freak shit can happen to anyone got out of a taxi in Monaco after a night out tripped on a drain ripped my knee completely out of its socket ACL, MCL, PCL, meniscus, popliteal artery... all gone was supposed to fly home in 12 hours. spent 2 months in a French hospital instead. 14 surgeries that year, i nearly lost the leg below the knee. now I can't lift my left foot and I wear an ankle brace every day let this be your reminder, take NOTHING for granted.
"you need a new domain for every 2-3 cold email inboxes." we run up to 60 off one domain using subdomains. we tested it across ~30,000 accounts first. these are the rules that held up: the root: • one clean .com per tree, bought from Porkbun or Namecheap • it gets forwarded through Cloudflare • it NEVER sends, not even one campaign • it's only there so the branches have something to hang off the branches: • each subdomain looks like send.yourdomain. com • 20 branches per root is the hard ceiling • every branch holds 2 to 3 official Google or Microsoft inboxes • SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX are set on each branch before it sends • a flagged branch gets cut off and the rest keep going the sending: • each inbox sends 10 cold emails a day • each inbox also sends 20 warm-up emails a day • warm-up and campaigns start together and run side by side • i build to about half the ceiling, so roughly 10 branches per root where to be careful: • somebody sends from the root and one burn takes every branch down with it • the root is a .info, which is fine on its own but too shaky to hang subdomains off • a root gets filled all the way to 20 branches, with no margin left • you only run ~30 inboxes across the whole business. this earns its keep at hundreds or thousands of accounts a few of our customers send from ~10,000 inboxes this way.
we paid acquisition(.)com $150,000 for mentorship they told us to make 2 changes in the business... INSTANTLY paid back the 150. and we've 3X'd since that conversation best money we ever fucking spent. lesson: NEVER be afraid to invest in yourself.
me: quick question about [Company] (0% reply rate) me: thoughts on [specific thing]? (0% reply rate) me: "{{FirstName}}, question for you" (0% reply rate) me: googles "cold email subject lines that actually work" article: "Quick question" is the best subject line! Me: ...
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we started Premium Inboxes because I wanted an Aston Martin told my co-founder: "this is the Aston Martin fund. any cash we make, I'm buying a car" the goal was a hundred grand. that was it. by the end of week four we were doing 80K a month... the question changed pretty fast after that: "how far can we actually take this thing?" funny what a stupid simple goal can become
in Clay, enriching 250 cold email contacts is a 12-hour job. i get the same 250 done in about 30 minutes with Claude Code. it: • turns a short brief on what i sell and who buys into an ICP, by asking me follow-up questions • builds the Apollo filters off a handful of companies i already know are a good fit • splits the list: tier 1 is anyone already running a sequencer, tier 2 is the wider pool • pulls each contact's website, job listings and recent news into new columns • writes a 3-step sequence off the enrichment data it just collected • checks every merge field has a matching column before anything launches • reads the results by segment against those enrichment columns and flags which emails to rewrite every job after enrichment can then run off those columns. bookmark this.
NOBODY has the universal answer to cold email behaviour right now. and i say that as one of the people who tried hardest to find it. literally been in this game for years. i’ve spoken to THOUSANDS of cold emailers. sent MILLIONS of cold messages. i used to think i was ‘special’ and knew all the answers. we ran same-copy / different-account / same-recipient tests across hundreds of accounts trying to crack google vs microsoft behaviour. we couldn’t crack it. the honest answer we landed on is that the minute we find out what works, it changes. so watch out. anyone selling the universal answer is selling something.
best performing cold email template i've used? PPQ. P (Problem): their specific pain, in their words. what's keeping them up at night. P (Proof): a quick line of social proof matched to their industry. something like "helped a DTC brand increase sales 28% in 60 days" placed right before the CTA as a casual mention. Q (Question): a soft CTA that's easy to say yes to. "would it be crazy to hop on a quick call?" or "is this worth exploring?" bookmark this.
we started Premium Inboxes because I wanted an Aston Martin told my co-founder: "this is the Aston Martin fund. any cash we make, I'm buying a car" the goal was a hundred grand. that was it. by the end of week four we were doing 80K a month... the question changed pretty fast after that: "how far can we actually take this thing?" funny what a stupid simple goal can become
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