Turning cold email into a $90k MRR business while traveling the world

New York salesman Ryan Doyle spent the pandemic hacking together SaaS projects that never really worked.

Then he met a new partner on X and the pair launched what would become $1,000,000+ ARR lead generation agency, Sales.co. He spent the next four years traveling the world, from Bali to Costa Rica and back to the U.S.

I caught up with the only salesman who codes as he fixes up an old van to tour America. Here's what he had to say. 👇

Taking the leap

I grew up on a farm in New York State then went to business school in California. I started a couple of e-commerce projects there and I thought, “Whatever I do, I'll need to learn how to sell.”

So, I got a job in sales at a software company in Palo Alto and then another in New York City. I was doing 80-hour weeks at this job during the pandemic and teaching myself to code on nights and weekends.

During the BLM protests in the summer of 2020, police would drive around my neighborhood at night blaring sirens to tire people out and stop them from demonstrating.

After two months, I couldn’t take it. I’m thinking, “It’s now or never.”

In truth, my coding sucked. But I thought it was good enough to take that leap.

So, I quit my job and thought I’d trade some manual labor for rent on my family’s farm.

First attempts at a SaaS

My first piece of software would send sales collateral to a prospect and chat with them about it. It was called Chatty and it used Slack’s API.

I built it with no marketing site or anything because I didn't know how. It kind of worked. I reached out to a few of my sales friends and they tried it, but they didn't want to keep using it.

That was six weeks of work. So, I’m thinking, “f***.”

The next thing I tried was a newsletter called salesadvice.io. People kept saying to me, “You know stuff about sales, you should write about it.”

So, I wrote like six issues. Then I realized I’d said everything I felt I had to say.

But I did make $500.

Persistence… and poetry

A turning point was getting access to GPT in November 2020. At that time, no one was getting GPT access unless you were cool. I was not cool. I was nobody. Still am.

So, I started writing a haiku to the CTO of OpenAI every day on Twitter. And it worked.

I used GPT to build a cold email writer called Magic Sales Bot. It was a s*** product, but the hype of AI was unreal and I got $1,000 MRR. I got funding from Calm Fund. I got press. I was taking a lot of calls. People were interested in this thing.

But the way I went about the product was ultimately stupid. It got better over time, but it wasn’t the SaaS I wanted to make.

Leveraging a bromance on X

A year and a half of Magic Sales Bot goes by, and I’m sharing everything on X. Someone I’m learning from there is Jakob Greenfeld. I take one of his scraping courses. I then download all of his blog posts to read during an off-grid weekend.

As I read them, I was like, man I wish I could think as clearly as this guy.

Then he DMs me and I DM him.

Hey, cool project bro.

Yeah man, this is cool.

We talked on Twitter for six months until eventually he’s like, “Why don't we do cold email for people?” I really didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to deal with clients. But he persuaded me to try it.

We didn't actually meet until four or five months later in person. By then we’d already hit 10K MRR.

Using GPT for productivity

Sales.co is a lead generation agency. We’ve built a few of our own tools to scrape leads. We then have tooling to personalize our outreach. We also have tools for productivity.

We use a lot of GPT and we run everything out of Airtable.

When we get responses for a customer, we'll feed that text to GPT and it'll get categorized as "positive", "neutral", or "has a question." It can then be assigned to a certain Airtable user.

That lets our people prioritize their work. It also lets us say at the end of the week: “Here’s what’s going on. Here’s who we’re gonna target next.”

That story you tell customers is super important. There will be weeks where activity slows down. We need to show we’re not just sitting on our hands.

We have a process for everything and we keep it simple. But it took work to get there. We only started categorizing responses with GPT once we’d processed several hundred thousand emails ourselves.

Jakob and I did every single piece of work on the business itself. He did all the lead lists, I did all the copy and the sales calls, the infrastructure and the initial hiring of VAs.

From free to $1,000,000+ ARR

Before we actually started, we tried running cold email for free for a week for three companies. We offered to keep it going for $500/mo, then $1,000/mo, $1,500/mo and eventually $2,000. Two of the companies decided to stay with us.

We didn’t just start out at $2,000. We were asking people all the time what worked for them.

Back then, we would get on the phone with anybody. We were offering every money-back guarantee possible. If you don't like it, that's ok. We'll give you your money back. We made it easy for people to spend money.

We failed at several business models initially. A commission-only model, a smaller, per-meeting model.

Now, we’ve laid down enough process that we know who we're meant to work with. We know the business model we should go forward with.

Growing the business

Jakob is the CEO of Sales.co and runs the day-to-day. I'm just out doing special projects and taking sales calls when somebody wants to reach out to me personally.

One line of business we're exploring is going into a young startup and helping them get to product market fit. I'm doing that with two companies right now. People will always need help getting more business.

The next thing I'm working on is Damn Good Leads. People have wanted to buy niche, contextual lead lists from us for a long time. I want to make that into a product.

I also love building things that sell themselves.

Sales.co is like that. We run cold email for ourselves. Another project that's like that: When I scrape every online newsletter, I can then scrape those newsletters for every advertiser. I can now email all those newsletters and say "do you want this list of all these advertisers?" I love shit like that.

When I think about how to grow the business, I think about that dynamic. I want a new product to be sellable by cold email. I want it to be able to use itself to grow itself.

I also like to try things that are pretty left-field. In a world where everybody is trying to be so smart, you can stand by giving yourself permission to do stupid s***.

I wanted my reply rate to be bigger, so f*** it, I just increased the text size. Sometimes stupid s*** works.

Traveling America

Speaking of stupid s***, I’m part-way through kitting out a van. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for years because I wanted to work with my hands a bit and build something physical that I could be proud of.

I want to travel the States, go to every national park and maybe go down to Mexico. It could take a year. It could take two. But it'll be my home whenever I’m in the U.S.

I love that I can do my digital work then immediately turn around and do this physical work till 11 pm every night. I'm not feeling frustrated. I'm enjoying it because I'm switching lanes.

In reality, I have no idea how to do any of this van stuff. But it's all on YouTube. Anything you want is out there.

Relax. And don’t do B2C

Have a determined goal and be flexible with how you approach it. You're always going to run into roadblocks. Be strong with where you want to go, but flexible in how you get there.

I would push you to build B2B for the money. I would also push you to build something that you can sell. Think, who's the individual that you're building it for? If you don't have that purpose in mind, you're just gonna build a hodgepodge.

Then, make that selling event happen as early as possible. Better yet, go out and do something for free for people when you’re scoping out your business.

Beyond that, I’d say relax. And don't do B2C.