Questions about cold email setup: account per client, forwarding replies, CRM/webhook usage, follow‑up timing, thank‑you approach, power dynamic, and meeting scheduling.
Nick recommends creating a fresh Instantly account for each client and having the client pay for it, then signing them up with your affiliate code to earn about 40 % lifetime commission. For interested replies, send them to Slack as a notification dump rather than directly to the CRM; only add a lead to the CRM after they book a meeting, because CRMs can’t handle high volumes of raw replies. Respond to leads within about five minutes to dramatically increase the chance of a yes, always thank them, and respect the power dynamic by offering specific times (e.g., ‘Are you available today at 12:30 p.m. or tomorrow at 2 p.m.?’) and providing your calendar link as a backup. Follow up roughly every 48 hours until you get a definitive answer.
With a $30‑$40 monthly budget, you can still run effective cold email outreach. Use a low‑cost plan such as Instantly’s $37/month offering, plus a few mailboxes (about $50 total). Send roughly 1,000‑1,500 verified leads per month. A simple setup: one domain, three mailboxes, a two‑step sequence (45 emails on day 1, 45 on day 2) repeated over ~26 days, yielding ~1,200‑1,500 emails monthly. Replies require checking the mailboxes, but with only three it’s manageable.
Return on your time would be trading a little bit of your money for said time through getting these cold email platforms and using AI to personalize your icebreakers and send them out. If you just think about strictly return on time, that would be the way. But in your case, Lucas, from experience, because you're in maker school, I know you're at the very start line of your business and don't have a lot of access to capital right now. For you, it's not about return on time; you can do things that are poor return on time because you have a lot of time. Something that would be a poor return on time would be things like custom Loom videos. Despite being poor return on time, they're a lot higher intent. So there's a difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Right now you're asking about efficiency, best return on time. What you should really be asking about is effectiveness given 12 hours a day. Why not just work all of that time to bootstrap your first client, and once you have some revenue coming in, focus on scalability.
Yeah, unfortunately unless you're slotting into a team that does cold email specifically, there's little reason to just work with you to build out and manage the system—you might work as a consultant but not handle the whole management side. It just doesn't work in practice; you've got to play the cold email game. People don't realize the layers involved and don't treat cold email leads like gold, so you can't just sell the system and have them self-manage it. Unfortunately, you do it, train them on it, and over several months they can learn to operate it and then you can pass it off. But if you're doing a guarantee offer—which I do—then best to treat you as an API endpoint: they give you money, you give them the result. To make sure the client doesn't see you stop sending emails, I'd assume they'd worry after seeing 10 uninterested emails. Yes, absolutely. So I use AI to filter those out: when I get a reply, I use an instantly received webhook or smart lead reply webhook, filter it with AI to see if it's interested, and if so, pass it through to their Slack with a formatted message saying, 'Hey, we just generated you a new lead. Here's their information.' I do the same for every booked call; the Slack channel ends up being nothing but wins. Hopefully that makes sense. All right, just a little under the weather again. Full cold email delivery—I've made videos on this before, though I don't know which one. Thanks for the value. Do you currently use only ClickUp to set up CRM? When you build a custom CRM, do you build a sub base as a back end? Yeah, it's almost entirely ClickUp; I don't use Superbase as a back end—it's a custom database, and I don't really care about that. Is Lovable secure enough to use your client solutions, not just as a prototype? No, it's definitely not secure enough to use as a client solution on its own. We see this because a lot of these vibe-coded apps are getting hacked—like the T app, which released hundreds of thousands of women's profile pictures, email addresses, locations, and photos online. This happens because these systems are often vibe-coded, and we're seeing more of them get hacked. So I wouldn't use a vibe-coded app to deploy a live solution with a database, user login, etc. If it's just a simple front end visualizing non-valuable data, that's fine, but if you want to make somebody an app, don't do that.
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.