Winner stories asks: Which industry should I offer my agentic workflow agency service to, and what should I do about my cold email outreach not yielding clients—should I go deep into cold calling?
Winner stories has a great story: he's starting an agentic workflow agency and has two questions. First, which industry should he offer his service to? He should target digital industries with easily scrapable data, high‑ticket services (average order value at least $5k, ideally $10k–$30k+), and industries that are non‑compliant—avoiding heavy regulation like healthcare. Instead, focus on unregulated, wild‑west style sectors such as agencies. Second, his main outreach is cold email but he hasn't gotten a client, and he's considering going deep into cold calling. If he hasn't sent many cold emails or invested real time in learning and iterating, he can't claim to have gone deep in cold emailing. To get good at cold email (or cold calling) he needs to spend several hours a day over months studying copy, testing, and improving—only then will he see real improvement.
Great question. I should make it abundantly clear that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. My hammer is cold email, so I try to solve every problem with it. Cold email isn’t always the most effective marketing method, but it’s like a video game where you keep playing the main character because you’re best at it. I would definitely use cold email. I’d start by pitching these SMA agencies. I’d go to Apollo and filter for 1‑11 staff, looking for digital marketing, digital agency, or creative agency. I’d use the OR operator to pull as many as possible—probably a list of 30 k to 50 k in the United States alone. Then I’d blast out my offer with the software, giving a free demo. I’d position it as if I’d read the person’s whole life story and built the software just for them. I’d mention that I’ve been following what they’re doing at [their company] and that I used to run a digital marketing agency (maybe I still do). I’d share that I’m suffering from XYZ problem and that this software is the solution I came up with. I’d want to put it in front of them to see if it has value. I’m 100 % confident that running their clients through my system will generate outsized returns, so much that I’m willing to guarantee it and give it away for free just to hear their thoughts. If they’re open to a quick call, we could jump on it. I’d approach this at the higher‑agency level, positioning myself as an agency owner talking to agency owners, not as a SaaS person trying to sell something. I’d get on as many calls as possible and frame them almost as partnerships: give them a trial of the software, let them solve their current problems with it, then use that feedback to improve the software faster and better. Once I have a ready‑to‑go version, I’d charge premium prices. And yes, I’d go straight cold email, starting with agencies because they tend to have more money than SMBs.
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.
That's an interesting point. I think the whole idea here about not pitching a specific service makes sense, but I don't believe it works in practice. I've tried not doing that and just being a results‑focused person who generates revenue, but I find uptake is a lot better when you can draw the shape of a solution for a client and then say, 'This is how I make money.' It makes it more believable. The good news is you have the ability to test this yourself. You could make a general vague offer that is 100 % results‑based around whatever you want, then compare it with a more specific copywriting offer where you guarantee the same thing, or a specific PPC offer with the same guarantee. I think you could answer this question and satisfy that part of your brain that's itching to know, but it would be more powerful for you to try it yourself. As a five‑year copywriter you probably have some capital saved, so you could try it instantly on your own. Keep those AI systems in the background if you want, but you can also sell to traditional copywriting clients. This is basically the idea behind my business.
The ceiling is virtually unlimited. The reason why is because cold email is quite productizable — there are only a couple of steps that really require a lot of human intellect and muscle. A quick example of how you could productize a cold email agency so you get almost unlimited output for the same fixed input: you could automate the process of buying domains, which is achievable via API endpoints. You can automate setting up mailboxes, also achievable via API endpoints or browser automation. You can automate finding offers that have worked really well for clients in similar verticals — presumably if you wanted to productize a cold email agency you'd just work with people in the same vertical, then copy and paste those offers, make minor context-dependent modifications, and run them. You can automate the process of replying, and you can automate iterating and managing that. Now you shouldn't automate everything, but when it comes to productization and scaling to 70K a month or more, you typically just need the same inputs done very similarly over and over again with minor modifications. Cold email agencies are probably one of the simplest and easiest ways to do so — that's a major chunk of the revenue that got me to over $70,000 in a month. So just productize the hell out of things across the stack. But note that when you start an automation agency you typically do custom work across a big swath of different client verticals and niches, and that's pretty difficult to scale to 70K a month. So typically what you have to do is close it down to a subset of those niches, sell a subset of the products you're currently selling to that subset of niches, and in that way make everything really similar over and over and over again.