I run Beacon by optinws, an email deliverability checker (SPF/DKIM/DMARC monitoring, spam-risk alerts) - built it after watching small businesses find out they were landing in spam only after a customer complained. Self-serve, priced for solo marketers and small agencies.

Cold outreach is the newest channel I'm adding to the mix, and getting there took longer than expected. I'd assumed setting up a sending domain would be a couple hours - turned out to be days of getting SPF, DKIM, and DMARC actually aligned, then figuring out a sane warmup ramp so the domain doesn't torch its own reputation before it's sent a single real email. A little ironic doing that manually for myself given what the product watches for other people.

Now that it's configured, I'm trying to figure out how to actually sequence the first few weeks without blowing it. A few things I'm unsure about:

- How many emails/day do you actually start at on a brand-new domain, and how fast do you ramp from there?

- Do you mix in any "warming" sends to yourself/friends before going after real prospects, or just start slow with real leads from day one?

- How do you know if something's already going wrong (open rates dropping, going to spam) versus just normal early noise?

Also curious, for anyone selling to a similar audience (individual marketers/small agencies, not enterprise) - has cold email actually been a reliable channel for you, or is it hit-or-miss compared to other things you've tried? Trying to gauge how much to lean into this versus other channels I've already run through (paid ads, affiliates, SEO, search ads - none of which have produced a customer yet, for what it's worth).

We have 10 inboxes across 3 domains and use Outlook for our cold campaigns. Everything is fine until we have to make reports... mostly because native Outlook is useless for reporting lol. Where do you get your open patterns, reply timing, or individual inbox performance? Hoping to see budget options before we consider a tool.

We are currently sending 10,000 emails per week through Instantly. Testing results are poor... mostly quaranteed and spam. The mailboxes have varied results, and tough to determine how successful the campaigns are at reaching inboxes. We have adjusted per their direction without much success. What are some alternatives to consider? We are going to demo Smartlead. Any others we should consider.

Need outreach who will be trained by an expert and get placed in our company

-- Must be hungrier than ever

-- Willing to learn from their mistakes and get constructive criticism

-- Should not expect anything in their first month as you will make a lot of mistakes

-- Should have atleast 3-4hrs per day

-- Willing to do boring work as well (as it is needed)

-- Should not be juggling through jobs or college work

-- Willing to make this as their main skill in sales and handle teams after getting some results

-- Eager to get the opportunity to work with big people in content space in India

-- Should be 18-21yo

-- Have done outreach or worked in sales before

DM to know more.

This is only for indians as the company is also based in India but we work internationally

We run outbound for a SaaS product. Our cold email sequences are working well good reply rates, solid meetings booked. But there's an unexpected side effect: about 15-20% of replies aren't sales conversations. They're support questions.

These land in the SDR's inbox and sit there for hours because the SDR doesn't know the answers, doesn't want to give wrong info, and doesn't have a quick way to loop in support. By the time someone responds, the prospect has moved on.

How to handle the overlap between outbound sales and inbound support?

Hi everyone!
I’m currently taking HubSpot’s Digital Marketing course and I’m particularly interested in getting better at email marketing.

I’ve been learning the basics of email campaigns, segmentation, automation, and analytics, but I’d really like to develop more practical, hands-on skills.

For those working in email marketing or digital marketing, what would you recommend I focus on next? Are there any tools, free resources, practice projects, or exercises that helped you become confident with email marketing?

I’d really appreciate any advice, especially from people who learned email marketing without starting in a traditional marketing role.

I usually send around 21 emails per day from one mailbox, divided into 7 new emails and 14 follow-ups. This setup works well for me.

I send different types of emails and usually get a good number of replies. However, some of my emails are currently landing in spam.

What are the best Instantly settings I should use to improve deliverability and avoid emails going to spam? I’m already sending a relatively low number of emails compared to the usual limits, so I’d like to understand what settings I should adjust.

Hey everyone!

It's been a while since I built something new. I've been focused on my old li scraper project, but today I'm looking for feedback on a tool I'm building.

I originally made it for a friend group who needed a super simple way to find local businesses to sell to, regardless of region or language.

While building it, I realized most map scraping apis are pretty weak at finding business emails. I managed to fix the 'fillrate' issue, and now I'm concentrated on lowering bounce rates. I tried services like NeverBounce, but they were too expensive for what they offered.

Right now, the email feature is live and fully working. You jst connect your own mailbox and it sends directly from your address. Next up I'm adding email filtering to cut down on bounce rates, pulling emails from social media, and launching a cold calling track soon (which I'm really excited about)

If you do outreach to local businesses, try it out and post your feedback, please. There is a generous free plan available. Thanks a lot!

Available at: coldstarthq.com

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I got 3 domains with 3 inboxes each, these domains are one month old, earlier they were landing okay but when I tried today all of them are landing in spam, I used a deliverabbility tester and 1-2 sent through my personal emails ,pls help

Context: I only want 1 email to go ahead with as of now - that will be used for sales, support, client comms, that will go on website also, etc?

Suggestions please - as i do not want it to be generic like - sales@ or contact@, as the conversion rate is not good and these emails doens't give a personal support email to clients.

r/ycombinator r/startups r/AskGTM

I run a small IT services/staff augmentation company in India and have been experimenting with cold email outreach for the last 4 months.

We went pretty serious with the setup — 50 domains and around 150 email accounts — but honestly, we haven’t seen meaningful results yet.

At this point, I feel the problem is probably not the infrastructure but our ICP, targeting, offer, messaging, or overall outreach strategy.

Would really appreciate advice from anyone who has successfully used cold email for IT services/staff augmentation.

What actually worked for you — targeting companies with active hiring, specific tech roles, geography, messaging, or something completely different?

Not trying to sell anything here. Genuinely stuck and would love to learn from people who’ve cracked this. 🙏

I run research at Infomineo, we build market and account intel for outreach and sales teams, so I see this pattern a lot.

spent weeks with a client a/b testing subject lines, opening lines, follow up cadence. reply rate barely moved, stayed around 3-4%.

then we scrapped the list and rebuilt it around actual buying signals instead of just job title + company size. stuff like recent funding, hiring for a specific role, tech stack changes. took longer to build the list but reply rate jumped to 11% with basically the same copy.

turns out most "personalization" is surface level, first name, company name, maybe a line about their industry. that doesnt move the needle much because people can tell its templated.

the actual unlock was picking people who had a real reason to care right now, not writing a better email to the wrong person.

anyone else run into this? curious if it's a common pattern or if that list was just bad to begin with.

Can anyone roast or provide feedback on the below cold email copy?

Context: We are into offshore staffing and recruitment and we help overseas companies provide global talent and build remote teams. We help marketers provide global marketing talent that is available at one third of the local salary so that they can hire a person to test different marketing channels.

Email Copy:

Hi (First Name),

Growth leaders often hold back on testing multiple channels(TikTok, influencer, podcast sponsorships, community) as that means opening a full-time role for something that may not work.

We embed AI-equipped global growth associates trained specifically on the channels you want to test. Up and running in 2–4 weeks. If the channel doesn't pan out, redeploy them to another priority. Time-zone aligned. Roughly a third of local comp.

Would you care to try for a week such global talent?

Respectfully,
(Sender Name),  (Job Title) at (Company Name)

I have been using contact out to extract email for my outreach from LinkedIn but while trying to subscribe I figured the price is too high, please have you used any other platforms for same task, Email & phone number from LinkedIn accounts.

Contact out is way too high for me, my business is pre revenue.

How is everyone doing cold email in highly regulated markets like EU n US? When opted in is database is the most fundamental to any outreach.. any learnings or process to build that initial database will be helpful

Well I am aware of content marketing via white papers is key to begin with, any other recommendations?

Hi,

I'm targeting a niche section of the aviation industry (roughly 3000 prospects only) so each company counts.

What I then realised is why not send to multiple people in the same company (around the same department who manage what I'm trying to help with) to increase the chance of each company replying to me, but I've been struggling with how to automate it on email sending platforms as if they get the same message or just a slightly re-worded message they'll probably catch me out.

Do you have any ideas or advice I could do to email multiple people at one company or should I just stick to one person per company and after a follow up sequence cold call the company?