Cold email outreach for a small B2B SaaS

TL;DR

• Goal of the first email is a reply, not a sale — no link, no call booking.
• Three sentences: personalised subject (owner’s name + benefit), a missed opportunity, a curiosity gap, then “reply if you want details”.
• Find the owner’s name and email where businesses reply to reviews — filter for bad reviews, owners answer those.
• Follow up 2–3 days later, then once more ~a week later, then move on.
• Marc’s math: 20 emails/day → 2 replies → 1 customer/day at $199/month.

Details

Results. Marc Lou grew a software product for local businesses (ViralyBot, gamified widgets for escape rooms and similar) to ~$80k in revenue from 2018 with zero ad spend, eventually reaching over $4k MRR, using only cold email — while still learning to code and not a native English speaker.¹²

Step 1 — leads. Go where the customers are listed (TripAdvisor, Yelp, Twitter). For each business, find the owner’s name; review replies are a good source, and filtering for terrible reviews surfaces owner replies — sometimes with a direct email for the manager.³

Step 2 — pipeline. Use a lightweight CRM inside Gmail (he used Streak) with stages: lead → email 1 → follow-up 1 → follow-up 2 → done.³

Step 3 — the email. His template got ~50% opens and ~10% replies.³ Structure:⁴

1. Subject line: owner’s name + the benefit they get (not your product name).
2. Open with their name again.
3. Show a missed opportunity (customers they are losing).
4. A curiosity gap (in his case, shareable mini-game bots).
5. CTA: “reply to this email if you want details” — not “visit my site”, not “book a call”.

Bad example he shows: unpersonalised, “how are you”, a feature list with ticks, unclear CTA — it tries to sell instead of opening a conversation.¹

Step 4 — cadence. No reply → follow up 2–3 days later → final follow-up about a week later → move on. At $199/month, 20 sends a day, 2 replies and 1 subscription a day was the whole growth engine.⁴

Disagreements / caveats

• Marc calls it “the fastest way to make money on the internet” but also the reason he burned out in 2018; he later moved to channels he enjoyed (free tools, pSEO, viral launch videos).⁵
• Works best when the buyer is a findable owner and the price supports manual selling ($199/month here). For low-price consumer tools it does not pay back.
• Deliverability, sending limits and anti-spam law (CAN-SPAM, GDPR in the EU) are not covered by the source — check them before sending at volume.

See also

• Marketing channels for a solo founder — Marc Lou's 11, ranked by cost and effort
• Customer calls at scale — Fastlane's 2,000 calls behind $69k MRR — the same outreach can book discovery calls
• Marc Lou

Footnotes

1. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 00:00 — Marc Lou ↩ ↩²

2. I made these 10 SaaS (and earned $237,631) @ 21:17 — Marc Lou ↩

3. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 01:30 — Marc Lou ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 03:01 — Marc Lou ↩ ↩²

5. I made these 10 SaaS (and earned $237,631) @ 22:52 — Marc Lou ↩