Hey buddy,

Cold email has a reputation problem.

Everyone has received a cold email that made them cringe. Generic opener. Fake personalisation. A pitch that has nothing to do with their actual business.

A "just following up" three days later.

Delete, delete, delete.

And yet cold email remains one of the highest ROI outreach channels in existence when it's done properly.

The problem isn't the channel. It's that almost every agency doing it is doing it wrong.

Here's how to build the one that does it right.

I used to run a ghostwriting agency. I understand outreach. I understand what it looks like when you find the right person at the right moment and say the right thing.

Cold email done well is the same principle, except it scales. And right now, most cold email agencies are selling volume when buyers want quality. That gap is the opportunity.

If I was not running this newsletter, I would definitely had started this.

A cold email agency is like the perfect business model to make your first six figures online.

You get good at cold emailing by outreaching for clients yourself and then replicate it for them.

If you’re actually good at getting a business leads, they’ll be your customer like forever and this has the potential to get you to 6 figures in just one year.

Three things make this agency different from every other one out there. Together, they're a positioning story that's very hard to compete with.

Pick one industry and only serve that industry. Not "B2B companies." One vertical. SaaS startups. Real estate agencies. Recruitment firms. E-commerce brands. Digital marketing agencies.

Here's why this matters: the moment you specialise, everything gets easier. You know the buyer's pain points cold. You know the language they use. You know who the decision maker is and what keeps them up at night. Your emails sound like they were written by someone who actually understands the industry — because they were.

Generalist agencies write emails that could be sent to anyone. That's why they feel like spam. Specialist agencies write emails that feel like they were written specifically for the reader. That's why they convert.

Pick your niche. Own it. Charge a premium for it.

Obviously you cannot do this on the day one though. You work, you figure out which niche is good enough for you, then you pivot and find the best option for you.

Don't charge a retainer. Charge per meeting booked.

Most cold email agencies charge $1,500–$5,000/month regardless of results. The client takes all the risk. You take the money. That model is dying — buyers are tired of paying for effort instead of outcomes.

Flip it. Charge a small setup fee ($500–$1,000 to cover infrastructure, list building, and copy) and then $150–$300 per qualified meeting booked. No meetings, no invoice. Skin in the game on both sides.

This pricing model does two things. It makes you instantly trustworthy — you only win when the client wins. And it filters your clients — only businesses with a real offer and a real product bother working with a performance agency, because they know the meetings have to convert.

The old way: hire copywriters to manually personalise 50 emails a day. Slow, expensive, doesn't scale.

The new way: use AI to research each prospect — their LinkedIn, their recent posts, their company news, their job description — and generate a genuinely personalised first line for every single email. Not "I saw you work at [Company]." Something real. Something that shows you actually looked.

Tools like Clay, combined with GPT-4, can do this for hundreds of prospects a day. The output reads like a human wrote it. The cost is a fraction of manual research. The conversion rates are significantly higher than generic templates.

Your edge isn't the volume. It's that your emails feel personal even at scale.

Month 1 — pick your niche, build your prospect lists, set up email infrastructure (domains, warming, sending tools), write your core sequences.

Month 2 — onboard your first 2-3 clients, run campaigns, iterate on copy based on reply rates.

Month 3 onwards — once you have results to show, charge more, take on more clients, hire a VA to handle list building and research while you focus on strategy and copy.

3 clients. Each paying $500 setup + $200 per meeting. Each campaign books 8 meetings/month. That's:

At 5 clients booking 10 meetings each — $10,000/month. One person operation, working part-time.

AI has changed what's possible in cold outreach dramatically. Personalisation that used to require hours of manual research per prospect now takes seconds. That means a one-person agency can produce output that used to require a team of five.

At the same time, the bar for cold email has risen. Prospects are more sceptical, inboxes are more crowded, and generic blasts are getting filtered out faster than ever. The agencies that haven't adapted are losing clients.

The ones that combine AI personalisation with genuine niche expertise are winning.

The window to build a reputation in a specific niche before it gets crowded is open right now. In two years, every vertical will have three or four dominant cold email agencies.

Your niche choice is everything.

Pick a niche where the average deal size is large enough that one meeting converted to a client is worth thousands to your customer. SaaS, recruiting, professional services, real estate. If your client closes one deal from your leads and it's worth $10,000 to them, paying you $200 per meeting is a no-brainer.

Pick a niche where the deal size is small — $200 products, low-margin services — and the math never works for the client. They'll churn before you prove yourself.

High-ticket niches. That's the filter.

Go Build It

Pick your niche today. Build a list of 50 potential clients in that niche this week. Send your first 10 outreach emails — manually, personally — before you automate anything.

See if people respond. If they do, you have a business.

Go.

One last thing.

I've been thinking about actually running this as a live experiment — picking a niche, using AI tools to run the outreach, and documenting everything over 30 days. The reply rates, the meetings booked, the money made or not made. Full transparency.

But I'm not going to do it unless there's genuine interest.

If you want to watch me test this in real time:

Reply to this email with "do it."

If enough people say yes, I'll run the experiment and report back with everything.

Talk soon, Kris

P.S. — The irony of a cold email agency is that the best way to get your first clients is a really good cold email. So write one. Make it specific, make it about them, make the offer obvious. That email is also your proof of concept.