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💆🏻 The Ultimate Founder Mental Health Stack. Psychedelics, depression drugs, dog walks, training, meditation, Whoop and loads more.
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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I had some really great responses from my piece on the weekend about mental health. It seems to have been something people really enjoyed reading. We all have our own journey I guess, and those of us that are founders are treading a particularly crazy path. Would you like that I write more of founder wellness and mental health?

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Life, Liberty & The Pursuit Of Pipeline

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” said the author Mark Twain. The same line could be said about outbound email. Sure it might be dying—and for many it is already dead. But if you can put the right message, in front of the right person, at the right time, you are always in with puncher’s chance. Nail all three you have a customer, two out of three and you have a lead. Only tick one, or God forbid, zero out of three and you are nothing more that dreaded little four letter word. SPAM.

Today though, we won’t be addressing the differences between great outbound and SPAM, but more so a strategy we employed at Athyna—and still do to a certain extent—that had us aiming to be the best in the world at cold outbound email. Today, I will tell you the story of our 1 million emails a day strategy. Life, liberty and the pursuit of pipeline.

The Unrejected, Salesforce & Predictable Revenue

Before going too deep into our story, we need to take a short walk down memory lane to the company that basically literally wrote the book on outbound—that is the $247B giant that is Salesforce. The company known for coining the term SaaS, and who literally built the CRM category, were also know for one thing: outbound.

The ‘Predictable Revenue’ model, pioneered by Aaron Ross at Salesforce, was built around systematic outbound prospecting. This model involved dedicated SDRs focusing solely on outbound lead generation.

Aaron, or as I like to call him—Aaron Ross of House Salesforce, First of His Name, The Unrejected, King of Outbound and the Cold Calls, Khaleesi of the Great Sales Sea, Breaker of Quotas, Father of Predictable Revenue— later introduced ‘Cold Calling 2.0,’ a framework to efficiently generate leads without traditional cold calling.

Instead of direct sales pitches, the focus was on setting up meetings through personalized and targeted outbound emails. Smart. So smart that Salesforce's strategies have been widely studied and emulated by other B2B companies all the way from California to New Caledonia.

I will admit, although I do not kneel daily the altar of Lord Ross, I did read his books when they were released, and his volume first approach to outbound shaped how I think about outbound still to this day.

The rise of ZoomInfo, Outreach, Apollo

The landscape of outbound sales tools has undergone a boom in recent years. ZoomInfo, long known for its comprehensive but grossly overpriced datasets, were the gold standard for sales intelligence. As tech boomed, the demand for efficient outbound strategies grew, leading to the rise of platforms like Outreach, Salesloft, Mailshake any more, all earning their keep enabling sales teams to scale their efforts more effectively. The era of quality and quantity had begun.

This period saw an unprecedented surge in outbound activities across the tech sector. It was a literally gold rush, with companies of all sizes embracing aggressive growth strategies to keep up.

Amid this frothy environment, Apollo emerged as a game-changer in the market. By making their system data accessible to smaller companies and early-stage startups, Apollo democratized—yes I know it’s the most overused word in tech—access to high-quality sales intelligence and outreach tools. This meant that your mom and pop’s business could finally target customers with the precision of a laser beam.

This move was particularly significant as it coincided with the increasing importance of SDRs and the growing reliance on outbound email as a primary sales channel. Apollo's approach lowered the barrier to entry for companies looking to implement sophisticated outbound strategies at scale, previously the domain of the mega-funded-gig-chads of the enterprise world.

Athyna’s journey with outbound

The journey of Athyna began as most startup outbound stories go: scraping our own data, burning multiple domains and getting genuinely all around shitty results. But let’s go back a step, to the decision to build a strong outbound arm at Athyna. This decision was made somewhere around day -90, three full months before we launched the business.

Picture me and my then co-founder—whose name is forever stricken from the records—a laughably large whiteboard, and a bunch of different growth channels scribbled across it. This would decide where we spent our limited time and energy in the early stages of the business. Meta, or Facebook at the time, was a no, no real budget there. That cancelled out Google as well. Network, yes, we could lean heavily on our network, and outbound. Good old fashioned outbound we could do.

Not only was it economical enough for us to invest time into, we also knew that strategically, all the biggest and best companies in the world had a thriving outbound function. Pick a random name out of the Fortune 500 hat, and they would have dominated outbound.

So on day one, week one of the company we started training our outbound muscle. We were off and running, starting with a humble 50 emails per week.

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Our 1M emails a day plan

After some trials and tribulations of getting our outbound engine humming we started to get really, good at it, fast. It didn’t take long before we were getting high quality leads consistently for less than $20. And not too long again after that, we had were had it dialled so nicely that we were acquiring a lead within our ICP of between $8-12 on average. Let me remind you that this was only really 24 months ago.

By this stage we had scaled our outbound to around 100k emails per week. To do this, in terms of scale and security wise we had a number of sub-domains we were running. Think AthynaHQ.com, HeyAthyna.com, WeAreAthyna.com and more, this is relatively commonplace. At this point in time you were safe to send somewhere between 500-800 emails per account per day. This was still the glory days of outbound.

The limit here is your brand. If you have a reasonably tight ICP, you can’t just hit people over and over and over again, otherwise you will not only get marked as spam, but you will slowly begin to do real lasting damage to your brand.

Luckily for us, we were struck by some terrible luck. Our outbound machine—the one channel that was attributing 85% of our pipeline at the time—broke. And when I say broke, I mean we broke it broke it. Pipeline was as dry as the desert of Arrakis on a summers day.

During the ensuing panic we began to plan for building our system back better, stronger, and more redundant so this could never happen again. The way in which we decided to build separate siloed accounts for everything from domain, to Google account, to IP addresses. The siloed created security in the system. If something broke it would mean that only one tenth would go down instead of the whole house of cards.

But the stroke of genius was the decision to not only create sub-domains, but entirely new sub brands. The first of which was called Ziggy’s Tech Talent, which was named after my dog, Ziggy.

The beauty of the sub-domain strategy was two-fold; scale and cut-through. To scale an outbound machine past 200,000 emails per week with one brand, no matter how many sub-domains you have is hard, may be impossible. Especially if you are trying to tell yourself that you are still talking to you ideal buyer.

Through the use of sub-brands however—custom built, uniquely branded domains—you don’t need to worry about crossing over the same prospect twice. And secondarily, and maybe more importantly is the cut-through piece. Athyna you see, services all forms of remote talent. For our clients, startups and enterprises in tech, we find the best sales, marketing, finance, ops, product, design and engineering talent. Quite the mouthful right? And when you land on our site, that’s what you see. Same in the inbox.

Picture that you are a VP of engineering at a Fortune 500 and you need 10 salesforce engineers and you really needed them a week ago. Two emails land in your inbox. One from Athyna saying, “Hey there, we hire great remote talent” and another from WeHireSalesforceDevs.com with the message, “Hey there, we hire great remote Salesforce engineers.” Which of those emails is getting a reply?

Armed with a new strategy in hand, I was hit with a sudden sense of dread. I knew what we had was a ticket to the glory land. Not that one channel can drive an exit but one channel can lead the charge. The thing was I knew that these things don’t always last forever.

“It was a great success, but even great successes come to a natural end,” said the great Isaac Asimov. Every great strategy is always one on borrowed time. And being that it’s the job of a founder to inject risk into a business, I took it upon myself to up the ante meaningfully by reverse engineering a plan to send one million outbound emails per day until out systems broke.

So that’s what we did. We set out on a project to understand what it would take to send 1 million outbound emails a day. In the research phase of the project, we realised it would take around 10 sub-brands to be able to handle the volume.

The plan was actually working wonderfully well, until around March of this year when Google lowered sending limits meaningfully again, making outbound at scale prohibitively difficult. It was already under that umbrella before we undertook this ambitious project, but we were better than most.

In the short time from launch of the project to to Google pulling the handbrake on us we were able to scale our volume from 200,000 emails per week to 1.3 million. And the annoying thing is, we had the infrastructure built to get to 5 million with in 2024. A full one million outbound emails per day.

It’s a real shame because this was one of those once in a decade strategies, that we were executing to perfection. If we’d have started the strategy only a few years earlier there would have been no stopping us. Brett Adcock, founder of Figure.ai said recently on an episode of My First Million that his first exit, Vettery selling for $100M, was powered solely by teams of VA’s in the Philippines scraping emails.

But the strategy simply cannot work today. Data is too expensive and sending limits and too low. Which is a good thing for the world really. A more pleasant inbox is what we all want after all.

Outbound today

While the landscape is certainly changing, innovative companies are finding new ways to breathe life into outbound strategies. Enter Clay, a rising star in the sales tech world. Clay's approach to intent measurement and data enrichment is revolutionizing how sales teams identify and engage potential clients. Common Room is another tool, we have been exploring closely.

By providing deeper insights into prospect behavior and interests, tools like Clay and Common Room are enabling more personalised and timely outreach, proving that outbound can still be highly effective when done right.

Moreover, the rise of social selling is redefining what outbound looks like. LinkedIn, Twitter, and personal branding have become crucial tools in a salesperson's arsenal. By building authentic relationships and establishing thought leadership on these platforms, salespeople are creating warm leads before formal outreach even begins. The death of outbound has been greatly exaggerated. Instead, we're witnessing its evolution.

Success in this new era requires a blend of cutting-edge technology, data-driven insights, and a human touch. As the lines between inbound and outbound continue to blur, the most successful sales teams will be those that can adapt to these changes, leveraging tools like Clay while also honing their social selling skills and building authentic, lasting connections with their prospects.

Fun outbound facts

Extra reading

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

I recently came across a cool piece by Bangaly Kaba, on something called the Adjacent User Theory. It's all about how Instagram identified users who were right on the edge of getting hooked but hadn’t quite made the leap. By focusing on these near-miss users, they managed to shoot their numbers from 400 million to a billion.

It’s a smart reminder that sometimes the biggest growth opportunities are pretty close to the obvious paths. Super interesting read for anyone trying to scale up!

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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