Nick (00:00): Hey guys, welcome back to the Nine-Five Podcast. I am back from the week-long break. There was no new episode last week, but we are back again with episode number 10. I took a little break for the holiday weekend here in the US and my wife and I, we went over to Maine for the extended weekend and we actually celebrated our two year wedding anniversary. And let me tell you guys, if you like seafood and more specifically lobster, you have to check it out. The food there is amazing. Anyway, this week we have a really interesting episode this week. I'm interviewing Daniel who runs a lead gen agency, and he does it through cold email outreach. That's right. He builds real leads by finding potential clients and simply reaching out to them through cold emails. And he does this through a well thought out system that makes it work and he is sharing that system with us today.

Nick (00:57): Now I want to give you a little bit of a heads up. I had some technical difficulties with my microphone, so the audio quality on my end did not turn out as I had hoped. I'm actually really upset about that because I'm usually really careful about double and triple checking my equipment before starting and nonetheless I goofed. So the audio, my end is not the best, but the episode and the information in this episode is so great. I didn't want to scrap the episode and I didn't want to risk losing some of the awesome information we discussed by going and trying to rerecord it. So I'm just putting it out there. I want to apologize in advance for the audio quality on my end, but the information is pretty awesome. So with that out of the way, let's get right into this interview with Daniel.

Nick (01:46): This is the Nine-Five Podcast, and I'm your host Nick Nalbach, where we get into the minds of entrepreneurs and people just like you. So you can start, build, and grow your own online business.

Nick (02:03): Alright, welcome to the Nine-Five Podcast. I am sitting here with Daniel, who we just met on Twitter probably a few days ago. I think I've seen your content out a little bit on Twitter, but really we just started talking a few days ago. So welcome to the show, Daniel.

Daniel (02:19): Thanks man. Glad to be here.

Nick (02:20): So we're here talking about cold emails and this is a, this is an interesting topic for me because I've dabbled with it in terms of like SEO and like SEO outreach, but I've not had a whole lot of success. So I'm really excited to kind of talk to you about how you are getting leads and basically running a business off of cold emails.

Daniel (02:45): A hundred percent. So let me, let me take you through my story here to tell you why I do this. So in August, 2018, I bought a Tai Lopez, social media marketing course. And I was like, okay, yeah, let me make it easy, like really hype. And now I'm thinking to myself, okay, how do I get clients? Right. So I go

Daniel (03:00): Through like the whole process where I'm like, okay, let me just send a bunch of cold emails for free, right. And just like being a spammer, just like that garbage. And you quickly find that, like, you're just being annoying. Like you really are like, if you have, so if you're spamming cold emails are gonna get like, stop emailing me. If you ever talk to me again, I'm going to report you to the FTC. And like, that doesn't feel good. That feels like dirty. So you go through this transition and you kind of make this, this change, right. And I'm going to tell you what it is and it's, it's instantaneously 10ss your responses. So let me do, let me make a distinction here. So like, if you go into your mailbox, you take out all the mail, you've got a bunch of, a bunch of content that has obviously ads.

Daniel (03:45): And then you've got a personal handwritten note with your name and address on it. Now you're going to throw out all the ads and what are you going to do with the handwritten note? Yeah, you're going to open that because it's like, Oh, this was specifically directed towards me. And this is exactly what I do with cold email. Right? So it's like, if you want to, if you want to instantly 10x the responses from a cold email, you better make sure the first line of that cold email is so obviously to them specifically. Right. So, Hey, first name, just listen to that podcast episode you made with So and so. I really liked that one point you said about this, right? So now at this point, the prospect sees that and they're like, Oh, okay. This was to me. Right. So it just changes the game straight up. And I know what a lot of people are thinking now. It's always, isn't that going to take a long time? Like personalizing every single one, but let me, let me help you out of here. The degree to which personalizing your cold emails increases conversions is astronomically higher compared to the incremental effort it takes to personalize it in the first place. It is absolutely insane.

Nick (04:54): So are you, are you going out and hand taken out every single one or do you typically run with a template and kind of pop in certain personalized aspects to the email? Or are you, is every email like original, fresh brand new just for that person?

Daniel (05:10): So, so I've, I've developed a system behind this, right? So I run an agency that sells cold emails for other people. And what you do is as follows, right? So say you're going to go scrape your leads, right? Do you have like a bunch of leads? And here's another thing to note, only pitch people you want to work with in the first place. Right? So if it's like, if your ideal client is like, like a specialized medical clinic who has above 10 employees, then make sure all of those leads are the owners of specialized medical clinics with at least 10 employees, right? It's not just, Oh, this guy's specialized. Dr. Ben, let me email every single specialized doctor, because then you're getting replies from people who are just garbage. Right? You don't want that. So make sure you actually liked these people in the first place.

Daniel (05:57): Right. And then second of all, here's what you're going to do. So you've got a Google sheet. And so you've got you scrape your leads. So you've got a first name, email, position through LinkedIn URL. And then you're gonna make a second column. It's going to say personalized line. That's the title of the column right there. And then what I do is I have a freelancer go in and click on their LinkedIn. I tell them, Hey, go click on their LinkedIn, go like, read their about section, go read the articles. They posted, search their name on Google. Find something, a concrete thing that you can compliment these people on, and then write that inside of the personalized line column. So now what you're going to do is you're going to take it. You're going to download this as a CSV, and then you just put it into your sending tool.

Daniel (06:38): You can use the Lem List or Mailshake and it's Hey, name, merge, field, personalized line merge field. And then you write the rest of your email, but put your pitch in there. And another distinction that's super, super important. Important to me is you're not selling your service on a cold email. Like I know a lot of people will, they're going to go, Hey, we do this and we do this and we do this. And here's why our company is so great. Nobody cares about why your company is so great. You better make it very short, the email, right? It's given, give them what I like to call one sentence case study. It's like, Hey, first name, personalized line. Just recently we helped a medical, a specialized medical chain clinic, just like yours. I get specific result within specific time period. I'd love to see if we can do something similar for you.

Daniel (07:28): Do you have time this or next week for a quick call? It's so simple, right? And if you're sending to direct owner email addresses and you put, and you put like inside the subject line, it's like, quick question for name. It's like, you're going to get like a 70% dude. And when, and when you're, when you put that personalized first line in there, your reply rates should be like 15% above. You should be able to get like 5% of people on the, which is like really insane if you're selling like $3,000 per month services. Cause it's like, well, how many of those are you going to close? Let's just say minimum 25%. So you got a hundred emails, five on the phone, like you just made $3,000 from a hundred emails.

Nick (08:11): Sounds real simple. I mean, I like what you were saying about keeping the emails short and sweet. So you're basically trying to, I guess, peak their interest enough to reply to you. And then that cold lead starts to become a warmer lead. And then you can start kind of building up to the sale, cold, warm, hot, however, do you typically, when you do those, so you get the response back, you kind of have a back and forth with them like that, or do you get the response and you like set up a call or how does that process kind of work?

Daniel (08:42): So about 70% of the positive responses you're going to get are going to say, Hey, yeah. When, when does, when next week does, uh, when next week is a good time for you and then the other 30% of positive responses are gonna be, um, could you send me some information in which case you're going to send like probably some kind of like PDF case study or like, here's what we did for this person. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And they might reply. They might not. Right, but it's, it's just show them what you do. Right. And your objective, you're selling a phone call, right? You're not, here's, you're not saying your whole process. So of course we do this, then this, and then they don't really care about that. They care about, okay. So here's, you, you, you try to exemplify to them. I work with people exactly.

Daniel (09:22): Like you and I got, I know what I'm talking about.

Nick (09:25): So I guess first off, let's back up a little bit here for your specific business. You help people get those leads. So do you help kind of craft those emails or do you help find the leads or what, I guess, how are you involved in that side of things?

Daniel (09:38): Yeah. So let me give you, let me give you an example of just like a, like a breakdown, say, have a client, right. And they're in there, I'm onboarding them and like, and it will be, just show you my whole process. Right? So, so let's say I've got a client who sells email marketing to eCommerce brands. He says, I want to get on the phone with more brand million dollar brands. And I want to sell them a $3,000 per month service. I want to manage their email list.

Daniel (09:59): Like, okay, well, that's, that's really good. So what I like to do in this particular situation is I'm trying to figure out, okay, well, what kind of brand is going to need email marketing, or it's probably going to be a brand that has Clavio installed. You know what Clavio is? What Clavio is, is it's like a, it's a high end email marketing service. That's a Shopify app, right? So what I'll do is I'll use this tool called BuiltWith and I'll tell BuiltWith, I'll say, Hey, find me every single store that has Shopify installed. And then further filter that by all of the Shopify stores that have Clavio also installed. So now I've got this giant list of domains, like 120,000 long. So now my objective is okay, how do I get the owner contact information of those domains? Here's what you do when you're going to take all of those domains.

Daniel (10:53): And I would like to use a software called Any Mail Finder. You tell Any Mail Finder, you're going to say, here's the company domain. Find me the email address of the person with this title. And I'll put founder or owner right. Pulling down. And it's going to spit out back another list. It's going to say, okay, here's the name of the person, Here's their email, here's their job position. Here's their LinkedIn URL. Here's their website. And it's like, okay, bam. Now I got all the direct owner contact for all those people. So now I've got the perfect list of ideal clients for my clients. So what do I have to do? I have to write those personalized lines down, right? So you're going to do this for yourself. You can just write the first lines yourself, right? You don't have to hire a freelancer, but personally I have a team of people who go and write the personalized first lines for me.

Daniel (11:37): So I give that to the freelancer and say, Hey, here you go, man, go, go take this. Write the first lines. Right? So they write all the first lines and bam, now I've got my list ready to go. Right? So what I'm going to do is I have to do two things here. Now I have to make sure that the emails are getting opened and I have make sure they're actually getting meetings from the emails, right? So first things first, I'm going to use the same body message and 4 batches of 20, and each one's going to have a different subject line. What I'm trying to test here is which subject line gets the highest opens, right? With everyone gets the highest opens. That's the one I'm using now for every single other campaign. Right? So now I'm like the targets and trying to hit are 70% opens and 15% reply rates.

Daniel (12:19): So now that I've found a good subject line, I want to start testing the angle inside of the body of the email. So it's Hey, name, personalized line, and then your angle. Like what, what exactly are you saying? Right. Normally it's just a one sentence case study that seems to work almost every time, but there might be a different component of the case study. You want to say? So it's like, say you do like advertising, like you're an advertising firm. Like you might, you might want to talk about, you want to test your angle, talk about split test at different case studies, split test the different components of a case study. Like maybe you maybe talk about how much money you made or talk about how much you spent on ads or talk about the fact that you've made different ads. Like what exactly, like one component within the case study, do you talk about? And it's basically just infinite variations until you get 15% responses. So now you've got the subject line and you've got the angle corrected and now it's just piling that on continuously over and over and over again. So if you want, it's awesome because it's an, a gauge now. So it's like, okay, so you've optimized this properly. If you want more meetings, just increase the gauge. Just send more emails with that. Perfect. That perfect flow.

Nick (13:28): So do you, you said you sat in typically four batches of 20 testing off the different emails. Do you do the same thing when you get into the, I guess the body of the email, is it a similar cadence there?

Daniel (13:40): Yeah. Normally I like to do it a little bit higher, like batches of 60 or 70 or 80, just cause you really want some more data. And even then like 60, 70, 80, isn't like statistically significant. Right? But, I mean it's, it's high enough to get like a general feel, right?

Nick (13:57): Yeah. Especially when you're working with hundreds, maybe thousands of emails. I mean, you get a pretty good idea there. That's very good for anybody getting into email marketing in general, start practicing the split testing and testing out different subject lines or different content in most of the emails. It's just good practice.

Daniel (14:13): Yeah. This is something really important to touch on. So say like if you're trying to sell like $2000, $3000, $10,000 per month services, like the only people that can afford that or people who are otherwise busy in the first place. Right. So you cannot afford to send an unpersonalized spammy email because you're going to run out of leads so fast. There might be like 3000 people, probably less who are qualified in the first place. Right? So it's like, you're, you're a lifetime pool of leads. Let's just say it's 3000. It's like you could mass spam a message, but all 3000 in a day. And like maybe you'll get one or two calls, but it's dude, you just, now you have no more leads good luck.

Nick (14:53): Right.

Daniel (14:54): So it's like your best bet is to personalize the email. So perfect. Just to like put in the effort to increase that to like 4% or 5%, if you got 4% 0.04 times, 3000, that's 120 people on the phone. And if you're selling, let's say you close 25% of those, 120 30 closes. And if it's $3,000 per month, you just got yourself $90,000 of recurring income. So it's like, dude, you have no choice. But to send emails in a non spammy way, like it's the only way

Nick (15:31): I think that's terrific. I mean, there's, everyone tries to find the shortcut. I mean, you have a lot of tools that help make that possible. And I'll probably dive into those a little bit with here in a few minutes, but I mean, ultimately yeah, you're going to have to put the work in and that's where that personalization is so big. Everyone wants to, I guess kind of skip that step because that's the hardest part it's going to take the most time. You're gonna have to sit down and do it. Or if you can hire a VA or someone else to kind of do the digging for you. But I mean, that's going to be your, your bread and butter, the most important part of the step. You have to take the time with that step.

Daniel (16:05): I mean, just, just the other day, some dude who builds websites with Web Flow, he was just telling me, he's like, Hey man, I did what you said. And I sent 50 emails and I got three people on the phone and I closed all of them and I made $15,000 and I was like, Oh my God, that is absolutely insane. It's just, it's honestly so easy. Cause like you might, you might be thinking, Oh, it's so hard to personalize, but dude, you're going to have a much harder time in the lon grun, not personalizing the email compared to if you just did it, like it's it's so it's stupid. Like it's, it's, it's, there's not a lot of cheat codes on earth. There's there's pretty much a cheat code. And the reason why is because nobody does this, right? So it's like just. You were saying, Oh, everyone wants to automate everything. Yes. The reason why this works is because everybody wants to automate everything. You cannot do this. You just don't do that. The degree to which you make money is out of this world, like it's non negotiable. You, this is the only way to say

Nick (17:13): If you're new and what other peoples aren't, if you're doing what other people aren't willing to do, you're going to be the ones succeeding.

Daniel (17:18): Yeah. And this is like you said, this is not a get quick kind of thing. So it's like, don't use this information to sell garbage. Right. So if it's like, if there's something like a $3,000 per month service, you better be able to deliver that service. Right. And this is just the lead generation mechanism. Right? Cause like, what is this like 20% of the equation here. It's like, you better get a client, do an amazing job for them. Get them on a video interview, talking about the results and have that on a landing page right now. This is stuff it's right. You're trying to grow a longterm business here. Right?

Nick (17:53): I mean, yeah. Once, once you get the lead is yeah, like you said, the first 20% you have to deliver their product tests still be spectacular. So you can't skip out on that part and you can't skimp out on the actual cold email outreach. And really, I guess what bugs me about some of the stuff I see on Twitter is it's like everyone is so instant. I mean, there's a lot in the space that, I mean grind, but everyone's looking for that instant win. Like, Oh, here's, here's another sale. Here's another click, here's another sale. And that's, it kind of bugs me about social media in that sense, because everyone's fishing for that. And that's where they kind of live in that realm. I've been personally going very hard that email marketing, preaching, email marketing is that no one's taking that their group off of social media and let's try and do venture outside of the social media realm.

Nick (18:44): And I think what you're doing is awesome because you you're living off social media in a marketing, digital marketing realm that everyone thinks is dead. The cold email thing. I mean, I think I saw some content that you were posting a while back. And I was, I was very curious how all that worked, because like I said, I was doing cold outreach with SEO and I kind of use a similar concept. Mine wasn't quite as personalized, but I had used a bunch of mail mergers. I used the Yet Another Mail Merge, YAMM with Gmail integrates with Gmail. So I'll do the same kind of thing, kind to trying to personalize to get backlinks there. I was doing that at a much bigger scale. Okay. Personalize a few different merge fields and kind of make the email seem more personalized. But when you send out 300 emails and you get maybe two or three people that are at all interested in working with you, the other either tell you to get bent, they just don't reply.

Daniel (19:40): Yup, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, like you were just touching on like the, like the quick hit dopamines of social media. Like if you're on Money Twitter is what we like to call it. If you're a money Twitter, you're seeing like people are posting Gumroad screenshots and like selling stolen how to get followers on Twitter and have courses in bullshit like that. It's like, I just made it the red the other day. And I was talking about, I basically said, I was like, Oh, so you want to build a marketing agency, but you know, absolutely nothing. Here's what you do. Right. And I basically go in and I say, don't expect this to be a, get rich quick kind of thing. Yeah. You see these $3,00-5,000 Stripe deposits. What, what these, you don't see behind these guys are like the 9 to 12 months, months they spent building this business.

Daniel (20:30): It's like, dude, not a single person on earth is going to give you $3,000. If you don't promise them a quantifiable result within a quantifiable time period with a guarantee and show them that you did it before. Not a single person is going to do that. So what I basically say is, Oh, what if you, what if you don't have a case study? What if you've done? Absolutely not. Well, here's what you're going to do. You're going to go on YouTube. So you want to learn SEO. You're going to go on YouTube and you're going to watch every single video on how to do SEO. It's going to take you like 35 hours, like a long time. And now that you're a semi expert, you're going to go do it for free for a client for another three to six months because SEO has a long time period.

Daniel (21:17): Right? And then you're going to blow that client out of the water, at how happy he is with the results. You're going to get on a video interview with him, put it on a landing page. And then you're going to do your cold outreach with the one sentence case study, bam, four months. Are you prepared to make that sacrifice? Because that's what it takes. You can't skip that. Right? Everyone, a lot of people say, Oh, don't work fo less than $$2000 or 3000 a month, it's like, dude, you can't just charge $2000 or $3000 a month for the fuck of it. You gotta be able to justify that price. Like, okay, you charge $3,000, $4,000 a month. Well does your client make four times that?

Nick (21:57): On, back in episode two, I had Tyler Nalbach on and we actually were talking SEO. Cause that's how he gets a lot of his clients is through cold email outreach. And a lot of the success that he has is from that wow factor right up front. So he will reach out to them. And I mean, he'll, he'll probably really like this episode because that's the basis of how he gets his leads. He'll basically come up front and give them a video and it'll outline what their, what he can do. The services kind of break down where that company is at and then send this video off to them. And that usually just blows them away out of the gate. And then they're emailing them back. When can we set up a call? When can we look at this? Once we look at that, but it's that instant like, wow, it takes time to upfront to do that. But it's the wow factor that brings people in. And if you can do that, you're going to have a lot better chance of actually closing those leads in those sales.

Daniel (22:51): Yeah. A hundred percent I think that's, I think it's a pretty good strategy deal. The only bad thing about that is that if you're, if you're sending look up like a whole ton of Loon, video audit straight up, you're gonna have an issue with bouncing. Like if you sent like 50 of those in a day, but it's fine because you can't even do 50 of those in the day.

Nick (23:08): Right? Right. Yeah. I think at most he's probably sending, then he can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he only does a couple of them a week. Like just a handful here and there. Cause I mean the videos are five, 10 minute videos. I believe that he's sending. So it's there's work to go in, but it's work upfront. But that work upfront kind of shows you or shows the client or the potential client that, Oh, they're doing this for me. And I didn't even ask for it and it's awesome. Imagine what they do for me if I'm paying them for the service.

Daniel (23:37): Exactly. Exactly. I like what I like about that is he's probably specifically identifying people who he could do good for in the first place. So it's like, why are you going to bother pitching someone who you're not going to want to work with? You know what I mean, already have the issues with which you are presenting to them. And that's a good way to do that. Right? The more scalable version of that is just doing the personalized line, right? Like someone wants to be like, just do it a little bit quicker. Maybe, maybe the service you have doesn't make sense with a loom audit. It makes perfect sense. But maybe knowing like lead gen or something like that, then like that, then you probably gonna want to do like the personalized line route. But, but the function is the same. It's like, you better do that kind of personalization because it doesn't work.

Daniel (24:23): If you don't like it very seriously. Just doesn't like that upfront work. You're thinking all, that's going to take a lot effort. Well, I'm telling you right now, you're going to spend a lot more effort doing nothing compared to personalization.

Nick (24:38): I mean, how many times do you go through something in life and your fingers have to take the shortcut or you're trying to get there quick. And then you ended up looking back in hindsight and you're like, man, I really wish I would have taken my time with that. Or I really wish I would have put more effort into this. I would have been way better off than where I'm at now. I mean, it's the same concept. You can either spend the time now and do it right the first time or you come to that realization later on that you fucked up. And now you spend the time now to start, like, you're just setting yourself way behind by not doing that.

Daniel (25:11): So something, someone I'm going to kind of figure this out very recently because I'm trying to grow an Instagram account right now. And I paid for some shout outs and I was like, Oh, this isn't working. But like obviously it wouldn't work over the long. So I was talking to these guys who run Instagram accounts and they basically pitched me on their service. So like, yeah, we got like a whole network of shout out people and they work with a bunch of other really big guys do amazing work for them. And they're like, okay. Yeah. Well, uh, let's do $2,000 of ads and we'll do a thousand dollars to manage it. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, you know what? This is probably a lot better of an idea as opposed to doing it myself. Because like when the money, when you put the money gone, it's like, okay, yeah.

Daniel (25:47): Now it's just going for you. And I wanted to tie this back into hiring freelancers to do the first lines for you. Because for a very long time, I was below like $10,000 a month. And it's really extremely difficult to get past $10,000 per month. If you're alone, it's very, very hard. And the reason why is because like, if you're doing those personalized lines, like you always want a full pipeline. Right? So the moment I hired a freelancer to just write the first lines for me, it's like, okay, now we're have like two extra hours per day. And it doesn't seem like a lot, but you have a fixed mental capacity that you can expend a per day. So it's more so about that. The mental capacity that you save. So that's two more hours of like sales calls I can get. Right. And you get yourself a lot. I don't want to spend $7 an hour. It's going to be like a couple hundred bucks. All right. Good luck. Growing a business at the rate, which impresses you without hiring somebody. Right?

Nick (26:49): Where do you go to get your freelancers?

Daniel (26:54): Upwork. Yeah. I like Upwork a lot because you can use a credit card and you get points on it. Yeah. Always use Upwork. It's the best.

Nick (27:00): Yeah. I've never used Upwork personally. I've heard great things. James, I think back in episode 4, he talked about, he used to be a freelancer on Upwork and he speaks very highly of that. For anyone listening, a lot of the links and tools and stuff that we discussed on this episode. I will be putting them in the show notes. So don't worry about if you missed any links or missed any of the tools that we're talking about here. Just hop on on the show notes and you can access all the links there. Um, so I guess with hiring a freelancer, I think it is important to say, so you kind of reached that $10,000 a month threshold, but you did reach that without hiring a freelancer. So I think that's, that's an important, I guess, note to make, you don't need to hire a freelancer to see a bunch of success because $10,000 a month is nothing to scoff at. You live in comfortably with $10,000 a month. So I think that is an important distinction, but yeah, like you said to get beyond that, now you're going to have to start freeing up some of your time so you can focus on the more like the things that matter.

Daniel (28:03): Yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, I think what'll happen is like, if you, if you've never like made a business, that's at $10,000 per month, you're, you're really thinking of yourself right now. Like, Oh, $10,000 is a lot for then like you're at $10,000 and you're like, Oh, that's actually not a lot. I need a lot more than that. Keep in mind, I was working my ass off like all day, every day, burnt out. And like, you're kind of miserable when you're doing that. It's like, I'm trying to have a life. You know what I mean? So if it's like, what, what are you really trying to get here? Are you trying to, are you trying to get rich? Are you trying to be free? Because like personally I'm trying to be free. Like I just don't want to have a job. Right. So you quit a job and then you make an agency and then you just have another job.

Daniel (28:46): It's like, that's really not what we want to do. So I mean, look at the point now, like I've hired enough people where I don't really, I spend maybe like an hour a day on the agency and that's it like everyone doing everything well, I don't do. And right. It's not, it doesn't take a lot of money for the freelancers because it's like, you just there's, you hire out very specific components, like the most time consuming thing for my agency, because my agency sends cold emails for other people. So I need to produce a lot of those personalized lines. So like that's mostly what the team does is they just make up a bunch of first lines. And then all I do is really write the actual emails and do the optimization. That's about it. Right. And I just load up a hundred people into a campaign and then just let the campaign run for like two weeks. I don't have to go back into the client account for one, two weeks. Right.

Nick (29:35): How long were you doing all of this before you started hiring?

Daniel (29:39): Probably like seven, eight months. Yeah. I was really scared to hire because like, I wasn't making like a lot of money. I mean, like, it was good, but you know, it's that feeling where it's like, Oh, I don't want to put some of that profit in there. Cause I, like, I moved out of my parents' house. I got an apartment and I'm living on my own and you know what I mean? It's like, I don't want to spend that money, but it's like, dude, listen, hiring a freelancer was the best decision I've ever made in my life. Like with no exaggeration because I, for so long now, like I've made my Twitter account and like I'm on Twitter all day and I'm having fun. Before I was writing personal lines all day and I was miserable. Like it was, I don't like doing that. Like at all, like I used to be a cashier and a bagger at Publix grocery store and it sucked like, cause it's the same monotonous thing over and over again.

Daniel (30:28): I did customer service for Apple, same thing over and over again. And that's like, what you're trying to escape from right. Now, like for instance, let's say you have a job, like you're a customer service rep for some company and you go and like, you can't do this, but like say you hired out your job. So you get paid like 15 an hour and you hire out your job for seven an hour. That's essentially what you're doing when you have employees. Right? So it's leverage or you're trying to lever your time up, what you want the time you don't really understand. Like I tell people on Twitter all the time, like do hire freelance or hire freelancer, like stop doing this monotonous this stuff all the time. You should hire a freelancer when you're at $3000 a month, like you should've did it much faster than I did.

Daniel (31:12): That was a mistake taking that long. Like if you, again, you can get to $10,000 on your own, but you really shouldn't because you're going to be miserable. So you, you, you need that just that time, bro. Like even like, I don't like to do work more than like three hours a day. I have about three hours or four hours of mental. Of like finely focused mental capacity. I can expend per day. And you might think you have eight hours per day, but you really actually don't because the other four hours of that is just garbage. Like maybe you're just surfing social media while you're sitting at the desk. Right. So, I want to be able to get up at 8:00 AM and be done with everything I need to do for the day at 11am. And that's not possible unless you have a freelancer, so it's worth $7 an hour to an astronomical level.

Nick (32:03): Are your freelancers, are they like full time or you hire them by the hour or I guess how does that work out?

Daniel (32:10): So what I'like to do is, um, so like with first lines specifically, like I've, I've hired some people where they try to like get away with writing garbage first lines.

Daniel (32:18): And I sometimes like a good freelancer will try to get away with writing some, some bad first lines. And then I basically tell them like, Hey, like I'm not giving you any first lines now because you just gave me bad ones. And like, it's kind of a punishment. So I keep them each at 20. So I have three people through each 20 hours a week. And so if one, if one decides they want to act up, it's like, okay, you don't get any now. And they go to the other guys. Right. So I like to like disperse it. Like I could have one guy at like 40 hours a week and like, it would probably be fine, but like I'd prefer to split it up just to like see like, and I'm happy to pay them a good rate too. It's like, I'm not telling them, Oh, you better be working extremely, extremely fast.

Daniel (33:00): It's like, do I care more about the quality of it than I do about the quantity that you produced? So like one time, one guy, one time he was like, uh, when I was first hiring him, he wrote some bad first lines. And he was like, Oh, until I get to the point where I'm good, do you want to just not pay me? And I was like, no, no, no, no, bro, I'm going to pay you. Like, this is the part of the process. And like, I, I, I would prefer that you are an employee of mine for a very long time. Like, don't try to stinge your employees to right. So one guy's in Nigeria, one guy's in like Eastern Europe somewhere and like $7 an hour is like, great, good for them for extremely unskilled labor. All you're doing is visiting LinkedIn profiles.

Nick (33:40): Hmm. Have you thought about the possibility of actually hiring people full time as opposed to freelance work?

Daniel (33:46): Yeah. That's the goal. So what I've been focusing on primarily in the past, like two months is info products. Like really? We own that because I really liked the idea of info products, but in terms of the agency side. Yeah. I think I'd want to find someone who probably someone who's bought one of my courses too. Like I'll just, I'll hire them full time. Like, Hey, like you scraped the leads. Like give it to the freelancers. Right? The angles for me do the optimizing and like to the point and then probably salesmen too. So there's just the two other components I need to select those two spots and then get it to the point where it can grow without me like to where I literally do not step inside of it at all. Um, if you're, if, if, if you don't really have like a business yet, that might seem like it's extremely far away, but that can happen extremely fast.

Daniel (34:31): If for instance, like you've got some service you want to sell maybe like a thousand, $2,000 per month. And like you did what I said with cold emails, you're going to get some people on the phone and then bam, you close one. And then, you know, now like, Oh, a hundred emails gets me a client. So if it's like if I want five, want 10 clients, all you gotta do is send a thousand emails and that is entirely accurate. Like you will, that, that will happen if you do what I say. So now, you know, it's like, okay. So at any given moment I can decide, I want 10 clients like, okay, cool. Now you've got to have those systems in place. You don't want to get it to the point, like if I have 10 clients I will be working all day. And I'm like, I don't want that going to me. I got to have the people in place. So yes, this is the next priority for the agency is get that task out. Like get the lead scraping and the angle writing, like get that out and then get a salesman out too. And then now what I now would do absolutely nothing and I hold a hundred percent equity.

Nick (35:27): Okay. I want to jump over to the tools again. Um, you briefly mentioned a couple of different ones. The two, I was really interested in the BuiltWith and Any Mail Finder. So is any mail finder, is that kinda like Hunter? What?

Daniel (35:42): Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of people standing use Hunter. Uh, I don't know if Hunter heard a bulk upload feature. It probably does, but Any Mail Finder has a bulk upload feature. So let me just like make this distinction really quick. If you have a list of any domains and you plug them into Any Mail Finder, it's going to find you the owner content, whatever. So if you put founder or owner, it's gonna find you the founders or owners just given the domain. So it's like now your job is well, where do you get the list of domains right now built with is just one tool to get those lists of domain specifically for e-commerce. If you want to scrape eCommerce stores, you go to BuiltWith, tell him to find you all the sites, but Shopify installed and then further filter that by some other technology, probably a specific, uh, Shopify app.

Daniel (36:26): It'll also tell you the monthly revenue, it's just an estimate of the brand. Um, and it would tell you how much money they spend on technology per month. So like, you'll see that like most of the time it's a million dollar brand. If they're spending over a thousand dollars a month on technology.

Nick (36:40): Interesting. I was just thinking when you were talking about BuiltWith, so I'm assuming from the name, it searches for apps and companies that have built their websites or apps with some, the Shopify app. It's looking for that, I guess, code for that bill. How are you able to search by topics? Like could you search by a niche?

Daniel (37:00): Yes. So there's retail reports. So for instance, you could find there's keyword reports too. So like for instance, yeah. So if you want to find a, if you want to find fashion shops, you make the retail report, fashion shops is, could find you all the eCommerce fashion stores.

Daniel (37:17): There you go. Have fun. Take the, take the domains, plug them into Any Mail Finder. You know write your, get the emails now and I'll write the first line, send them an email right back. It's the same thing like it really is. And that's so cool because get, get the leads. Write the first lines, test the angles, bm, you have a lead generation machine,

Nick (37:39): The BuiltWith anybody else who's using like Ahrefs or SEMrush. And the keyword research tools like that. A lot of those tools have competitor analysis functions built into them. I know with like Ahrefs When I was doing my email outreach for SEO, I would be able to, I guess, search a specific keyword or topic or something where a competitor was writing an article about something I wrote about. And I can basically pull up every single domain and wrote an article about that single topic that is also an option as well. But this BuiltWith sounds really interesting. Any idea what that is like the cost per month?

Daniel (38:16): Yeah. So built with is $295 a month.

Nick (38:18): Okay.

Daniel (38:19): So it's entirely worth it. If you're selling something that's over a thousand dollars a month, you need to scrape it one time. So like, if you just want all of the eCommerce stores with Clavio installed, there's about 125,000 of them. Get your good just don't renew for the next month. Like that it. Have fun.

Nick (38:38): Dang. And then how about that? Um, Any Mail Finder? I know Hunter has got a free option. I think you can send so many per day.

Daniel (38:45): Yeah. So Any Mail Finder is a credit system. It's, it's a $49 for a thousand verified emails. They only charge you for the verified ones, which is convenient. And then it's a hundred dollars for 5,000. So I do a ton of scraping cause I got an agency that does it. So I pay for BuiltWith every month and I pay for Any Mail Finder.

Nick (39:04): That makes sense. Yeah. Anybody listen, a hunter.io. It's a very similar concept. Like you mentioned, I'm not sure if you can do the bulk upload. I think maybe if you jump to the paid option, you can do bulk uploads, but I, I'm not sure on what the limitations are with that. Um, I think it's something kind of similar where you have X amount of emails per month as you upgrade. But

Daniel (39:24): Yeah, like what you, what you were saying before with Ahrefs like it it'll basically spit out all the domains of every website that's written about a particular topic. Like, okay, cool. So the function with which you retrieved the domains doesn't matter. So you could use that process. I said before, but now you need, you can't send to an info@email like this don't do that. Right. So if you have the list of domains from anywhere, plug it into Any Mail Finder and get the owner contact info, right.

Nick (39:57): That's I want to give email Any email, Any Mail Finder, a try, because I've as messy as I've been messing with Hunter. And I don't know if other people have had this experience, but there've been several emails where it's got the verified check. It should be a legit email. Then I get a bounce and that's happened more times than not. And it's really frustrating. Disappointing when you put in the time to, I guess, scrape the emails, kind of build the email templates out and do all that stuff and then they go nowhere. So I kind of want to get into your course, is it a course or ebook?

Daniel (40:29): So it's a course now it used to be just an ebook, but there are videos inside of their now.

Nick (40:33): Okay, cool. Well, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about what that course is. I mean, you already gave us a ton of awesome information here, so I'm really curious what you got inside the course.

Daniel (40:44): Yeah. So what's inside there is, it's basically going to take you through like the process of setting up a domain, like the backend systems behind it. I touch on like using the secondary domain to send, because you don't want to use your main domain and then like how to, how to make sure you most don't get in spam. I go through I'll show you actual emails that worked like real campaigns. Um, I go, I'll tell you what to write. If you do have case studies, all the follow ups what's right. If you don't have case studies and just go through the process of like hiring a freelancer and everything like that. And I will say I am in the works right now of making an extremely massive course. So that's, that's something to look forward to because they're going to have a whole coaching component, but yeah, that's going to be, that's going to be really cool. So

Nick (41:22): That's awesome. Yeah. Is it more to, well, no, I was gonna say, is it more to kind of help people build a very similar agency, but really you can take it with any kind of service or product that you're selling.

Daniel (41:33): Yup. Yeah. So My course is for any person who is selling any kind of digitally delivered B to B service that is at least $1,000 plus per month, right. It's, it's basically going to show you, how do you build out this system just to like show you everything I use, like, what are all the tools I use? What's the system behind it? How do you aggregate everything together? Like what does it actually look like? Right. Everything like that. Right. And then there is a component in there that will show you how to make an agency just like mine. Right? So after I've gone through, after, after I've gone through and taught you, I basically go through and I say, well, these are the clients you want, you want to work with. And like, here's the pitch you want to give them? And here's like the stack you want to do. And basically like that just like reveal all of that information to you. So that's where someone like doesn't have anything they're already selling. It's like, Oh, let me just show you how to sell this.

Nick (42:18): Right. That's awesome. What's the, what is the name of the course?

Daniel (42:21): It's called Cold Email Mastery.

Nick (42:23): Okay. Cold Email mastery. Just like any, any other ones here, I'll be putting a link to that course on my website, in the show notes there. So make sure you go at least check out that course and tell Daniel what's up. That's very cool. I'm kinda interested in that. What, what do you charge for that course?

Daniel (42:41): So that course right now is $55 that is going to be removed. Um, so I think there's a, the, the, the optimal situation is I want to make sure, because a lot of people will, they'll like, buy course not really serious about it and things like that. It's like, dude, I want to make something where it's you buy this and you are guaranteed for it to work. So I'm putting together kind of like a, like a whole, whole like coaching thing. Like one-on-one component, like there's a Facebook group. Like send me your emails. I'm going to optimize this with you kind of thing. And that that's, that's really where this is going. Um, but kind of like a surface level, like just kind of like a backend look at everything. The current Cold Email Mastery is 100% great. I think it has like 49, five star reviews right now.

Daniel (43:26): So, so every single day someone's coming on and telling me, dude, this is so crazy. Like before I got on this show, someone said, dude, I just personalized 10 emails and got two calls. It's like, Oh my God, that's insane. Like good. So like even with the small version, like I had some dude tell me he just made $25k the one dude I said earlier made $15k it's some dude who like just started an agency, said he made $4k. I had some 18 year old kid tell me he made $2,200. I was like, Oh my God.

Nick (43:56): That's so crazy. Awesome. So Cold Email Mastery. Okay. Now, before we get kind of wrapping up with the episode here, you have any other, I guess, last final tips. Anything else that you want to leave the audience before we wrap up?

Daniel (44:12): Yeah. So let me reiterate this. I'm going to be extremely disappointed with you. If you don't personalize your cold emails, because you are leaving an astronomical amount of money on the table with absolutely no exaggeration. You need to personalize the emails, the degree to which your conversions will increase is out of this fucking world. Like it seriously. Like, so if you, if you think you're going to be spending a lot of time and wasting your effort, you are absolutely not. It works every single time. So do it.

Nick (44:43): Beautiful. Okay. And last but not least, where can people find you? What social media website, where do you want people to come reach out to you? Maybe get your course or just, they want to ask you questions about sending cold emails.

Daniel (44:56): Yeah. So go on Twitter. So my Twitter handle is @blackhatwizardd with two Ds. And I tweet about cold emails every single day, just drop in snippets. And if you want to do something really, really interesting, once you go to the Twitter search bar type in my username, @blackhatwizardd thread, just the word thread in quotes. And you're going to see every single thread I've ever made. Cause I always put the word thread, but I make a thread.

Nick (45:18): Oh, sweet. And then is there a website or a place where people can get your course?

Daniel (45:24): Um, it's just the Gumroad link inside the link and my Twitter.

Nick (45:27): Oh, okay. Okay. Perfect. That is easy enough. Well, Daniel, I want to thank you for coming on the show. You gave a lot of, a lot of awesome advice, a lot of awesome tips. Um, I'm excited to start trying it myself and hopefully the listeners here all are going to start putting this to use right away and hopefully they can get it start closing on some clients. If anybody's listening to this episode and they're trying the techniques and tactics that Daniel mentioned here in the episode, I want you to tweet at both myself and Daniel and let us know how it's going. I'm really curious to see how people like the results people are getting from this. But yeah. Daniel, yea, Thanks for coming on the show, man. This was awesome.

Daniel (46:06): Thanks man. Appreciate it.

Nick (46:08): Okay. That was the episode with Daniel. I hope you enjoyed that interview. Uh, the most important thing to remember when trying to see success is that there's no getting around needing to put in the work. There's no shortcut or cheat code that can get you there. And really the sooner you realize that the sooner you'll be able to put in the necessary to actually see the success.

Nick (46:30): So just remember that, don't try to take the short route or try to follow the, get rich, quick schemes. I mean, none of that really works. You're just going to waste time. And by the time you do realize that that is reality, you're going to have to be starting over and it's time you could have spent actually focusing on building your business the right way. So I hope you guys enjoyed that interview. If you want to get any of the links mentioned in this episode, or if you want to check out Daniel's course Cold Email Mastery, make sure you head over to the show notes for this episode. The show notes for this episode can be found over at ninefivepodcasts.com/episode10 And just remember nine five is all spelled out.

Nick (47:14): N I N E F I V E Podcast.com forward slash episode 10. And that is the number ten. One zero. If you did enjoy this episode, please head over to iTunes or your podcast app of choice and leave a review. Your reviews help get this podcast found by more aspiring entrepreneurs and people like you who are looking to start and grow something of their own. Just the few seconds it takes to leave a review can make a huge difference. So if you do that, I would be extremely grateful. So thanks for tuning in guys. Glad to be back. Next week, we are back to our regular podcast schedule every Wednesday, new podcast episodes, super excited. I know we have some really great interviews coming up and I'm super excited to share those with you guys. So I look forward to catching up with you guys next week.