He has cold outbound data on 40 million startups. Here's what works. | Daniel Saks, Co-Founder of Landbase and AppDirect

Precision outbound is winning the cold email war

Cold outbound has split into volume and precision, and only precision still works. Spam filters now weigh the credibility of the sending domain rather than whether AI wrote the message, so sellers need a full map of their market and humans on the accounts that will not close on autopilot. Saks built Landbase to hand AI agents that data, and built AppDirect on the lesson that one beachhead customer, worked hard and evangelised, brings the adjacent ones.

Takeaways

• Precision outbound is beating volume. Spam filters now sort messages by the credibility of the sending domain rather than by whether AI wrote them. After a year of AI slop, the sellers getting through are the methodical ones, and Landbase claims a 4-7x uplift in outbound efficacy.
• Product-market fit feels like magnetic momentum. Win one beachhead customer, evangelise that case study, and adjacent customers come to you. AppDirect's Bell Canada launch drew nobody, yet AT&T and Comcast reached out because of it. Honeywell played the same role for IoT.
• Landbase gives agents context on 40m businesses. Saks started Landbase in 2023 with Wa Gao, a Stanford machine-learning PhD who had co-founded EverString. It runs native inside Claude Code and Codex, giving agents 400m business profiles with 1,500 fields each.
• AppDirect became the everything store for B2B. It lets telecoms resell SaaS to their own customers by training the telcos' human sellers rather than buying billboards. It owns PartnerStack and FirstBase, works with 10,000 agents and resellers, and generates upwards of $10bn in gross merchandise value.
• Never scale outbound on a weak value proposition. Saks says the first message and target will probably be wrong, so experiment at low volume until you feel pull. Scaling a weak value proposition or spraying early burns domains that are hard to recover. He treats outbound like product-market fit, never solved.

The outbound playbook

1. Build a map of the whole market. AppDirect once hired Grant Thornton and paid a few hundred thousand dollars for a TAM map. Saks says Claude with Landbase can now produce it.
2. Score and tier the accounts. Saks personally handles about 100 top accounts, his team takes the middle tier, and the rest runs on autopilot through AI SDR outreach.
3. Cap sequences around three. Three sequences capture 90% of the value, and a fifth adds perhaps 10% while risking spam flags. Email response runs about 2% on a good list and 8-10% on a tight one.
4. Put humans on the top of the list. Calling is the best channel today, but only around 10% of SDRs have the DNA for it. Phone connect rates run 2% typical and 8-10% with the right list.