okay this is a bit rambly but i want to share it while it’s still fresh.
a few weeks ago we were working on speakoro.
the original thing was pretty simple:
find speakers, find events, sell the email addresses for upcoming editions.
we spent weeks building it. crawling data, pulling linkedin posts, all of that.
and then we talked to actual speakers.
and they were like…
“cool, but how do i know these emails are any good?”
which, yeah. fair.
that’s when it clicked.
i’d been reading this yc post about full-stack ai companies. the idea was:
don’t sell the tool. become the business. sell the outcome.
so instead of selling email addresses, we said:
we’ll get you speaking gigs. and when you get paid, we take 10%.
way more risk on us. but also… more aligned, y’know?
.. and once we made that decision, everything else changed.
because now outbound actually had to work.
our theory at the time was:
AI is good enough now that you should be able to automate most of this
so we did the obvious thing.
find leads. message them. reply with ai.
first few batches were fine.
then we sent the full list (~2,700 emails).
and basically all of it went to spam. like 80–90%.
not “bad response” / ignore.. just gone.
and that sent us down a rabbit hole.
turns out email isn’t something you set up once.
warm-up isn’t just a phase.
and sending limits aren’t suggestions.
you need multiple domains, multiple inboxes, continuous warm-up, strict per-account limits, and you have to reply from the same identities you send from.
and you have to keep doing this, basically forever.
none of that is obvious until you break it.
we looked around for a tool that just handled the whole system.
couldn’t really find one.
so cold cannon started as…
“okay, we need this to exist or we can’t sell outcomes.”
what’s still kind of insane to me is the timeline.
from realizing this was broken to having something working took about two weeks.
not because it was easy.
just very compressed. lots of learning very fast.
anyway. this feels like the same pattern i keep running into.
AI makes it easier than ever to build things.
… but the hard part is still figuring out how to actually deliver something that works in the real world.
and cold cannon is just the latest place that lesson showed up.
check it out .. cold cannon is launching soon!
i’ll share more as we keep going.
— yazin