What's happening with my cold email agency

Hey there,

As you all know I had started a cold email agency as an experiment to show you guys if it’s a good online business or not.

Well, I have my verdict ready.

But before that, a short story.

I had been playing around with the cold email tool, fixing the email scripts and putting in new niches to target.

That’s when, a prospect replied to one of my cold emails. I was ecstatic seeing that notification.

He was interested. He'd read the pitch and he liked the idea.

But he had one question before we moved forward:

"What are you doing differently?"

I stared at that email for a long time.

I didn't have an answer.

Let me back up.

At the start of September, I told you I was building a cold email agency in public. It was called Koldbound, and it was my third side-hustle experiment for Wifi Moolah.

I'd been circling cold email for years. A friend of mine runs an agency doing $20K–$30K a month, and he once handed me a campaign to manage. I hated it. Scraping leads by hand. Managing inboxes by hand. Sending everything by hand.

So this time I promised myself I'd do it the smart way.

I signed up for this tool called AutoGTM by Explee, an AI tool that does the whole outbound job for you.

It builds the lead lists, sets up domains and inboxes, picks targets, writes and sends the emails. I just had to point it at an audience.

My offer was simple: $497 setup fee, then $199 for every meeting I booked.

And yes, I was cold emailing people to sell them cold email. I was fully aware of the irony.

I built nine campaigns, each aimed at a different type of business: agency founders, B2B service firms, consulting firms, funded startups, commercial real estate, and more.

Most of the sending happened in one big push in mid-September. The tool fired off over 2,000 emails that week. Then the replies started coming in.

Agency founders replied the most, at a 1% reply rate and 3 interested leads. B2B service firms were close behind.

Funded startups? 308 emails. Zero replies. Not even a "please remove me."

By the end of the month, here's where I landed:

Five hot leads. Not one of them became a client.

It wasn't that people hated the offer. Most were actually open to it.

The problem was that they'd already seen it tons of times. Setup fee plus pay-per-meeting is everywhere now. Dozens of agencies send the same pitch to the same inboxes every week.

So when that prospect asked what made me different, he wasn't being rude. He was asking the only question that mattered.

And "I'm new" isn't an answer.

Before calling it, I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious. So I bought two courses: one on Udemy, and one from Daniel Fazio, who I'd followed for years.

Both were good. Genuinely. I picked up a lot about targeting, copy, deliverability, and how the real operators structure their campaigns.

But by the end of both, I kept coming back to the same thought:

None of it matters if the offer is weak.

You can have perfect copy, clean inboxes, and a great list. If the thing you're selling looks like everyone else's, people will reply "interesting" and then go quiet.

AutoGTM made the whole thing painless. I didn't touch a single DNS setting. For a non-technical person, that's a big deal.

But you pay for that ease in control. There's barely any customization. You can't export your lead list. You only see the emails of people who reply. And my 0.6% reply rate was well below the 2% you'd expect from a proper manual setup.

That's the trade: convenience vs. control.

If you do it all yourself with something like Instantly, reply rates jump. So do your upfront costs and your workload.

My advice for anyone else who wants to do this is to start with the easy tool, learn the game, close a few clients, and then switch to the manual setup once you can afford it.

I'm putting Koldbound aside for now.

Not shutting it down. The domain stays, the site stays, and I might come back to it. But I'm running several things right now, this was always meant to be an experiment for you, and I don't have the time to give it what it needs.

And honestly? I still don't have an answer to that prospect's question. If I did, I'd have kept going.

When I come back, I'll do it the manual way. And I won't send a single email until I can answer "what are you doing differently" in one sentence and that means having an offer that is actually different from the rest.

Here's the one thing I'd tell you:

Make your offer so good it feels criminal to say no.

Not "good." Not "competitive." So specific, so low-risk, so clearly better that the prospect feels a little stupid turning it down.

Everything else: the tools, the copy, the courses — comes after that.

If you've run an agency and cracked the "why you?" question, hit reply. I'd love to hear how you answered it.

Until next time,
Kris

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