For about two years, my job was to write emails to strangers and get them to reply.
I did outbound for a personal branding agency, and this is what it looked like at my peak:
(Over the last 2.5 years of doing cold outreach through emails and DMs, I’ve sent well over 15,000 personalized messages, so I’ve learned a fair bit about what actually gets a reply.)
I was an employee, so none of that money was mine.
This thread is about the first week of building something that is.
I’m Tanjay Thakur, I’m 23, and I live in India. I’ve been reading this forum for a few weeks, and this is my first post.
How I got here
I started online when I was 15, writing blogs.
At 19 I got my first job at an SEO agency, and three months later I moved to the agency where I did outbound. I worked there for almost two years, and over that time my outreach helped them grow from about $3,000 a month to $25,000 a month, even though I was still new to outbound when I started and learned most of it along the way.
I wrote cold emails for VCs, coaches and many other niches, and I learned to pick up the voice of whatever market I was pointed at. I also cold emailed C-suite executives at Inc. 500 companies with questions I wanted answered, and several of them wrote back.
Then I joined another agency to do the same job. When I started, they were making about $2,000 a month, and six months later my outreach had helped them grow to around $18,000 a month.
Around that time I got bored, because I realized I had spent the last 2.5 years doing nothing but outreach for other people’s businesses.
Outside of work, I had spent three years learning marketing. I love funnels, ads and offers, and most of what I know comes from the books of Russell Brunson, Sabri Suby and Alen Sultanic, and from studying Agora Publishing.
I had also launched my own digital product and scaled it profitably witn 2X ROAS
I already knew how to get clients, and I had wanted to run ads for a long time, so I decided it was time to start something of my own.
The partner
For the SEO side, I asked my friend to partner with me, because he’s the best SEO I know.
He has spent four years doing SEO and AEO, which means getting businesses to show up on Google and in AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. He has a lot of results, including businesses at the top of Google and businesses ChatGPT names first when people ask for a recommendation.
He still has a full-time job at an agency, and most of his results belong to clients there, so he can’t share them. These are the case studies we can show publicly, from clients outside his job:
Then I quit my job. He plans to quit his once the agency hits a certain number.
Why we started with UAE law firms
I didn’t start with the US, and the reason is money. Clients in India don’t pay much for SEO, and US ads need a bigger budget than I have right now.
There’s also a harder problem. People tend to buy from people who look and sound like them, and I believe an ad with an Indian founder talking to a US business owner starts at a disadvantage.
I know that sounds odd from someone who closed $200K+ over cold email from India. Cold email worked because the reader judged the message first, while with an ad, the person sees my face before they hear a word I say.
The UAE gave us a middle ground, and our strongest shareable case study is that law firm in Abu Dhabi, so that’s where we started.
What we built in week 1
The offer for UAE law firms:
Week 1 numbers
Our goal is $5K a month in recurring revenue within two months.
Where I need your help
Right now we only sell to UAE law firms, but I want to reach the US and other Western markets, and I don’t think I can get there alone with ads.
I think the realistic way in is to work with someone in the West who already has clients, budget and trust in their market.
What I can bring is the funnel, the ads and the outreach, and with my partner, the SEO and AEO work and the client communication behind the scenes, at a price that’s affordable for a US business.
So my questions for anyone who has done this:
TL;DR
The honest answer is that cold email has a longer sales cycle than most people expect, and how well it works depends a lot on the service you’re selling and the niche you’re selling it to.
I learned this the hard way when the agency I worked for expanded into running ads for local jewelry stores in the US. I spent a week learning everything I could about how those businesses run, then sent more than 100 cold emails, each one written for the specific owner reading it, and I got zero replies.
It was a humbling week, because it showed me that a lot of local business owners, many of them in their 40s and 50s, don’t live in their inbox the way a VC or a coach does.
So right now the fastest path for us is to run ads, sign clients and build steady cash flow, then go after white label partnerships. Once the cash flow is consistent, I’ll bring cold outreach back in, since it works best when you can afford to wait for it.
I did outbound for a personal branding agency, and this is what it looked like at my peak:
- About 100 cold emails a day, each one a full email written for the person reading it, instead of a one-line “hey, I saw your post”
- 10 to 15% reply rates in most niches once follow-ups were in place
- More than $200,000 in contract value closed from my outreach
(Over the last 2.5 years of doing cold outreach through emails and DMs, I’ve sent well over 15,000 personalized messages, so I’ve learned a fair bit about what actually gets a reply.)
I was an employee, so none of that money was mine.
This thread is about the first week of building something that is.
I’m Tanjay Thakur, I’m 23, and I live in India. I’ve been reading this forum for a few weeks, and this is my first post.
How I got here
I started online when I was 15, writing blogs.
At 19 I got my first job at an SEO agency, and three months later I moved to the agency where I did outbound. I worked there for almost two years, and over that time my outreach helped them grow from about $3,000 a month to $25,000 a month, even though I was still new to outbound when I started and learned most of it along the way.
I wrote cold emails for VCs, coaches and many other niches, and I learned to pick up the voice of whatever market I was pointed at. I also cold emailed C-suite executives at Inc. 500 companies with questions I wanted answered, and several of them wrote back.
Then I joined another agency to do the same job. When I started, they were making about $2,000 a month, and six months later my outreach had helped them grow to around $18,000 a month.
Around that time I got bored, because I realized I had spent the last 2.5 years doing nothing but outreach for other people’s businesses.
Outside of work, I had spent three years learning marketing. I love funnels, ads and offers, and most of what I know comes from the books of Russell Brunson, Sabri Suby and Alen Sultanic, and from studying Agora Publishing.
I had also launched my own digital product and scaled it profitably witn 2X ROAS
I already knew how to get clients, and I had wanted to run ads for a long time, so I decided it was time to start something of my own.
The partner
For the SEO side, I asked my friend to partner with me, because he’s the best SEO I know.
He has spent four years doing SEO and AEO, which means getting businesses to show up on Google and in AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. He has a lot of results, including businesses at the top of Google and businesses ChatGPT names first when people ask for a recommendation.
He still has a full-time job at an agency, and most of his results belong to clients there, so he can’t share them. These are the case studies we can show publicly, from clients outside his job:
- A law firm in Abu Dhabi went from not ranking at all to top 5 position on Google for 5 keywords and also gets recommended by chatgpt and google ai overview.
- A billiards club in Abu Dhabi got 217 calls from its Google Business Profile in one month
Then I quit my job. He plans to quit his once the agency hits a certain number.
Why we started with UAE law firms
I didn’t start with the US, and the reason is money. Clients in India don’t pay much for SEO, and US ads need a bigger budget than I have right now.
There’s also a harder problem. People tend to buy from people who look and sound like them, and I believe an ad with an Indian founder talking to a US business owner starts at a disadvantage.
I know that sounds odd from someone who closed $200K+ over cold email from India. Cold email worked because the reader judged the message first, while with an ad, the person sees my face before they hear a word I say.
The UAE gave us a middle ground, and our strongest shareable case study is that law firm in Abu Dhabi, so that’s where we started.
What we built in week 1
The offer for UAE law firms:
- The firm picks 5 searches its clients type into Google, in English or Arabic
- We put a deadline in the contract, and if we miss it, the firm stops paying until we hit it, while we keep working
- We work with only one firm per practice area, so their 5 searches never go to a competitor
- Meta ads shown only to people in the UAE (3:2:2 Strategy for meta ads + Alex Hormozi's $100 Goated Ads playbook to build ads + My coywriting experience on the creativve side of ads)
- A landing page with a short video, where they pick their emirate and practice area and tap a WhatsApp button instead of filling out a form (People usually prefer what's app instead of filling a form)
- I reply within 5 minutes, send a personalized video audit of their website, and follow up with a full lead nurture sequence
- Every lead goes into a Google Sheet, and when someone books a call or signs, the sheet sends that back to Meta, so the ads learn from people who buy and not only from people who click
Week 1 numbers
- Ad spend: ₹10,000 (about $115)
- Clients closed: 1, at ($500/m for 8 months $4,000 total)
- In talks: 2
- Money we’ve paid ourselves: ₹0, because everything from the first client goes back into ads
Our goal is $5K a month in recurring revenue within two months.
Where I need your help
Right now we only sell to UAE law firms, but I want to reach the US and other Western markets, and I don’t think I can get there alone with ads.
I think the realistic way in is to work with someone in the West who already has clients, budget and trust in their market.
What I can bring is the funnel, the ads and the outreach, and with my partner, the SEO and AEO work and the client communication behind the scenes, at a price that’s affordable for a US business.
So my questions for anyone who has done this:
- Have you built a setup where an agency in the US or Europe works with a delivery team in another country?
- How did you split the work and the money, and what made it work or fall apart?
- If you’ve used a white label provider, what made you trust them or drop them?
TL;DR
- I’m 23, from India, and my cold outreach closed $200K+ for an agency I worked for
- I quit to start an SEO and AEO agency with a friend who’s still finishing out his job
- Week 1: ₹10,000 (about $115) in Meta ads to UAE law firms brought in one client at $500 a month on an 8-month contract, with two more in talks
- Biggest lesson so far: start with one niche, because one offer, one audience and one case study make everything easier in the beginning
- Next: reaching the US through a partner in the West, and I’d love advice from anyone who has done it
The honest answer is that cold email has a longer sales cycle than most people expect, and how well it works depends a lot on the service you’re selling and the niche you’re selling it to.
I learned this the hard way when the agency I worked for expanded into running ads for local jewelry stores in the US. I spent a week learning everything I could about how those businesses run, then sent more than 100 cold emails, each one written for the specific owner reading it, and I got zero replies.
It was a humbling week, because it showed me that a lot of local business owners, many of them in their 40s and 50s, don’t live in their inbox the way a VC or a coach does.
So right now the fastest path for us is to run ads, sign clients and build steady cash flow, then go after white label partnerships. Once the cash flow is consistent, I’ll bring cold outreach back in, since it works best when you can afford to wait for it.
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