How we started

Aakash and I never started with sales. Instead, we were trying to find a way to grow revenue for our side business: Daily Dropout.

DailyDropout.FYI was a pandemic project - newsletter - that grow up to 100,000 subscribers. We made money by selling ad slots to advertisers.

I would do a bunch of manual outreach to secure ad slots. Around the same time, Aakash, should us a new tech with a funny name - "GPT-3". We initially used it to write funny stories. Then, he trained a few shot model on my sales emails.

And pretty soon, the model started sounding a lot like me. It also did way better in my sales email conversions than me alone.

We looked at each other and said, "We have to bring this to the large companies we've worked with".

Be the CEO of your own outreach

Today, the sales experience for reps sucks. It's output-based, clunky, and manual. Here's a screenshot of a Salesforce dashboard of "tasks" that reps are made to complete daily.

Instead of providing high-value feedback - like custom research, strategy, or offers - reps are forced to look at screens like this. Daily, they dial, send templated emails, and are measured on charts that show "activities".

With several outreach strategies - outbound, inbound, conferences, etc. - each channel is being more saturated. Here's where AI can come in.

Outbound + AI is the only channel that scales infinitely

Cold outreach is one of the best ways to figure out if your product resonates in the market.

If you can sell to a stranger, you have the keys to growth.

Selling cold means you've done a few things:

• you know what message resonates with your audience
• you likely have a built out 'asset library'
• you have your infrastructure setup

The company that has these setup has a GTM moat compared to one that doesn't.

For unicorns like Ramp, Athelas, Verkada, a solid outbound motion has been responsible for a lot of growth.

Often cold outreach can be the lowest channel for Cost of Customer Acquisition (CaC). You can send a lot of emails, recycle contacts, and keep your brand top of mind for prospects.

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However, with basic automations available today, anyone can do outbound. Outbound has steadily gotten less effective. Strategies that'd be effective - like sending based on triggers, or hyper personalizing, or sending an email before a conference - has been traded out for high-volume campaigns with little thought.

We work with good sellers - but they’re not outbound gurus. They shouldn’t have to be.

In our journey working with hundreds of selling teams now, we see the same pattern:

We see sales people who are great later down the funnel - e.g., closing. But they may not necessarily know all the complexities of setting up top funnel (DKIM, inbox rotating, etc.).

They shouldn't have to. These are low value activities that can be done better for prospects and receipients with AI.

SellScale aims to abstract away the complexities of cold campaigns. Making outreach should be easy. The end result is personalization and outreach that's delightful.

Will cold outreach go away?

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ .. The second question is actually the more important of the two. - Jeff Bezos

We think companies will always be doing outreach, because it's hard to start a business. Companies will always have to hunt to grow:

• There will always be companies starting up
• There will always be new product lines with zero brand awareness
• There will always be moments where you want to grow faster

Even classically "Product Led Growth" companies, like Notion, have SDR. Doing outreach is a classic problem, whether you're moving upmarket or just starting up.

Our mission

We're here to help companies grow revenue with Artificial General Intelligence.

We're starting with the hardest workflow to crack: cold outreach.

Just like Aakash and I realized withour newsletter business - we want to introduce a new era of prospecting. This is a world where there's less spam, outreach is more targeted, and selling is delightful.

Join us or drop us a line for more info.

SellScale.com/careers