Chapter 13The engine under the hood

The engine is boring on purpose. A few domains that look like yours, bought in your own name. A handful of mailboxes on each one. Ten sends per mailbox per day. Copy that is about the other person, with no link in it. Fast answers when someone says yes, a pre-interview on the calendar, a debrief after that. Nothing on that list is clever, and that is the point. Most founders I meet who tried cold email on their own and quit broke one of those boring rules early.

People ask me about the plumbing on a lot of debriefs. I put my calendar on the screen, they look at three weeks of meetings back to back, and somebody leans in and says, okay, but how? So let me open the hood. This is the setup in the order we build it for a founder, and in the order you can build it yourself.

Your name on the keys

The first thing we ask a new customer to do surprises them. We don't log into some account of ours and start sending. We send them off to open three accounts:

we ask you to go create a name cheap, send grid, and instantly account. On your own name and ideally put, like, your credit card. And then you give the keys to Charles, and he. Sets it all up and does his wizardry

That's one account to buy domains, one to deliver the mail and one to send and track the sequences, all in your name and on your card.

Why does that matter so much? Because I want the engine to belong to the founder on day one. If we ever part ways, nothing has to be migrated and nothing is held hostage. I tell founders the worst case out loud, before they ask:

worst case you're gonna see exactly how we do what we do and then we give you the keys to the Ferrari

I mean the worst case. A founder can stop after a month because cash is tight and the machine keeps running. The domains and the mailboxes are still his, and the sequences sit in his account where he can tweak them or hand them to someone on his team.

for that worst case for the rest of your life you will know how to do outreach at scale which I think is pretty valuable.

That one decision changes the sales conversation too. A founder who knows the keys are his stops asking what happens if it doesn't work. He starts asking how fast it can start.

Never from your real address

Rule one of the plumbing is the one founders break first. The email on your business card never sends a cold email. Ever.

if you did cold email you would never want to send it from your own email

The reason is simple and it hurts if you learn it the hard way:

if somebody marks it as spam you're gonna you know your main business will get affected

Your real inbox is where investors reply, where customers send purchase orders, where your lawyer sends the closing documents. You don't gamble that address on a stranger's mood. I run my own business the same way. I showed a founder my sending setup on a call in August and walked him through it:

I have four hundred mailboxes. Each of these mailboxes will never send more than 10 emails per day because guess what? If you send more than 10, you're going to be landing in spam.

And then the rule I hold myself to:

I'm never going to send something from contact@sunnyray.com because those are only for people that I've already met and talked to. Otherwise, I'll lose my business over it.

So we buy domains that look like the founder's and set up mailboxes on them. The structure I describe on calls is short enough to memorise:

we grab you know five alternate domains we create five mailboxes per domain we limit it to 10 emails per mailbox

Do the math. Five domains, five mailboxes each, ten emails a mailbox. That's 250 a day, every day, without your real address ever touching a stranger. Add domains and the number climbs. On our own setup the number is in the thousands:

But the engine is this, right? And it just cranks every day. A thousand emails.

New mailboxes don't carry a campaign on day one. They need a warm-up period first, a week or two of light, normal traffic so the inbox providers learn to trust them.

there's a bit of a warm up process so that those emails don't fall into spam. But after a week. Boom. It's crazy.

Skip the warm-up because you're excited and you can burn a domain before the first campaign is done. Then cold email looks broken, when the only thing missing was the boring part.

A hundred landmines

When a founder tells me he'll just set it up himself, I don't argue. I tell him what he's walking into:

there's about a hundred different [mines] that most people fall into when they try and do cold email

I won't list a hundred. Three come up on almost every call, and they're the three I'd tattoo on a beginner's hand.

Number one, the first email carries no link of any kind. A link in a first touch from a new domain reads like spam to every filter on the way in.

you're never supposed to include a URL in the first email it should be under 80 to 100 words

When I show founders one of our live invites I point at that absence before anything else:

See, notice one thing. I don't have any URL in my email, no URL

Number two, no calendar link until they say yes. This one feels backwards to salespeople, because the booking link is what they're after. Hold it anyway. A booking link in a first touch looks like a sales email to the filters and to the person, and it can land you in spam. The link goes out after the yes, never before.

Number three, don't look polished. A perfect, capitalised, branded email looks like a campaign, and people delete campaigns. I tell founders to write the subject line in small letters, like a note from a busy person:

if you send an email and it's like perfectly you know capitalized guess what most likely you'll get deleted

So the three rules are no link, no calendar until they say yes, and write the way a busy person writes.

The copy is about them

The invite itself is chapter 6, so I'll only say what the engine needs from it. It needs one line that proves you looked at their work and one line that hands them the spotlight, and it stays under 80 words with nothing about your company or your round.

When I explain the invite on calls, the version I give sounds almost lazy:

dude like you have the craziest story you want to come on my podcast I'd love to put a spotlight on you

The craziest story is where the work is. That's the line about them, and with today's tools it can be specific to every single person on the list:

And every email can theoretically be custom and data driven. Right. Because we have LinkedIn, we have their websites, we have their blogs.

Volume and personal were opposites for most of my career. When I sold robots to universities I could write five or ten custom emails a day, and the rest of the world was mass mail. Now the machine writes a thousand that each read like one.

The reply is the product

Everything above exists for one moment: a stranger writes back and says yes. The sequence carries a first email and a couple of follow-ups. A yes gets the calendar link, and the booking lands on my calendar as a pre-interview. Once that loop runs, the output is the only thing I look at:

once the machine starts running

the output is just our calendar filling up with meetings.

Speed matters here more than anywhere else in the chain. A yes is warm for about an hour. Answer it the same hour and the meeting books itself; answer it tomorrow and you're cold again. I apply the same clock after the call. A prospect hears this from me before we hang up:

you'll get an email from me, maybe within a half an hour.

Then comes the gate. At a few meetings a day you can talk to everyone. At thirty or forty you can't, and you shouldn't try. The booking page asks a question or two before anyone reaches my calendar:

And so in my Calendly, which is our first gate, I will ask questions

How much did you spend on growth last quarter?

It sounds blunt, but people answer it, and the answer tells me who to prepare for before I say hello. As I put it on the same call:

See, more volume means more filtration.

That's the whole engine. Domains, mailboxes, a short invite, a follow-up or two, a fast answer, one question at the gate, a pre-interview on the calendar. From there the show takes over, and the earlier chapters of this book take over with it.

It's just a decision

The last thing I tell founders about the engine is the thing that makes some of them stop paying us. I say it anyway, because it's true:

You don't need me for that. You don't need to pay me for that. It's just a decision. You could just say, I am going to start a show.

The gear doesn't matter at the start. The studio doesn't matter. It's easy to lose weeks choosing a microphone before you've booked one guest.

if your calendar is filling up, you're going to figure out what mic to use, what light to use. Like that stuff is irrelevant.

So decide. Then do the boring parts in order, and don't skip any of them.

Try this week

Build the short version in your own name, so the engine is yours from the first send.

1. Write your ICP in one sentence that names the title and the company type, plus one sign they need what you do. 2. Open the three accounts from the top of this chapter in your name, on your own card. 3. Buy three to five domains that look like your company's. Never send from your real one. 4. Set up two to five mailboxes on each domain. Cap every mailbox at ten sends a day. 5. Warm the mailboxes for a week or two before any campaign touches them. 6. Write the invite in under 80 words. Put the subject line in small letters. Give it one line about them and one line offering the spotlight, and leave the links out. 7. Add two follow-ups, and send the calendar link only after a yes. 8. Put one qualifying question on your booking page. 9. Answer every yes within the hour.

If you would rather have us build it, our prices are the public ones on the site: a Sprint at USD 7,500, Ignition at USD 15,000, Momentum at USD 25,000 and the Full Engine at USD 33,000. You'll still open the accounts in your own name. The keys are yours either way.

If the keys were in your name by Friday, what would you still be waiting for?