I want to tell you about the email that changed everything. Not a successful one—a spectacular failure.
It was 2021. I had spent three hours crafting what I thought was the perfect cold email. Personalized opening. Value proposition. Clear call to action. I hit send and felt proud.
The reply came 20 minutes later: "Please remove me from your list. I have no idea how I got on it, and this is the third identical email I've received this week."
Identical. Identical. I had spent three hours on that email, and it sounded like a template. Worse, it sounded like a template that three other people were also using.
That moment started a journey. I became obsessed with understanding what makes cold outreach work—and what makes it fail. I sent thousands of emails. I tracked everything. I studied copywriting, psychology, sales methodology. I interviewed people who replied and (more importantly) people who didn't.
I did everything by hand. Research on LinkedIn. Company websites. Recent news. I wrote every email from scratch, tailoring each one to the person. My reply rate was incredible—about 15%. But I could only send 10-15 emails a day. At that pace, I'd never build the business I wanted.
I tried every tool on the market. The expensive ones, the cheap ones, the "AI-powered" ones. They all had the same problem: they turned my thoughtful outreach into spam. My volume went up to 200 emails a day, but my reply rate crashed to 2%. I was sending more and connecting less. It felt awful.
I started building my own system. A way to research prospects automatically but thoughtfully. To write personalized emails at scale without losing the human touch. It was clunky, held together with scripts and APIs, but it worked. 100 emails a day. 12% reply rate. This was it.
I refined the system. Added AI that actually understood context, not just pattern-matching. Built it to run locally, because I was tired of trusting my data to companies that saw me as a data point. Made it simple enough that anyone could use it. Suplex was born from four years of trial, error, and obsession.
Today, Suplex sends emails that I'm proud of. Emails that get responses like "This is the most thoughtful cold email I've ever received" instead of "Remove me from your list." Emails that start real conversations between real humans.
That's the journey. From shame to strategy to a tool that embodies everything I learned along the way.
If you're on your own journey with cold outreach—struggling with the grind, torn between volume and authenticity—I built Suplex for you. Because I've been exactly where you are.
Here's to better emails,