A cold email example that landed a $5.5k a month client

A cold email to a high-value prospect works when the subject line makes a bold claim about them and the first line proves it, like quoting something they wrote. This is the real cold email that landed me a $5.5k a month client in 2022, word for word, with what worked, what I’d fix and the rules I broke.

I sent this email to a founder I’d never met, when I was nobody. He replied, “Normally I ignore these kinds of emails,” and it turned into a $5.5k a month deal. At the time I couldn’t believe a stranger online would pay me that much.

The email is only half of it. The other half is where an email like this fits in 2026. I split outreach into two buckets, borrowing Nassim Taleb’s barbell strategy: a small number of accounts you research and write to by hand, and automated cold email at scale for everyone else. Nothing in the middle.

How I found him

In August 2022, I had just left AWS and decided to start an agency. I googled people I thought would be good clients. One of them was Jason, the founder of Super, the tool I was using to build my website at the time. Super has since been acquired.

Before AWS I worked at Salesforce on what they called summit accounts: companies worth billions of dollars. You can’t send those people a template. Every message had to be targeted and had to stand out. So I did the same thing with Jason. I went looking for something personal about him and found his blog. One line stood out.

The email, word for word

His reply thanked me for taking the time to write him a personal email and said he was happy I was enjoying the product. We got on a call, and the deal followed. Jason and I still have a relationship, and I’ve talked to him since about why it worked.

Line by line: what worked and what I’d fix

The subject line and first line: 10 out of 10

This is the part that won the reply. The subject line makes a bold claim: I just read everything on your website. The preview line backs it up straight away, because it’s a direct quote from one of his blog posts. Big claim, immediate proof. He’s in before he opens it.

The introduction: fine

“I’m hoping I can provide value to you today” flows from the quote. It reads like a story: he believes in giving value, and here’s someone offering it.

The big tech line: cut it

“I recently decided to switch from big tech…” is weak. It’s all about me. If I sent this email today, that whole sentence would go.

The link: a rule I broke on purpose

I usually tell people not to put links in cold emails. That rule is for sending at scale. For a handful of hand-picked accounts, a link is fine, and here it helped: it went to my website, built on his product, so it proved I was a real user.

That’s the strongest thing in the email. It’s one thing to email someone to pitch your service. It’s another to pitch your service while telling them you already pay for theirs. If you work at a big company, this is your best angle. Say I was at Salesforce and had to win Ramp as an account, and Salesforce paid for Ramp. I’d lead with that.

The thank-you: needs a number

“It has been a seamless experience” is okay. I’d make it better by quantifying it. A specific number sounds more believable than a general compliment, the same way “I’ve helped a lot of people make money” loses to a count, a time frame and a result.

The ask: a gamble

“See if there’s any need on your end” goes against what every sales coach says, which is to find the problem first and mention it. I didn’t check whether he needed help. The message was personal enough that it worked anyway, but the timing was luck. More on fixing that below.

The PS: okay

It says what I want, not what he gets. With a case study, it would be much stronger.

My score: 6 out of 10

I don’t give 7s, because a 7 is a cop-out. It isn’t an 8, because there’s a lot I’d change. So it’s a 6. The opening carried it.

How I’d write it today

To make this a 20 out of 10, I’d do two pieces of research before writing the ask.

• Check their ads. — Meta’s Ad Library and Google’s Ads Transparency Center both let anyone look up the ads a company is running. I know Super was running ads on Facebook and Google, and I’d have said so.
• Check their team. — If I remember right, his website showed one sales rep. I’d have named him. Call him Michael.

Then the ask becomes:

I see you’re running a lot of ads on Facebook and Google. I was wondering if Michael is doing any outbound work to win B2B customers on email and LinkedIn. If not, this is an area I can help with. If that’s the case, feel free to book a time to chat with me here.

That’s a real reason to talk, not “can I help you with anything?” This is the idea behind signal-based selling: find the sign that they need you before you ask.

And the PS would carry proof instead of a wish:

PS: I helped Junction go from $3M to $20M ARR. I’d love to do the same for Super.

Split your outreach like a barbell

The barbell strategy comes from Nassim Taleb. Put most of your resources into something safe and reliable, put a small slice into high-risk bets where the upside is huge, and avoid the middle.

For outreach, that means two buckets. Taleb’s split is often told as 90/10. I call mine the 99% and the 1%, because it sounds stronger.

• The 1% — A few accounts where one win would change your year. Researched and written by hand, like the email above.
• The 99% — Automated cold email at scale, sent to a big market with filters and AI doing the work.
• The middle — Avoid it. That’s the most important part of the idea.

The 1%: accounts worth writing by hand

In 2022 I did all of that research by hand. Now AI does most of it. We built a feature into our app for exactly this, and I call it the 1%.

You give it a LinkedIn URL. From there, a set of scrapers looks for personal details about that person. A regular chat assistant like ChatGPT, Claude or Grok can find personal details too, but it hits less often, because it can’t scrape every website. More scrapers means more hits.

In the video I run it on myself. It finds that I used to be a full-time magician in Toronto, that the first trick I learned was the coin matrix, a National Post article about me, a Toronto magic event that wrote me up, and a trick I created and sold to one of the biggest magic companies of the time. It also suggests gift ideas, which is a topic for another video. I’m seeing more people move to real-world touches like gifts and events.

Here’s how you’d use that. Say you want to be the first account executive I ever hire:

• Subject line: — “Coin matrix.” Nobody else is sending me that. You stand out before I open it.
• First line: — “The coin matrix was the first trick you learned, but I want to be the first AE you hire.” The story flows: first trick, first hire.
• PS: — Something like “With our backgrounds, I think we could do magic together (pun fully intended).” Corny, but I’d appreciate it.

The research finds the detail. You still have to be creative with it, and that’s why the 1% takes hands-on work. It’s worth it because one of these accounts should be worth something like 10 smaller ones.

The 99%: cold email at scale

For everyone else, send cold email at scale. On some days in our dashboard we sent almost 7,000 emails. (You’ll also see a gap in the last 90 days: we paused outreach while we built new features for the app.)

That volume takes infrastructure. We run 952 mailboxes. Depending on the provider, a mailbox can send 15 emails or only 5.

Cold email is the safe end of the barbell because it becomes predictable. After about a month at a good volume, you know your numbers. The one I track for myself and our clients: for every 437 people we contact, we get 1 interested lead. That’s a reliable bet.

It doesn’t work for everyone. You need a big market: give or take 30,000 or more people you can reach each month. With that, you can test different angles and targeting. When you find the copy and the audience that work, you rerun that campaign every 20 business days or so, because people forget the cold emails they get.

Once you have the list, the mailboxes and the copy, it’s a repeatable format you launch whenever you want. I know exactly how to book 27 meetings, who to reach out to and what to send. That’s the setup in how 8 Grok Bots booked me 27 meetings.

Frequently asked questions

Key takeaways

• The subject line and first line won this email: a bold claim, then the prospect’s own words as proof.
• Showing you already pay for their product is one of the strongest openings you have.
• Links are fine in a handful of hand-written emails. Leave them out at scale.
• Don’t gamble on timing. Check their ads and their team, and name the problem.
• Split outreach like a barbell: hand-written for the top 1%, automated cold email for the 99%, nothing in the middle.
• Cold email at scale needs a big market and becomes predictable: for us, 1 interested lead for every 437 people contacted.

For the opposite case, a message that got no reply and how I rewrote it, read why nobody replies to your cold emails.