What realistic results can I expect from my first cold email campaign, and what volume is needed to start making money?

#202 · 60min open Q&A on how I make $400k/mo

What realistic results can I expect from my first cold email campaign, and what volume is needed to start making money?

There are nine key variables—deliverability, open rate, reply rate, positive replies, meeting attendance, proposal conversion, sign‑up rate, refund rate, and your price—so you can’t give a single volume number. You need to estimate based on your own metrics; if you could send a million emails a day you’d likely make money, but you’d have to pay for that sending capacity.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

What is a good cold email positive reply rate?

Usually somewhere between 0.3% and maybe 5%. Mathematically that means one in every 200 to 400 emails or so should be somewhat positive. I can usually get a booking rate of about 0.1% to 2% without much fuss. My best performing email campaigns have positive reply rates and later booking rates of somewhere around 1% to 2%, which is quite difficult to achieve. Practically speaking, as long as you get 0.1% to 2%, you're pretty solid — that means basically one in every 300 emails or so will land you a meeting. And you need to understand that not everybody will show up to those meetings, because cold email is a pretty cold approach — it's kind of buried in the name there. So you can expect somewhere between 1 in 400 people that you send to actually showing up to a meeting if your copy is good. Aim for that and you can make a tremendous amount of money.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

What is the best strategy for sending cold emails, when did you start your first campaign, how many days did you send them, and after how long did you get your first client?

I started cold emailing around 2018‑2019 with my business partner Gurinder; those early attempts didn’t work well. I kept sending emails for about three to four years before I made any money, and it was probably closer to two years before I saw real revenue. The breakthrough came in roughly 2021 with what I called 'one second copy': I ran many cold email campaigns and offered free sample articles that were produced cheaply using AI, which hardly anyone else was doing at the time. That got me attention from big companies like Kixie. The best cold‑email strategy is to front‑load value—give the recipient more work or benefit than you’re asking for. Instead of asking for free labor, identify a problem they’re suffering from, solve it, and attach the results to your email. For example, I once rewrote 40 YouTube titles for a follower, provided a one‑click doc, and they saw immediate CTR improvements. That’s how successful, ‘rich‑people’ cold emails work: you save them time or make them money, not the other way around.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

Can you do a step‑by‑step for somebody looking to do their first cold email campaign at a small scale? How would you structure a campaign on Instantly?

I already recorded a video that does all this called "Watch Me Start and Sell an AI Service in 10 Hours" where I go through the process of finding a need, picking niches, finding needs via Reddit, converting them into offers, putting offers into Instantly, scraping and uploading lead lists, reaching out, and I usually get about 10 interested people who want to book calls within an hour and a half of work.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

When should I stop a cold email campaign? What volume of sends and which KPIs indicate it's time to cut a campaign?

To decide when to cut a cold email campaign, look at the positive reply rate. It depends on the niche—higher‑ticket niches often have lower reply rates. A rule of thumb: don’t send more than about 1,000 emails per piece of copy before checking results. Aim for around a 1% positive reply rate; if you’re getting ~0.8% after 1,000 sends, that’s decent and can be improved to 1–1.5%. If most of your campaigns are performing poorly (e.g., five out of six at ~0.9% while one is at ~0.8%), drop the weak ones and create variants based on the better performer. There’s no perfect threshold, but this is how I evaluate campaigns.

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