u/dikshamishra34

11 months ago i was mass applying to SDR manager roles on linkedin with the desperation of someone whose lease renewal was coming up. today im running a cold email agency doing about $15k/mo with two contractors and my apartment is the office. the path here was genuinely weird and i want to walk through the numbers because thats how my brain works and maybe itll help someone whos in the same spot i was.

actually let me scratch that word genuinely, i just mean it was weird. like actually weird.

BEFORE

i was running a 5 person SDR team at a series C fintech company. $95k ACV product, selling into CFOs and VPs of finance at mid market companies. on paper it sounds great. in practice we were drowning.

here are the numbers from my last full quarter there (Q3 2024):

9,200 cold emails sent per month across the team. reply rate sitting at 1.8%. positive reply rate was maybe 0.6% on a good month. booked meetings per SDR per month: 3.1 average. pipeline generated per SDR per month: roughly $285k which sounds ok until you realize our VP of sales wanted $500k minimum and kept bringing it up in every single standup.

bounce rate was hovering around 4.2% which our CRO kept saying was fine but it wasnt fine because we were burning through domains and nobody wanted to deal with the infrastructure side. we had 12 google workspace domains and maybe half of them had proper DKIM and DMARC configured because the ops person who set them up left in june and nobody documented anything.

the HubSpot situation was its own nightmare. we had sequences running in HubSpot but also campaigns in Lemlist and the two systems would constantly create duplicate contacts, overwrite each other's activity data, and the reporting was basically useless. i spent probably 4-5 hours a week just trying to reconcile what actually happened vs what HubSpot said happened. our CRO would pull a report showing 14 meetings booked and id pull my own sheet showing 9 and wed argue about it for 20 minutes every monday.

morale on the team was bad. two of my reps were openly interviewing. one told me he felt like he was "just spamming people" which... yeah, he kind of was. we all were. the copy was generic, the targeting was broad because marketing kept giving us lists of 10k contacts with no real ICP filtering, and we were basically playing a volume game with volume that wasnt even that high.

i got laid off in january 2025. not performance related, they cut the whole outbound function and moved to a PLG model. i got 6 weeks severance and a linkedin post from my VP saying i was "one of the most data driven leaders" hed worked with. cool.

for about 3 weeks i applied to jobs. SDR manager roles, rev ops roles, even a couple marketing ops positions. got a few first rounds but nothing moved fast and i was watching my savings account tick down. i think i applied to maybe 40-45 positions total.

then in mid february a former colleague asked if i could help his startup with cold email. they had a 3 person sales team, no outbound infrastructure, and a product that sold to HR directors at companies with 200-1000 employees. he offered me $2,500/mo as a contractor to set everything up and manage it.

i said yes mostly because i needed money but also because some part of me thought... maybe i actually know how to do this if i dont have a CRO breathing down my neck and a broken HubSpot instance fighting me every step.

AFTER

that first client changed everything. not because it went perfectly but because it forced me to build from scratch with no legacy garbage.

month 1 (february 2025): i set up 8 domains for his company, all on google workspace. configured SPF, DKIM, DMARC on every single one before sending a single email. used Instantly for sending because i already knew it from my old job and honestly the warmup feature is solid even if the UI gets clunky when you have more than 15-20 accounts. warmed up for 21 days. during that time i built the target list using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to pull HR directors at companies in their ICP, enriched through Prospeo for email finding and then verified everything through MillionVerifier before loading into any sequence.

results after first month of actual sending (march): 2,100 emails sent. reply rate 4.3%. positive reply rate 1.9%. booked 7 meetings for him. bounce rate 0.8%.

compare that to what my old team was doing. 9,200 emails for maybe 9-10 meetings total across 5 people. i was getting almost as many meetings solo with less than a quarter of the volume. the difference was targeting and infrastructure, thats it. same basic cold email principles.

my old assumption was that you needed volume to make outbound work at scale. that more emails equals more pipeline, linearly. took me about 6 weeks of running this client to realize thats completely backwards. tighter lists, better data, proper infrastructure, and suddenly your reply rates go up 2-3x and you need way less volume to hit the same numbers.

month 2 (march): that first client referred me to a friend running a B2B SaaS company selling into operations managers. $2,000/mo retainer. i also picked up a third client from a cold email i sent (yes, using cold email to sell cold email services, the irony is not lost on me). that one was $3,000/mo because they wanted me to handle everything including list building and copy.

revenue in march: $7,500/mo. expenses were roughly $1,800/mo across all the tooling - Instantly subscriptions, MillionVerifier credits, Sales Navigator, a few hundred in google workspace fees for client domains.

month 3 (april): this is where i almost screwed everything up. i got cocky with the third client and started sending before warmup was fully done. 14 days instead of 21. bounce rate on their first campaign hit 3.8% and two of the domains got flagged. had to pause everything, swap those domains out, and basically restart. lost about 10 days of sending time and the client was not happy. i ate the cost of the replacement domains and gave them a partial credit on that months invoice.

lesson learned the hard way: warmup is not negotiable and 21 days is the minimum, not the target. i actually do 25-28 days now for new domains.

month 4 (may): picked up two more clients. one was a recruiting firm targeting tech companies ($2,500/mo) and one was a cybersecurity company going after CISOs at enterprise ($3,500/mo). the cybersecurity one was interesting because CISOs are notoriously hard to reach and the client had tried apollo and zoominfo lists before with terrible results. i spent extra time on the list building, used Clay to enrich company data and pull technographic signals so we could personalize around their actual tech stack. reply rate on that campaign ended up being 5.1% which is honestly the best ive ever seen for a CISO audience.

total revenue in may: $13,500/mo. i hired my first contractor, a guy id worked with at the fintech company who got laid off a month after me. paid him $3,500/mo to handle list building and verification for all clients.

month 5-6 (june-july): things stabilized. picked up one more client at $2,000/mo, lost the recruiting firm client because they ran out of budget (startups, man). net revenue settled around $15,000/mo. hired a second contractor part time to help with copy and A/B testing.

current numbers across all clients combined:

about 11,000 emails sent per month total (across 5 active clients). average reply rate: 3.8%. average positive reply rate: 1.4%. average bounce rate: 1.1%. meetings booked per month across all clients: somewhere between 35-45 depending on the month. cost per meeting for clients ranges from about $55 to $120 depending on their ACV and how hard the persona is to reach.

my margins are decent. revenue is $15k, contractor costs are about $5,500, tooling is around $2,200, misc expenses maybe $400. so im netting roughly $6,800-$7,000/mo which is less than my old salary but i also work maybe 30 hours a week and dont have a CRO asking me why rep 3s pipeline is down 12% from last month.

the biggest thing that changed between my corporate SDR life and running this agency is how i think about infrastructure. at the old company we treated domains and inboxes as an afterthought. something IT handled (poorly). now i spend probably 20% of my time just on deliverability - monitoring domain health, rotating inboxes, checking blacklists, making sure warmup stays consistent even on accounts that are actively sending. its not glamorous work but its the foundation everything else sits on.

oh and the HubSpot thing. i use Folk CRM now for tracking client campaigns and its so much simpler. no salesforce integration nightmares, no duplicate contact wars, just a clean pipeline view for each client. i know Folk isnt for everyone and it probably wouldnt work for a 50 person sales org but for what i need its perfect. every time i see a post about HubSpot sequence issues i get a little twitch in my eye.

things i still havent figured out: pricing. i feel like im undercharging the cybersecurity client given the results were delivering but i also dont want to rock the boat when things are working. also havent figured out how to scale past maybe 7-8 clients without hiring someone full time which would eat into margins significantly. and honestly some months the revenue fluctuates more than id like because clients pause campaigns for holidays or internal reasons and theres no recurring minimun guarantee in most of my contracts.

if youre thinking about doing something similar, the one thing id say is that the skills transfer from running an SDR team is almost 1:1. list building, copy, infrastructure, metrics analysis - its all the same stuff. the difference is you own the upside instead of getting a pat on the back and a $500 spiff.

anyway this got way longer than i planned. gonna go check my domain health dashboards because thats apparently what i do for fun now

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