How we used cold email to get our first 4 clients in a month with <$50 (the stack, the hacks, the wins)
We knew from day one that we couldn’t rely on warm leads - we didn’t have any. So we bet everything on cold outreach. Why cold email? Because it scales, it’s direct, and it doesn’t cost much if you’re clever. But we didn’t just spray and pray. We were super targeted. We used Apify to find small businesses that had just started running ads; either in the Facebook Ads Library or via the Google Ads Transparency Center. New advertisers = likely spending on growth = more open to a better website. Then we scraped their emails, websites, and phone numbers using another Apify plugin. Honestly kind of wild what you can automate with a few smart scrapers. Our cold email setup (~$39) We experimented with a bunch of providers but eventually landed on a super simple, reliable stack: Google inboxes, Instantly.ai for sending + managing campaigns, ~15 emails/day per inbox, across 4 domains and 3 inboxes. We kept it clean and warmed everything properly. But again what really mattered was what we sent. We figured out how to call the Lovable.dev backend API endpoints, locally using Python, from our scraped list to generate a redesigned version of each business’s homepage. So our cold emails looked like this: “Hey, made a version of your homepage — click here to check it out. Let me know if you want it live.” We could effectively design 100 websites in 10 minutes and send them all out to our prospects. That one move improved our response rate significantly. One guy actually thanked us for cold emailing them XD. LinkedIn follow ups ($0 free trial) We also ran LinkedIn campaigns alongside email - nothing crazy, just Sales Navigator for targeting and a personalisation tool + our hacked Lovable tool for outreach. We liked LinkedIn, because it shows a preview of the website that the internal tool. It added a few leads, re-engaged some email ghosts, and helped build trust. The results? 🚀 4 clients in ~4 weeks 💰 $4500 💸 ~$39 spent total