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LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🕹️ Mario, Luigi & The Long History Of Nintendo. A story of a video game behemoth beginning all the way back in the 1800s, and still thriving today.
🦇 Exiting Weapons, Betting On Gotham & The Anti-Portfolio. An interview with Bruce Wayne, Chairman of Wayne Enterprises.
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PARTNERS 💫

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Although I speak about my team at Athyna a lot in this newsletter, I probably don’t speak about them enough. The message below was posted on social media without any prompting by a talent who went through a process with us recently. Incredible stuff.

We might not be the most impressive company in the world, but we are growing fast and profitably, building cool stuff, with a great brand. It is all underpinned by one thing, though: culture. Everything is so much easier when you have 92% engagement scores on average. Culture eats strategy for breakfast; all day, every day.

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

Life, Liberty & The Pursuit Of Pipeline

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated," said the author Mark Twain. The same line could be said about outbound email. Sure, it might be dying, and for many, it is already dead, but if you can put the right message in front of the right person at the right time, you are always in with a puncher's chance.

Nail all three, and you have a customer. Two out of three, and you have a lead. Only tick one, or God forbid, zero out of three, and you are nothing more than a dreaded little four-letter word: SPAM.

Today, we won't be addressing the differences between great outbound and SPAM, but rather a strategy we employed at Athyna (and still do to a certain extent) that had us aiming to be the best in the world at cold outbound email. This is the story of our 1-million-emails-a-day strategy. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of pipeline.

The Undefeated, Salesforce & Predictable Revenue

Before going too deep into our story, we need to take a short walk down memory lane to the company that wrote the book on outbound: the $247B giant, Salesforce. The company, known for coining the term SaaS and for building the CRM category, was also known for one thing: outbound.

The 'Predictable Revenue' model, pioneered by Aaron Ross at Salesforce, was built around systematic outbound prospecting. The model used dedicated SDRs focusing solely on outbound lead generation.

Aaron Ross, the Godfather of Predictable Revenue, later introduced ‘Cold Calling 2.0,’ a framework to efficiently generate leads without traditional cold calling. An offer the sales world, it turned out, could not refuse.

Instead of direct sales pitches, the focus was on setting up meetings via personalized, targeted outbound emails. Smart. So smart that Salesforce's strategies have been widely studied and emulated by other B2B companies, from California to New Caledonia.

I will admit, although I do not kiss the ring of Don Ross daily, I did read his books when they were released, and his volume-first approach to outbound shaped how I think about outbound still to this day.

The rise of ZoomInfo, Outreach, Apollo

Outbound sales tooling has undergone a boom in recent years. ZoomInfo, long known for their comprehensive but grossly overpriced datasets, were the gold standard for sales intelligence. As tech boomed, the demand for efficient outbound strategies grew, and platforms like Outreach, Salesloft, Mailshake, and more rose to meet it, all earning their keep by helping sales teams scale faster. The era of quality and quantity had begun.

This period saw a surge in outbound across the tech sector. It was a gold rush, with companies of all sizes embracing aggressive growth strategies to keep up.

Amid this frothy environment, Apollo broke the price floor. By making their system data accessible to smaller companies and early-stage startups, Apollo democratized (yes, I know it's the most overused word in tech) access to high-quality sales intelligence and outreach tools. Your mom-and-pop business could finally target customers with the precision of an enterprise sales org.

The timing mattered. It coincided with the rising importance of SDRs and the growing reliance on outbound email as a primary sales channel. Apollo lowered the barrier to entry for companies running sophisticated outbound at scale, previously the domain of the mega-funded-gig-chads of the enterprise world.

Athyna’s journey with outbound

The journey of Athyna began as most startup outbound stories go: scraping our own data, burning multiple domains, and getting all-around shitty results. But let's go back a step, to the decision to build a strong outbound arm at Athyna. This decision was made somewhere around day -90, three full months before we launched the business.

Picture me, my then-co-founder (whose name is forever stricken from the records), a laughably large whiteboard, and a bunch of growth channels scribbled across it. This would decide where we spent our limited time and energy in the early stages of the business. Meta, or Facebook at the time, was a no, no real budget there. That canceled out Google as well. Network, yes, we could lean heavily on our network, and outbound. Good old-fashioned outbound, we could do.

It was economical enough for us to invest time into, and strategically, all the best companies in the world also had a thriving outbound function. Pick a random name out of the Fortune 500 hat, and they would have dominated outbound.

So on day one, week one of the company, we started training our outbound muscle. We were off and running, starting with a humble 50 emails per week.

Our diabolical million emails per day plan

After some trials and tribulations of getting our outbound engine humming, we started to get really good at it, fast. It didn't take long for us to start getting high-quality leads consistently for less than $20. And not too long after that, we had it dialed in so well that we were acquiring a lead within our ICP for between $8-12 on average. Let me remind you, this was 2022.

By this stage, we had scaled our outbound to around 100k emails per week. To do this, in terms of scale and security, we had a number of sub-domains we were running. Think AthynaHQ.com, HeyAthyna.com, WeAreAthyna.com, and more. This was relatively commonplace. Back then, you were safe to send somewhere between 500 and 800 emails per account per day. These were still the glory days of outbound.

The limit here is your brand. If you have a reasonably tight ICP, you can't just keep hitting people over and over again. You'll get marked as spam, and you will slowly begin to do real lasting damage to your brand.

Luckily for us, we were struck by some terrible luck. Our outbound machine, the one channel attributing 85% of our pipeline at the time, broke. And when I say broke, I mean we broke it. Pipeline was as dry as the desert of Arrakis on a summer's day.

During the ensuing panic, we began to plan for building our system back better, stronger, and more redundant so this could never happen again. We decided to build separate siloed accounts for everything from the domain to the Google account to the IP addresses. The silos created security in the system. If something broke, only one tenth would go down instead of the whole house of cards.

The stroke of genius was the decision to go beyond sub-domains, into entirely new sub-brands. The first of which was called Ziggy's Tech Talent, named after my dog, Ziggy.

💡 Note: We actually have brands named after my brother Jack, Tino (our GM), Cucu (our Creative Director), and more.

The beauty of the sub-brand strategy was two-fold: scale and cut-through. To scale an outbound machine past 200,000 emails per week with one brand, no matter how many sub-domains you have, is hard, maybe impossible. Especially if you are trying to tell yourself that you are still talking to your ideal buyer.

Through sub-brands and custom-built, uniquely branded domains, you don't need to worry about crossing the same prospect twice. Second, and maybe more important, is the cut-through piece. Athyna, you see, services all forms of remote talent. For our clients, startups, and enterprises in tech, we find the best sales, marketing, finance, ops, product, design, and engineering talent. Quite the mouthful, right? And when you land on our site, that's what you see. Same in the inbox.

Picture that you are a VP of engineering at a Fortune 500 and you need 10 Salesforce engineers, and you really needed them a week ago. Two emails land in your inbox. One from Athyna saying, "Hey there, we hire great remote talent," and another from WeHireSalesforceDevs.com with the message, "Hey there, we hire great remote Salesforce engineers." Which of those emails is getting a reply?

Armed with the new strategy, I was hit with a sudden sense of dread. I knew what we had was a ticket to the glory land. Not that one channel can drive an exit, but one channel can lead the charge. The thing was, I knew these things didn't always last forever.

"It was a great success, but even great successes come to a natural end," said the great Isaac Asimov. Every great strategy is on borrowed time. And since it's the job of a founder to inject risk into a business, I took it upon myself to up the ante by reverse-engineering a plan to send one million outbound emails per day until our systems broke.

So that's what we did. We set out on a project to understand what it would take to send 1 million outbound emails a day. In the research phase, we realized it would take around 10 sub-brands to handle the volume.

The plan was actually working wonderfully well until March 2024, when Google lowered sending limits meaningfully again under their new sender requirements, making outbound at scale prohibitively difficult. It was already under that umbrella before we undertook this ambitious project, but we were better than most.

In the short time from the project's launch to Google pulling the handbrake on us, we scaled our volume from 200,000 emails per week to 1.3 million. And the annoying thing is that we had the infrastructure in place to reach 5 million by the end of 2024. A full one million outbound emails per day.

It's a real shame, because this was one of those once-in-a-decade strategies that we were executing to perfection. If we'd started the strategy only a few years earlier, there would have been no stopping us. Brett Adcock, founder of Figure.ai, said on an episode of My First Million that his first exit, Vettery, which sold for $100M, was powered solely by teams of VAs in the Philippines who scraped large volumes of emails.

Unfortunately, the strategy simply doesn’t work today. Data is too expensive, and sending limits are too low. Which is a good thing for the world, really. A more pleasant inbox is what we all want after all.

Outbound today

Two years on, the answer to ‘Is outbound dead?’ is still no. The shape of it, though, has changed completely. The 1M-a-day strategy that almost worked for us in 2024 simply cannot work in 2026. Volume is over. A lot of the playbook from 2022 now reads like ancient scripture. Three shifts redrew the map.

First, AI SDRs had their moment, and the verdict is in. Tools like 11x and Artisan promised to replace human SDRs entirely. What they actually proved is that outbound without judgment is just spam at scale.

Second, signal-based outbound has eaten everything. Clay went from upstart to category-defining infrastructure. The smartest go-to-market teams I know now run something like: signal in (job change, funding event, product usage, hiring spike), enrichment in Clay, 1:1 outreach drafted with AI and sent by a human. Not a million emails. Maybe a hundred a week, with reply rates 5-10x what we were seeing at scale.

Third, LinkedIn is quietly the channel now. The same Fortune 500 VP of engineering who used to open cold emails no longer does. But they will read a thoughtful LinkedIn message from someone whose content they recognize.

The takeaway: the 2024 sub-brand strategy is dead; so is volume. What's alive is a much smaller, much sharper version of the same idea. Right message, right person, right time. The economics just moved. Data used to be expensive; attention was cheap. Now data is everywhere, and attention is the only thing that matters.

Fun outbound facts

• The origins of SPAM: The term ‘SPAM’ comes from a Monty Python sketch where the word is repeatedly sung, drowning out other conversation, much like how spam emails overwhelm inboxes.

• Google’s spam filtering history: Gmail, introduced in 2004, revolutionized email with its then-unheard-of 1 GB storage and advanced spam filtering, which has continually evolved to challenge even the most sophisticated outbound strategies.

• Email volume trivia: The world's first spam email was sent in 1978 by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation. He sent it to 393 people via the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet.

Extra reading

• Outbound Sales Strategies, Outreach - June, 2023

• The History of Email Marketing, Knak - February, 2024

• The World’s Hottest Industry: Post-Training - March, 2026

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Lightfield*—an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from your email, calendar, and meetings.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

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