You got a new product and need a hack to get it into the market. This hack costs $124, and it Enrich Layer to a million dollars in annual revenue. This is my go-to market plan right after I finish building Enrich Layer, and I will break down how I did it in this post.
Our constraints
The goal here is to send cold emails at scale without going into spam. I always believed that to get customers, and I have to talk to them. I did not have money for ads, but emails are almost free, right?
Now, It is no coincidence that this hack cost us just $124. We are a bootstrapped company, and whatever we do has to be cheap in actual dollar cost as well as the manpower cost to implement and maintain it. And given that I intended to send tens of thousands of cold emails, including follow-up emails, I ruled out outsourcing the solution to any SaaS plans because I do not believe there is any solution that is cheaper than sending emails via Amazon SES.
In a nutshell:
-
Something cheap.
-
Uses Amazon SES to send emails.
-
Something fast to implement.
-
Something that is easy to maintain.
The "hack" stack
I picked Sendy as my email delivery tool. Sendy cost me $69 as a one-time payment, and I get to host Sendy in perpetuity. Amazing. I can also send as many emails as I want from it without paying more, unlike other SaaS, which will make me pay more the more I use it.
Officially, Sendy is a newsletter app. As a newsletter app, it has an editor for me to craft an email to be sent to a list of email addresses. It even handles unsubscribes. It's perfect for cold email outreach (for me). The only thing that it does not do natively out of the box is to send automated follow-up emails. I work around that by creating new email campaigns for the same audience list.
To receive emails, we use Gmail. Google Workspace, to be exact, with our own custom domain. This works the best for deliverability, and it is fairly priced.