Cold Email: Daniel (aka the Cold Email Wizard) walks us through his cold email & business ascension

What's going on brother? How are you? What's up man? Glad to be here again. Glad to be here. We were just saying, we did the last one about a month and a half ago, two months ago. How's everything been since then? It's good. Twitter blew up. When we did that first interview, I got a ---- ton of people to come and say, like, hey, I loved your interview with Chase. So people really liked that one, so I'm glad they did. And this one will be cool too. This was actually the very first video that I put on YouTube, that YouTube picked it up. I think it has like three or 4,000 views because every time someone looks now for like how to do cold email, they're picking it up, which is really, really cool. So do you remember about a month and a half ago, two months ago, like where you were at follower wise? And I think you're at 16 to 17,000 now or 14,000. I don't even know. Yeah, so I'm at 16.2 thousand now, but I have to have only been at like 5,000 at that point because like in November I grew like 5,300 or something like that. So yeah, it's compound growth, dude. Like things aren't linear at all. I love it, man. I'm proud of you. You're definitely very deserving. So I know we had a couple of people that wanted to ask questions, but we were talking before. We were having kind of fun just exchanging stories about like the agency and how we built it. So I think we're going to pivot and I'd love to hear kind of your story and what you're working on. Yeah, bro. So let me give you a sense of like the whole ascension of how I got to where I am now. So like the very last week of college, I saw a YouTube video, how to make $10,000 per month with Amazon FBA. And I watched that video. I was like, oh, I'm sold on this. I'm doing that. So I went to the guy's channel and I watched every single video. It took me, I think it must have been like 10 hours of videos. And I watched every single one. And by like day five, I ordered a product from China, from Alibaba. I got it shipped to the United States and it like ended up being a really, really good product. And I made like $7,200 in like two weeks from it going live. I got really, really lucky on that, though. It was really easy to do that. I don't know if you could pull off some bullshit like I did now, like on Amazon FBA. You really got to make a brand. I got really, really lucky, though. And it was that moment where I was like, oh, there's no chance I ever go get a normal job ever again. Because I graduated college a year early. So I told my parents, I was like, yo, I want to like try to make myself online, see if I can like make a business. Because I was always selling ---- as a kid. So they're like, OK, yeah, you can do that. You graduated a year early. And then I hit that. I was like, oh, OK, like I've got what it takes. I ended up losing all that money in other products. And then that year I bought a Tai Lopez social media marketing course. Right. So now I watched that whole course. I did all that. I thought it was a good course. A lot of people talk ---- about Tai. I thought it was a great course. I think all the people talk ---- about Tai just haven't actually purchased a course from him. So, yeah. So I was selling Facebook ads management to medical spas. I tried chiropractors. I tried real estate agents. I had the most success. I got a medical spa. I got a real estate agent. But I just like wasn't very good. Like I knew how to do it, but I wasn't good. You know what I mean by that? And then one day I was at a bar with one of my friends and he showed me this. This these guys who were doing Instagram growth and it had a it was called a legacy marketing. I remember that it was these two dudes that had a ---- ton of clients and their website. It was one hundred dollars a month. There was like one hundred and eighty dollars a month. There was like a 250 a month for like a certain amount of followers. So now I was asking and these dudes are driving like sick ass cars, Range Rovers and Maseratis and ----. I was like, oh, I want to do that. So so I'm trying to figure out, like, how are these guys growing? So I follow them and this is when Instagram had the activity page. And like if you would just go look at the activity, you'd see these guys are just following a ---- ton of people. So I'm like, oh, they're using follow on follow. Right. So now I dive down that hole. Well, how do you do follow on follow? How do you automate that? And I came across two softwares that did it. I don't know. There's some shitty one. And then there's Jarvee. Yeah, probably use Jarvee. So I was like, oh, you can use Jarvee. Then I bought a course on how to use Jarvee from this one guy named Aaron Ward. It was a really good course, showed you how to use Jarvee and everything like that. So. I started offering Instagram growth as a service. And what I did was I made my packages exactly like a legacy marketing. See what I mean? And then the structure of their landing page was like it was like VSL. Testimonials and case studies, packages. So I'm like, well, I need to go get the testimonials if I really want to convert people. So I started doing outreach to a bunch of people, cold emailing like in a shitty way because I didn't know how to do it yet. So I got I think it was like five people, like five free because it wasn't difficult to do. So I got five people, three of them ended up like I stuck with these guys for like three months. Like I wasn't getting paid ---- for three months until I was able to show good results. Like, oh, we took this person from six thousand followers to ten thousand followers. And now that's a case study. It's like, OK, cool. And this is back when follow on fall actually worked like it doesn't work now. So I don't go do it. But back then it did. And it was like it worked so you could grow and it was fine. So now I've got five testimonials on my landing page. So I'm like, OK, I can start actually pushing the real packages now. So I'm sending I'm sending these cold emails. And what I was doing, I didn't know you could scrape email addresses on Jarvi. So I I was personally going through hashtags like fitness coach, fitness coaches, my niche. I only did fitness coaches. I know these a legacy marketing guys would work with anyone like, oh, any influencer. I was like, no, I'm not doing that. I'm niching down. So I niche down to fitness coach. So all five of the people I had were fitness coaches. So I was like, OK, I'm going to do fitness coaches. So I'm collecting fitness coach email addresses and I'm writing them emails. And then I ended up hiring people to get the emails and then. Like. Just screwing around on Jarvi because Jarvi has a million buttons. So I was like playing around in it and then I figured out like, oh, you could just scrape the emails using Jarvi. So I was like, OK, OK, I can just get rid of all these people and just get a ---- ton of email. So that was like that eliminated like two to three hours a day of work. So now all of my time could be spent towards optimizing the email because I wasn't collecting emails. Right. So now I'm testing all these things and I figured, like, let me like put like a compliment in there somehow. Like so I put it in a P.S. line first, like the normal script I was using the P.S. And it would it would not be a personalized compliment. It would be just a. Oh, by the way, you're really killing it on Instagram. I like what you're what you're showing and then like different variations of like generic compliments like that. And that way that marginally increased replies just like a little bit. And then I was figuring, well, let me let me like individually personalize each one to get very, very hyper specific. I get it's going to take me a little bit of time, but let me just see what happens. So I started doing that in the P.S. line and it increased to a very high margin. So I'm like, oh, OK, cool. Like this is the way because if you look at it, I was like, well, it takes this much time expenditure to get it. But it increases in this many conversions. So the dollar amount, it just made more sense to do that. So I'm like doing all these variations. And and then I just I just thought, well, why am I making it the last one? Why would why would I just put it as the first line of the first thing they're going to read? And you know what I mean? So I did that. And that was just another massive increase in conversion. So I'm like, oh, ----. So it's like breakthrough, breakthrough. You can see all these iterations of things you do over time. It just starts to stack and you figure things out. It's like, oh, OK, this is what you do. Everything else is garbage. I'm only doing this. This is when I first started getting like 15, 20 percent responses. I was like, holy ----, I'm renting meetings here. And I was like I was like 21 years old. And I was I think the peak of that was like ten thousand six hundred dollars a month. And at 21 years old, like straight out of college, like that's a ******* lot of money, bro. You're like, oh, my God, like I'm rich. Right. And this is what so. Jarvi like Instagram starts changing their algorithm. It's getting like more and more difficult. Some accounts like get banned, like not fully banned, but like get like a lot of action blocks. And they basically say, hey, we know you're automating this. You need to stop. And then people would start churning because they're getting those messages. So I'm like, oh, this is not good. And then it just got to like a breaking point where it was so much stress where I was like, OK, I'm just done with this. I'm not doing this anymore. I need to go find a more sustainable business. So I shut it down. I was like, I'm not even going to do that anymore. So now I'm like, ****, I was just making ten thousand dollars a month. How do I get back there? But that felt great. And this this is like, oh, this is like Valley of Despair, dude. I'm like, ----, I got to restart this whole thing. It took me like eight months to get there. I was like, it's eight months of work out of the window. So I was like, well, I figured out how to get clients with cold email. I'm pretty good at cold email. Let me just go offer this as a service to other people. So I start doing that using the same exact strategies. And then that makes the cold email business. And then it's ******* cake from there. And then here we are. So I was doing that for about a year and a half of just the cold email business. Like I had commission type deals and then retainer type deals. And like over this time, I'm gradually increasing price. I know a lot of people say like, hey, you start an agency. Don't even bother doing anything less than two thousand a month. And like to me, like that young, like two thousand dollars sounds like a lot of money. I'm like, bro, I'm like scared to even ask someone for that much money. So it takes a really long time, like getting client results and whatnot. And then just becoming better at cold email because it's like, well, now I run this cold email agency. But every client sells to a different niche and every niche is different. So I would **** some of them up. And I'd have to send a refund to them because I couldn't get results. I'm like you quickly learn like, oh, sending to like home service companies, plumbers and contractors like it doesn't work with cold email. Don't don't even bother. Like it doesn't work. It like over time, you find out that like it really, really works best with digitally based businesses. So I'm talking like marketing agencies, e-commerce stores, coaches and consultants like real estate agents and mortgage, mortgage originators or brokers are very good, too, even though that's kind of like a local thing. But like you, this is just I've worked with so many people. And only like very certain categories of them would work. So it takes a long time to like aggregate all that knowledge. And then I just switched it to like, oh, no, I actually only do this for people who sell to digitally based businesses. So real estate, e-commerce coaches and consultants, anything that you can get. I can get like an intuitive sense now. Like if you tell me like, oh, I want to sell this to this target market. I'll know like if it will work with because I've just done so many niches. So now I'm sitting here and I'm like, all right, well, this is cool. Like making like 15, 20 K a month of a cold email agency like that's cool. But you're running an agency. And I'm like, well, if I want to if I want to make like a **** ton of money, then I have to hire a bunch of people and then like build that out. And like now, now, like you start making a lot. You're like, I want some like seven figure exits here. Like, how do I make something that's a seven figure exit? And we'll we'll get that. We'll get to that in a minute. So I'm like, well, what would probably be a good funnel into the course as well for a funnel into the service would be, of course, because like I'd get in the phone with people and they're like, yeah, this sounds really cool and all, but like, I can't afford that. And I'm like, I don't want to work with a service provider. And people would say, like, if you just had like a course on this, like I would buy the course. So I'm like, OK. And then simultaneously, I'm on money Twitter, like seeing people post all these Gumroad screenshots. And I'm like, I want Gumroad. So I was like, well, let me just let me just make this course. I'll price it really cheap, see what people say, make it better over time. So I make the course. I make cold emails. And then. Like, basically just spit out absolutely everything I know for free on the timeline and people start taking notice like, oh, this is actually very useful information. This isn't just a standard hustle money motivation account. Like this dude runs a business and has a system that if you implement, we'll get you results. And he shows you exactly what to do. So that's why people sort of following me very quickly, because like I would pin, I would make so many threads. I pin the threads in my profile. So like that's the first thing they see. Then they go through and like, oh, ----, this is like really, really good knowledge. So now I'm going to stop you right there. I want to interject one point from everything that you've done and kind of what I'm seeing personally, the fact that you were a practitioner first, right? You were doing what you're telling people to do and you're teaching them how to do it right. You have the credibility over here building the agency to multiple five figures a month. And then you're teaching people to do that with me, too. Right. I run an agency that has close to 50 people. Like this past month in Q4, we did close to almost half a million dollars in revenue for the agency. And then I taught a course teaching people how to scale. Right. It's a lot more believable. It's easier to get behind someone like you and me. I've actually done it. So more power to you. I'll let you get back to that. That part to me is really important, the fact that you've done this and then you're giving it away. And then you're selling something for a very, very affordable price that is changing people's game. You really are. I've been reading all the reviews and from the people that you're getting reviews from, they're very legitimate. So you're crushing and I'm so proud of you. Continue. Yeah, well, that's a that's a big point, because a lot of people want to sell a course just because they sell course money. It's like, bro, you can't sell a course if you don't have anything worthwhile teaching in the first place. Like it doesn't just work like that. Like you just sell a course and it doesn't have to be business related. Like you can like let's say you're really good at drawing, like you make a drawing course. Like it has to be something that some kind of skill that you have acquired. You don't just sell a course. And this is the thing with selling a course, too. It's like people are going to pick up on the intricacies with which you say things and very easily identify if you're bullshitting or not. Yes, this this happens all the time. Like I've bought courses. I bought a I've I've spent a ---- ton of money on courses. And it's very, very easy to tell whether someone actually knows what they're talking about or not or if they just wanted to sell. Right. So if you're thinking about selling a course, you don't actually have anything to teach them. Like, good luck. It's not going to happen. I put a tweet about this out the other day. I was like, do what I say in order. Build an agency. Make an info product about what you do in the agency, like the skills you deliver, and then sell a software app that makes the process easier. Do that in order, not simultaneously. You have to do one before the other. It doesn't work if you go out of order. I mean, you could build a software app and then sell a course and like how you built the software app. But you see what I mean? Like you can't sell a course unless you did something to acquire the knowledge with which you are saying, of course, it just doesn't work like that. Right. So now this goes on to course does really well. Right. And about courses, if you're selling a course, here's how you here's how you sell a course. You basically tweet out everything in the course for free and then show them how to do it in the course. Like the tweet tells the course shows like that's that's basically what you do. I love that. Yeah. And then here's the thing with with selling course. The number one thing that pushes the course is testimonials. So you need to increase the speed with which you receive testimonials. So the best way to do that is to make the course better and to answer questions. So like I get questions, but I send it whenever someone buys my course. The next day I send an email and I say, hey, whenever you've written your cold email, send it, send it to me and I will make sure it's good. And then people send me their cold emails and then I make sure they're good and then they ask me questions and I make sure they are on the right track because it decreases the time it takes for them to actually make money. And then they get a testimonial faster and then I can post the testimonial and receive more course by it. You see what you see how this works. Right. It's like you. Yes, you did. They just they need to make money. Like if the objective of your course is. Get clients with cold email. I need you to get a client as quickly as possible. This is a win win here. You make money. I make money like that. That's how it works. Right. So now we go into, OK, like courses are cool, but you can't like sell a course business. That's not that's not a packaged business you can sell to someone. Right. So now I'm thinking, OK, well, how do I how do I make a multiple seven figure exit software, make a software app that the people who bought your course want? It basically makes the processes laid out in the course. This is just the easiest thing. Right. So I'll give you, for instance, in the software app that I'm releasing probably next week, it was supposed to release this week. But I tried to make the bank account with Bank of America and they suck and they had to mail you your login information, which is absolutely stupid. Defeats the purpose of making a bank account. So the software app is for scraping e-commerce brand owners. So if you want to do that now, you have to use built with plus an email finder. So built with three hundred dollars a month, an email finder is one hundred dollars a month. And not only do you have to just buy those, you have to like do this. The system works like you. You grab the domains from built with and then like upload them to an email finder with like a column with with two titles. And then like get the outputs and like check for duplicates and then go back in and put more titles than just to continuously do this over and over. It's a giant pain in the ass. Like if you want to get like a thousand leads, it takes like six hours. Like it's really annoying because like an email finder has to process it. So basically what my SAS does is it combines these two for less money and it's instant. Brilliant. So just to summarize this, the agency is where you learn the knowledge and you get the cash. The course is great cash flow, but it's not a great exit strategy, right? It's making your bank account bigger. You're reinvesting the knowledge and cash into the SAS tool. And the SAS tool basically is serving the need of the two, three, four thousand people that have already purchased your course. That's going to make their life easier. Right. So you're now serving a need that you know people have. That's incredible. And you're charging them less money for it. Right. So it seemed like these other tools, that's a huge friction point. That's a huge barrier to entry. That's not going to allow you to get reviews and feedback as quickly as possible. This also now shortens the window of time for people to actually get the data and actually start sending emails, which then in turn speeds the whole hamster wheel up. Right. Yep. Exactly. Right. So if my SAS is $200 and you get 100 people, that's a $20,000 per month business. Let's say you sell that at like a four year multiple. Right. That's low too. $20,000 times 12 times four. That's $960,000. If you get it to 200 people, that's $40,000 a month. And then you could sell it for $2,000. So you see what I mean here? People buy SAS apps for that much. Right. And now you're selling this course and you continuously get sales of the course over time. And then they have this particular need that your SAS fulfills. It just only makes sense for them to buy the SAS. It just makes sense. Yeah. With all your offerings, you're really building what I call like an ecosystem. Right. You have a product for every single person, whether they're a beginner or someone that's advanced. Right. You're really building this knowledge sharing, this ecosystem, this community. So that's incredible. And you also just launched kind of a monthly thing. So for people that want even more from you, they now have this monthly product. So it's great, man. I love it. Yep. It's the ecosystem, bro. It is. It takes so much time. People are so, so impatient. Everyone wants to be a millionaire. It's like, bro, you need to make $1,000 before you make $5,000. You need to make $5,000 before you make $20,000. It takes so long. People are so impatient. If you just sit down and commit to it, bro, your life changes. You see how long this has taken me? I'm like three years into this, almost three and a half years. Look at me. Right. If you don't know anything online, don't expect to be a millionaire that fast. It just doesn't work. It's not going to happen. This is sick. I knew some of this stuff. I've learned a lot more. I don't know if you've finished, if there's other things you want to add. If there's anything else you want to add or kind of go through, I would love to. If you've finished, dude, this was sick. I appreciate it. Where are you feeling? What are you feeling? Dude, I want to hear your story. Okay. Yes. All right. So my story. So out of college, I went to work for basically an ed tech company. Spent a year there, rushed to scale this platform to hundreds of thousands of college students. And that was really where I found my love of cold email. Basically scraping college directories for student email addresses and sending. At that time, too, I was sending one-off emails. I was sending an email to you, Daniel, and to this person and that person one by one. And when I figured out that this worked and people wanted access to these documents, my engineers were laughing at me. Like, why are you manually scraping it? Why are you manually sending emails? Like, why don't you automate it? I'm like, what do you mean? You could automate this? So these engineers basically were building these custom scripts for me to automatically scrape college directories. And then they were teaching me like, oh, about SMTP servers and all these different types of things to be able to scale email. So that was personally for me where I found the love of email and cold email. From there, I built basically a specific business around inspiring people to discover the world from their inbox. So much like the Hustle or the Skim or Morning Brew, I built basically a newsletter. And our largest channel of acquisition was cold email. We were scraping Instagram primarily for people that posted with hashtag travel, people that would follow things like Nat Geo, or people that would post things like Bali Indonesia. And it's like the skill set that I had at the other business and applied it here. You know, we sent 5 million to 10 million emails. Very different than what you're doing now. I think the way that you're doing it through B2B is a lot better. We did a really weird, strange kind of, I don't know, stars aligned with B2C. High volume, but really high quality touch because we were doing personalization within the subject line. Hey, Daniel, came across your hashtag, you know, Miami photo. Or, hey, Daniel, saw that you also followed Nat Geo, right? So we were leveraging this personalization at scale. Hey, dude, you know, the past 5 of your 120 posts were my personal favorite, right? We have all the info on your profile and we knew your biotech. So we were sending emails that would get 50, 60% open rates and 10 to 15% click-throughs and replies. We must have acquired probably about 150,000 to 200,000 opt-ins through a cold email in a 10-month window. And we then took that base and ran giveaways. We did ambassador programs and all these different types of things to scale it. And then from there, I had a couple of people, I was on a podcast, a couple of people hit me up. Dude, this is so sick what you do consulting for me. So I started doing consulting on top of this newsletter. And the consulting started being a lot of fun and making more money. So I kind of started, you know, an agency through people just wanting to work with me. And as it got to the point that I couldn't do any more work myself, I worked with business partners. I found team members and whatnot. And I still at the time was doing more like kind of growth hacking, for lack of a better word. But in June of 2018, I made the focus of like, hey, I'm going to go from cold email to opt-in email. Let me do traditional e-commerce email marketing. That's kind of what I focus on a specific niche. And from then since now, we merged with another company. So the whole company has like 45 to 50 people. On the email team right now, we have about 30 people. We work with about 50 different clients. And as mentioned, we did about half a million dollars in revenue for the agency, which was our biggest month ever for the month of November. So really long-winded, that's kind of where I was at. And I had a lot of people on Twitter asking for, hey, if you ever taught a course, I would take it. And also my team at the same time wanted some new training. We haven't updated our training in a long time. So I was like, man, it's going to be such an investment of time to do the training for my team, but I have to do it. Imagine if I can make a little bit of cash as well. And that's really kind of the thesis of my course, which, you know, I can't believe I launched it in October and now I've done over 200,000 in revenue, which is just crazy. And you and then Matthew were my inspiration for trying something on Gumroad. I just saw, like, you guys were crushing it and getting the Discover feed, and I wanted to see if I could do it too. So about a week ago, I launched my Gumroad course. It's different than my main course. And I've had, I think this morning I hit over 150 people have bought it so far, like in the first seven or 10 days. So I haven't had the Discover feed or any of those things yet, but you guys were actually the inspiration of me wanting to create a course specific for Gumroad. So long-winded, that's kind of my story. Yeah, that's dope. Gumroad's really cool, dude. The reason why is because of that Gumroad Discovery, and I get a lot of organic Google searches. Interesting. Because I guess Gumroad has such a high domain authority. So, like, people just kind of stumble across it. It's very strange. I get a lot, a lot of sales from recommended by Gumroad. So that means, like, someone bought a course on Gumroad and then says, hey, you might like this too. Interesting. That's why Gumroad's awesome. And a lot of people say, oh, I would never ever send cold traffic to a Gumroad page. But a couple weeks ago, I was running cold traffic to my Gumroad page and converting at 5%, getting a three times ROAS. That sounds sick. It stopped working because I guess I just needed to add more creatives. I only had, like, three creatives. So that's probably why. I just needed to add more. But, like, the retargeting, so maybe you should do this too in yours. Retargeting is getting, like, a 27 times ROAS. So if you're not retargeting, both on your big course and your small course, go do that now. Because I guarantee you're going to get a lot of conversions from that. Like, a lot. So do it. I just actually hired an ad agency that's going to work with me. So I'll have them also do the retargeting for the Gumroad course. I did, thanks to you, add the pixel, but I haven't done anything with it. So I've collected, like, a few thousand people already. So, dude, thank you so much for the time. So for anyone listening to this that isn't already in your ecosystem, where do they start? Do they start with the cold email mastery course? Do they start with the monthly kind of subscription plan? Do they start with the tool? Like, if someone was listening to this and they kind of just found you or they weren't too sure about you, where should someone start? Yeah, so follow me on Twitter. It's BlackHatWizard with two Ds. And, I mean, just get a sense of what I'm tweeting. Like, you can go on the Twitter search bar, do at BlackHatWizard, space, in quotes, thread. And you'll see all my threads. And that's just basically valuable. So just, like, watch what I tweet. If you run a B2B agency where you sell some kind of service to other companies, then, yeah, my course is for acquiring clients if only it's B2B. So I don't teach, like, the B2C kind of stuff. It's B2B only, right? If you want it, then you can get it. And then basically what happens is I get inside and show you all the software apps. So by that time, my SaaS will probably have released. It hasn't been released yet. It'll probably be next week. So 100% follow me on Twitter, though, because that's, like, that's where I'm always at. Yeah, you're crushing. So easy to do. Follow him on Twitter. I'll drop the link. I'll probably post this, like, on YouTube or something. I'll drop the link in the bio. But, Daniel, man, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for the energy. Thank you so much for the story and the knowledge. I really appreciate you, man. I hope you have a great rest of your day. Sure, bro. Thanks.