#114 · $350K/M AI Automation Expert Answers Questions For 80Mins
I wouldn't use MailerLite; use Kit (kit.com) instead. Set up a sequence, keep the first email short with few links, and encourage replies by being personal. Aim for high open rates; improving from 40% to 60% can increase revenue. Follow examples like Jay Klaus's welcome email, which is straightforward and transparent.
Yeah, you’re missing the scale. There are about 8 billion people worldwide, and perhaps close to a billion businesses—maybe one in eight people runs some kind of business. Even if a thousand people each sent a thousand emails a day, that’s only a million emails daily, and most would land in spam; maybe only 20% get seen. Moreover, far fewer people actually do outreach than you think—maybe only about 1 in 50 viewers take action. So the market is far larger than you imagine, and your real competition is much smaller. There’s plenty of room to differentiate: you can tweak your copy, assets, niche, solution, offer, etc.—dozens of levers. For example, with 10 niches, 10 solutions, and 10 geographies you already have 1 000 combinations, and you’re only scratching the surface. In short, there’s huge opportunity out there.
I first ensure the emails are good by running five to six thousand leads through a campaign and checking for a decent reply rate (around 3-4%). Only after confirming the emails aren’t trash do I add follow-up emails to the sequence, because adding them earlier would increase the chance of being marked as spam. I want to avoid spam as much as possible.
Use a done-for-you mailbox provider; I recommend Zapmail (with affiliate code Nyx for 10% off). Get 9-12 mailboxes at about $3.50 each per month; with the discount that's roughly $33 total. Buy domains—one domain per three mailboxes—so about 3-4 domains at ~$10 each, adding ~$35. Set up Instantly: the $37 plan works if you're bottlenecked, bringing the total to about $105, leaving $15 for Make.com (or n8n) for personalization. You can also scrape leads for free using Apollo or Apify, then personalize them for a few dollars per thousand. Overall you can start with around $70.
I’d suggest starting with a heuristic of sending roughly 100 to 500 leads before you decide whether an offer works—this number depends on how different the positive reply rates are between what you’re testing. If the gap is large, you’ll see significance with fewer emails; if it’s small, you’ll need more. I don’t get bogged down in strict statistical testing; instead, I recommend sending about a thousand emails and then simply choosing the better‑performing variant. In practice, that works out to about a thousand emails per week. For beginners I advise a two‑step campaign: send around 300 emails a day, six days a week, which gives you roughly 150 new leads daily and about 1,000 per week. Monday through Saturday you send the outreach; Sunday is your reset day for running split tests or determining which version to keep. I still follow this weekly rhythm even as my volume has grown.