Does cold outreach work for founders?
Usually not, the way most founders do it. Two in three said it didn’t work, and the typical campaign got about 2 replies per 100 messages. But founders who wrote to a narrow, well-chosen list said it worked three times as often as founders who blasted a big one.
Syed Asif Sultan · every number regenerable from the repository
Short answer: usually not, the way most founders do it.
I read what founders said after doing cold outreach for their own product. Two in three said it didn’t work. The typical campaign got about 2 replies for every 100 messages. Most of the ones who said never got a customer from it.
But it isn’t hopeless. The founders who wrote to a narrow list, with a real reason to contact each person, said it worked 3 times as often as the ones who blasted a big list.
One thing you should know. I’m building GTM for One, which writes cold emails. So I have every reason to want these numbers to look good. Most of them don’t, and I’ve left them that way.
Here’s where it comes from. I read 327 posts from founders in seven subreddits (r/SaaS, r/SideProject, r/startups, r/indiehackers, r/Entrepreneur, r/microsaas and r/buildinpublic) that mention outreach next to numbers. 171 were founders reporting on outreach for their own product. And 78 were really ads for outreach tools, lists or agencies, often dressed up as a founder’s story. I left those out.
What a typical campaign looked like
The typical founder reached out to about 200 people. A quarter sent 46 or fewer. A quarter sent more than 513. Almost all of them were selling to businesses.
98 said how many replies they got. The typical reply rate was 2.3%. A quarter got none at all. 36 founders said outright that nobody replied.
Replies aren’t customers. The typical founder booked fewer than 1 meeting per 100 messages. 72 said how many paying customers came from it. 51 got none.
Who you write to matters most
I sorted each campaign by who it went to. A narrow list means a specific kind of buyer with a reason to write to each one. Say, Shopify stores that just raised their prices, or agencies hiring a salesperson. A broad list means a big generic pull, like “small businesses” or a database export.
| Who they wrote to | Founders | Said it worked | Typical reply rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| A narrow list, with a reason to write to each one | 46 | 60% (18 of 30) | 4.8% |
| A big, generic list | 40 | 20% (7 of 35) | 0.6% |
| The post didn’t say | 85 | 27% (18 of 66) | 3% |
That’s the biggest gap I found. Narrow lists got about 7 times the reply rate. And founders who used them were 3 times as likely to say it worked.
It makes sense. A message to someone with the exact problem you solve isn’t really cold. It’s relevant. A message to a random list is spam, however well it’s written.
How you write it matters less
You’d expect writing every message by hand to win. It didn’t, here.
| How they wrote it | Founders | Said it worked | Typical reply rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Written by hand for each person | 29 | 32% (6 of 19) | 2.4% |
| A template, lightly tailored | 27 | 64% (16 of 25) | 4.6% |
| The same message to everyone | 9 | 50% (4 of 8) | 2% |
| The post didn’t say | 106 | 22% (17 of 79) | 2% |
Founders using a tailored template said it worked more often than founders writing each one from scratch. These groups are small, so don’t read too much into it. But it fits the point above. A decent message to the right person beats a perfect message to the wrong one.
Email against everything else
| Channel | Founders | Said it worked | Typical reply rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 86 | 19% (12 of 62) | 1.5% | |
| 21 | 53% (9 of 17) | 12.5% | |
| DMs elsewhere (Reddit, X, Instagram) | 19 | 39% (7 of 18) | 8.3% |
| Phone calls | 8 | 60% (3 of 5) | 10.2% |
| A mix | 28 | 36% (8 of 22) | 0% |
Email was the most common channel, and the one founders were least happy with. LinkedIn and DMs did better on replies. But those groups are small, so I wouldn’t switch channels on this alone.
Email is also the easiest to do badly at scale. It’s cheap to send 2,000 of them. That makes it tempting to skip the hard part, which is choosing who to write to.
So does cold outreach work?
It works when you know exactly who you’re writing to and why. It mostly doesn’t when you’re hoping volume will make up for not knowing.
That matches what I found in Where did founders find their first customers? Founders still stuck talked about cold email more than the ones who’d got customers. My guess is the reason is here. Of the campaigns that failed and said who they went to, 28 of 40 were big generic lists.
What I’d do
Pick one narrow kind of buyer. One industry, one size, one role. If you can’t name them in a line, you’re not ready to write to anyone.
Find a reason for each one. They just posted about the problem. They’re hiring for it. Their reviews mention it. That reason is what makes the message worth reading.
Start with 50, not 5,000. The typical founder here sent about 200. With a narrow list you’ll learn as much from 50 as from a huge one, without burning your domain.
Use a short template you tailor. One line about why you’re writing to them, one about what you do, one question. Don’t spend an hour on each.
Judge it by meetings, not opens. If 50 messages to a narrow list get you no conversations, change the list or the offer, not the subject line.
If you’re buying a list, I priced what a verified address costs in What does a verified B2B email cost?
What I can’t tell you
These are Reddit posts. People post when something worked, and they post when they’re frustrated and want help. The middle, where it sort of worked, is probably under-counted.
Many posts don’t say how the list was built or how the message was written. Half the campaigns were “didn’t say” on targeting. The comparison rests on the rest.
That’s also the field the two readers agreed on least. A second reader went through a random 33 of the posts without seeing the first reading. They agreed on the verdict 18 times out of 19, and on the number sent 16 times out of 16. But they agreed on narrow against broad only 13 times out of 19. So treat that split as a strong lean, not an exact figure.
A lot of outreach advice online is written by people selling outreach tools. I removed the posts that were clearly doing that. Some subtler ones may have slipped through.
How I did it
The posts: every post since 1 January 2022 in the seven subreddits above, from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive. A small model sorted each one: is the poster building something of their own? The method is in Building got easy. Getting anyone to care didn’t.
The sample: every post, one per founder and with at least a few sentences of text, that mentions cold email, cold DMs, cold calls or outreach next to a number sent and a number of results. 327 in all. I read each in full. I kept founders doing outreach for their own product, with at least one result number. I only recorded numbers the post states, and worked out reply rates only where it gave both counts.
The groups: “Narrow” needed a specific buyer and a reason to contact each one, or a list picked by hand. A whole industry with no reason per contact counted as broad. “Said it worked” is the founder’s own verdict, counted only where it was a clear yes or no.
Cite as: GTM for One (gtmforone.com), “Does cold outreach work for founders?”, https://www.gtmforone.com/blog/does-cold-outreach-work-for-founders.
We wrote this while building GTM for One: type your domain, it finds your buyers, verifies their addresses, and writes every email. You read them and hit send.
See it on your own domain