound” against agencies with public case studies...

He opens an agency’s case study page.

Finds the client.

Then finds 3 similar companies in the same niche that are clearly behind them.

Message:

“Saw [competitor company] is running [agency/system] and looks like they’re pulling ahead in [specific channel]. We can build the same backend for you without the 6-month retainer structure. Want the Loom?”

This works because founders are tribal little animals.

They can ignore a normal pitch.

They cannot ignore the possibility that a direct competitor has a machine they don’t.

The case study does all the proof work. You don’t even need to be better than the agency. You just need to make the founder feel like he’s late.

The emotional state is envy disguised as strategy.

One client in the landscaping SaaS niche ran this against 9 public agency case studies.

186 emails.

31 replies.

8 calls.

3 closed at $12,400.

$37,200 from using one agency’s proof against the market they were bragging to.

Case studies are supposed to attract buyers.

They also expose exactly who the buyers’ competitors are scared of.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

cold email in 2026 is different. most people are still running 2024 systems

scrapers gone, cleaners unreliable, enrichment changed, here is the full updated playbook built for right now

https://t.co/GkumZoCzG6

#ColdEmail #EmailMarketing #LeadGeneration #OutboundSales #B2BSales

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

made your first cold email money? domains and inboxes. that is it.

stop buying domains with no proven offer, paying for coaching over sends and building an agency look with no clients behind it. looking different is the whole edge

#coldemail

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

not a guru, not selling a dream, just making the videos that would have helped when starting out

the assumption that stops most people is thinking they need thousands in tools, a polished website and a full team before they can begin. so they wait.

they keep the job, tweak the site, buy another course and convince themselves the timing is not right yet. the timing is never right.

that is not pessimism that is just reality. the people winning right now did not wait for perfect conditions they just started with what they had.

#ColdEmail #B2BSales #AgencyGrowth #LeadGeneration #Outbound

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

A very funny cold email play is buying the expired domains of dead agencies and catching the ghosts...

Thousands of agencies died after 2021.

Websites expired. Founders went back to jobs. Stripe accounts closed. LinkedIn posts stopped.

But old clients, referral partners, and random buyers still email those domains asking for work.

So you buy the dead domain for $12.

Set up Google Workspace.

Turn on catch-all.

Now every email sent to any address at that agency lands in your inbox.

hello@, founder@, support@, sales@, old account manager emails, all of it.

Most of it is trash.

Some of it is insane.

A guy I know bought a dead lead gen agency domain and got an email 9 days later from a former client asking if they could restart campaigns for Q3.

He replied:

“[Founder] shut the agency down last year. We acquired some of the remaining infrastructure and still handle the same backend. Want me to look at what you were running before?”

Closed at $7,800 upfront.

The old agency spent 4 years building trust.

He bought the corpse for less than lunch.

Dead businesses still have living relationships.

Most people just don’t check the inbox.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

A funny cold outbound angle is finding companies hiring SDRs and selling them the system before the human shows up...

A company posting “2 SDRs needed” just announced they have a pipeline problem and a budget.

They are about to spend $118,000/yr on two nervous 24 year olds who will need 90 days, 6 tools, a manager, a script, and a reason not to quit by month 4.

So you don’t pitch lead gen.

You pitch subtraction.

“Saw you’re hiring 2 SDRs. Before you commit $118k/yr to people who still need the system built for them, I can install the outbound engine first so whoever you hire walks into working lists, scripts, inboxes, CRM routing, and follow-up. Usually saves the first 60 days of flailing.”

That lands because the founder already admitted the pain publicly.

The job post is the wound.

Your offer is the bandage before they hire the wrong person to hold it.

Charge $6,800 for the install and $1,900/mo to maintain the machine until the new SDRs stop being useless.

5 installs a month is $34,000 upfront.

12 maintenance clients is $22,800/mo.

The funniest part is the new SDR thinks they got hired into a company with “great processes.”

No bro.

A stranger cold emailed your boss and built your job before you arrived.

[Sabo @MrColdEmail]

It’s funny how a pretty girl saying “I found 9 missed leads in your funnel” will outperform 30 cold email bros pretending to be strategic...

A guy I know pays a real model in Scottsdale $2,200/mo to record 40-second Loom intros for ugly B2B audits.

She doesn’t sell anything.

She just opens the loop.

“Hey Matt, I looked at your ad funnel and found something weird. You had 9 people ask about pricing last week and nobody replied. Want me to send the screen recording?”

Matt replies because Matt is a man with a pulse and a small ego problem.

Then the actual operator sends the audit.

The offer is boring as hell: lead routing, 5-minute SMS follow-up, missed-call text back, CRM cleanup, quote follow-up, all the stuff founders ignore until they see money leaking in public.

But the packaging makes it feel like someone attractive found a secret problem in his business.

That matters more than people admit.

The girl creates curiosity. The audit creates shame. The operator sells the fix.

14 clients at $3,400/mo is $47,600/mo from turning ignored leads into a little humiliation package.

People will call it cringe because they imagine the girl is the product.

She isn’t.

She’s the doorbell.

The money is behind the door.