A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:26:15 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:26:15] S1: That was a key thing like he you know, that that was one of my takeaways was like, if you're gonna do cold email, you can't have like 10,000 customers because you're gonna you're gonna blow through that, need millions. [00:26:25] S0: Yeah. That's precisely right. And you have to you have to be thoughtful about your aliases and warming and domains and rotating things and and kinda infra. A mistake that I made in that QA company is like, never trust the floor and the ceiling in these larger tools. Like Apollo is a big tool that people use, myself included, to like fetch emails into outbound. Apollo told me, yeah, just do 50 a day, burn my main.com domain. I ran roughly 15 to 20 emails per alias, no more than two aliases per domain, and like vigilantly watching all of this every day. [00:27:03] S1: What would you say, like, to somebody that's thinking of doing this? Let's say they they've got a horizontal market. They've got enough market size that they could do cold outbound, and you're you're kinda telling them, like, some of the big learnings or maybe even for yourself. If you were to start over your cold email campaign knowing what you know, what would you do different? Like, there's the technical piece, know, use Apollo, use Lemlist, warm it up. Okay. I think people either whether they do it right or not, like, they know that high level, but what are some of the the learnings? I don't know if the copy matter, the number of of follow ups, the personalization, like, wherever you've learned something, what what are what are some top things that come to mind?
00:27:35 · George
[00:27:35] S0: Yep. I'm making like a list so that I don't ramble because in my head, it's like it's like a big Rubik's cube. So what are the inputs? Okay. I made a list of four things. So we have a circle piece, we have copy, we have email strength, I'll come back to this, and then we have experiments. So technical piece I'm not gonna go into, but there's a bunch of solutions you could use. Let me know if this is helpful. Copy on subject, I think not a rocket science insight. I think that it's one of those things where like everyone says the same thing is probably true. So more personalized, the better. Subject lines, I try to do things like dash dash or no subject, or yeah, I would also do Pablo and George, but I'll also just do like random subject lines to try to get to open because it's an equation. Like if they kept open, it doesn't really matter how good my copy is. And then for copy, plain text, no links, no images, doing things like send from iPhone, lowercase. They cannot know that it is AI or spam, especially today, like there's so much email. There's like 50 guys that are smarter than me that are doing outbound. So the more plain text average copy it is the better. As far as sequence length, I've tried everything. I've tried like, I was inspired by a ramp in many ways. I've tried like nine step sequences and I've tried three step sequences. I haven't really found a huge delta between them, but whatever the sequence is, just keep it as if it's like a casual email assigned to someone else. Email strength is important, so like it's not necessarily part of the tooling, but you have to make sure that you're outbound into the right aliases and whatever source you're buying them from. Just because you got a bunch of emails from Paul, it doesn't mean they're real, and you can actually burn your domains or have bad examples. And then the experiments need to be not complacent. So what I think I did wrong in the beginning is I like spent a weekend obsessively build all this stuff and I loaded it and then didn't get a result. And then I just kinda like said, yeah, this is broken. But I think a better version is to like keep trying.
00:29:33 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:29:33] S1: Like, that's kinda my take is the copy is, like, you know, because you got you see these things on LinkedIn and it's like, oh, look at this, like, insane rage bait stuff. I everyone was like, you know, like, just anything for them to click on it and and, know, go it might go viral on LinkedIn. I don't think it gets it it gets results. What my learning seems to be, like, frankly, pretty simple. You try some few things in the subject line, but it's not, you know, rocket science stuff. Like you said, you know, find a way to make the thing just personalized enough that it's made that person at least somewhat thinks, did they write this to me? Like, that that's it. That's good enough sort of thing. And then volume. I mean, it just feels like it's volume, you know? [00:30:06] S0: I was in all the Slack channels trying to like absorb any sort of alpha Discord groups, trying to learn. I'm seeing all these crazy campaigns. Oh my god. Like 5% response rate. I feel super dumb. I don't know if these are real and if they are like good for them. I think it's volume. And then you didn't ask, but one thing that did not do and I'm still not doing, but I have a lot of sources that say this is like a killer way to do it. Like I should probably be doing this now is LinkedIn. People are showing founders that I respect are sharing how LinkedIn is working better than email, they're leaving voice notes on LinkedIn, they're sending photos on LinkedIn. [00:30:41] S1: This is cold outbound through LinkedIn.
00:30:41 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:30:41] S1: This is cold outbound through LinkedIn. [00:30:44] S0: Cold outbound LinkedIn. I wish I did it last year, we're still not really doing it, but that's a miss and not BS sources tell me it works. [00:30:53] S1: How fast did you hit like a million ARR? [00:30:55] S0: You know, Recubus started selling last fall and we hit a million in roughly, I don't know, six months. [00:31:02] S1: Let's walk into some of the kind of more tactical areas that we're gonna go kind of deeper on. The first one, everybody's talking about being AI native, being an agentic company. Obviously, creating agents, selling agents. But you told me that you're designing your company for agents, which to be honest sounds amazing, but I don't really know, like, what that means. Tell me more about that.
00:31:22 · George, Pablo Srugo
[00:31:22] S0: More disclaimers only because I really feel like I'm figuring this out as I'm doing this. I don't wanna come off as someone that, like, figured this out. You know, we're not Ligora, we're not Harvey. A few things that we're trying or like that we believe in. Number one, write a lot. Write a lot and write cleanly. One of our values is clarity. I like to call it ambient signaling. You write in Slack cleanly and precisely in a way that if I write something, you can immediately act on it. And it has all the context. This is something that took from my last company and it was good during pandemic when people were remote and now it's like incredible for agents. So the more context there is and reasoning for the decisions, the better. It's also just polite to the rest of the team. Like why have a 10 step Slack thread if you can just act? If you just spent like five seconds more writing the message to Pablo, maybe I would act faster. So good written culture and no product managers. I was always bearish from the role and now more so. I don't think you need a conduit of information anymore. And I think engineers should work with customers. And yeah, if someone has good design standards, just code. [00:32:25] S1: On the writing side, do you use like WhisperFlow or something like that to just like get get the stuff out? Does that help or hinder?
00:32:25 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:32:25] S1: On the writing side, do you use like WhisperFlow or something like that to just like get get the stuff out? Does that help or hinder? [00:32:31] S0: Whisper. People only use Whisper, use Whisper. If not, just like Crite and Slack as much as possible in in the open. Pretty much outside of like deeply personal issues, every single DM that my co founder and I get, we like politely ask and turn around to share this in the open with team. And I track as a Slack admin, I don't have a way to see detailed stats, but I see like macro things and I track how many DMs versus how much is in the open, and I want the open to be like a much higher ratio than DMs. [00:33:02] S1: Are you remote by the way or are you guys in person? In person. And even still, you use Slack that much? [00:33:07] S0: Yes. We're in person. We're in no meetings. We do three meetings a week all on Monday, and then there's zero meetings, which is work. We don't even do stand ups. We do all hands every morning, 9AM. We discuss everything, like what I see in the market, customers, what we're gonna build, what we're gonna sell, etcetera. All hands, customer meeting, sales meeting. Three meetings, and then just like flow state. [00:33:29] S1: How how long is each meeting? [00:33:30] S0: Half an hour.