The first issue of Houck’s Newsletter was about how to send good cold emails to investors.

To wrap up our first full calendar year I’m revisiting the topic of cold email but through a different lens. This time we’re talking about how to effectively use it as a growth channel for your startup.

I’ve gone deep down this rabbit hole in the last few months and was surprised to learn how effective it can be since cold email gets a bad rap. It turns out the key is to not send cold email but, instead, cold content.

I’ve done my fair share of cold emailing but my friend Sam Claassen is a master. After leading growth for the YC-backed startup SafetyWing for a few years and helping them reach a Series B, he founded Startup Cookie and now helps founders build outbound engines.

We caught up this week to talk about how I can use outbound to grow Megaphone, and I realized it’d make sense to pass along what we talked about to other founders.

In this deep dive you’ll learn

Let’s get this out of the way: cold email has a perception problem.

We feel it every day as we suffer through endless spam messages in our inboxes. Outbound email has spammy and oversaturated, with 99% of it being complete garbage.

The problem is that anyone can now set up dozens of inboxes and send thousands of cold emails a day, at a very low cost. Predictably this has led to a huge rise in low-quality emails.

But, if you know what you’re doing, the channel works for many businesses including what Sam does with Startup Cookie. If you do it right you can acquire almost 100% of your users through outbound email.

So cold emailing is far from dead. In fact, the rise of low quality email has actually lowered the bar and made standing out easier than you’d think.

In recent years, tools have emerged that allow the setup of unlimited inboxes for less than $100 a month. Obtaining email contacts and leads is also cheaper and easier than ever before with tools like ContactOut, Opps, and Apollo.

Anyone with something to sell has realized they can just play a volume game where a poor conversion rate barely even matters. Instead, you’ve got unlimited emails — the strategy can be to just increase the volume until you hit your goals.

This is the essence of "spamming," and it's, unfortunately, effective — which is why the volume of poor cold emails has increased dramatically in recent years.

Even with deliverability penalties meant to protect inboxes, like the new ones Gmail is rolling out in Q1, It's still quite easy to land in someone's inbox. You just have to be good enough to catch their attention.

In the past, personalization was key. The more personalized an email was, the higher the chance people felt it was manually sent from a “real” person rather than a mass send, and therefore the more likely the sender was to get a response.

AI has changed this. Now, extreme personalization indicates it was written by AI, and hyper-personalization can feel inauthentic and creepy. Effective personalization requires a manual approach, which doesn't scale well.

Ideally you have product-market fit and know precisely how to communicate your value. If so, focus on good targeting and clever copywriting for easy growth — but most startups don’t fall into this category until way down the line.

The rest will need to create something new that’s related to your product that is easy for readers to quickly understand and, with good targeting, is relevant to them.

The simplest way to do this is through content creation. The goal is for recipients to know it's a cold email, but not mind because it’s so helpful.

In particular it’s an ideal approach for startups in new categories with complex positioning.

Content enhances the quality and performance of outbound campaigns, but most founders never even think of outbound email as a channel for content.

Using content as the basis for your outreach forces you to craft the best email possible, not the best sales pitch.  

It also builds trust and authority — two things outbound email normally lacks as a channel (think about it — even if you do read a cold email you likely don’t walk away thinking the person writing it is a subject matter expert). It helps you stand out from spam and low quality lead magnets, demonstrating immediate value.

The best part of building an outbound content strategy, though, is that you can use the same content pieces to help grow through a second channel — one that offsets the weaknesses of cold outbound.

Traditional content channels (SEO, social media, newsletters) don’t generate immediate revenue — they’re long-term growth strategies. Much if not all of the content you create for outbound email can be repurposed for your SEO-optimized blog or other content channels with minimal tweaks to build authority.

That way you have longterm, authority-building channels and also immediate revenue generation from the same content pieces.

Most cold email recipients won't convert immediately. A periodic newsletter provides an excuse to follow up with those who opened or engaged with your campaign.

Expect more of a transactional audience for the newsletter, though, rather than a highly engaged one that you’d get by growing on social media, or even through paid ads.

People appreciate learning new things. If you can solve a problem, they're more likely to consider your product.

Focus on the workflow, using your product for a demo if necessary, but prioritize the solution over advertising.

Many aspire to be thought leaders. Leverage this by interviewing customers or industry experts for insights and send these out via email.

This type of content is particularly good to repurpose into other content forms and social media posts or a low-effort podcast.

I added 15,000 newsletter subscribers earlier this year by using lead magnets on social media, but they’re also great for cold outbound.

Offer free and simple tools or resources that help people in one very specific way that’s easy to understand.

Outbound content allows for immediate feedback — a high open rate means a good subject line and good deliverability, and a good click rate or response rate means compelling, interesting content.

Start with a single piece of content rather than trying to build out an entire strategy from day one. Collect learnings and iterate — maybe even try different types of content (video can work well in emails). Once you’re confident in your approach, build out a full campaign and funnel.

Outbound email is not dead, but its traditional execution is.

Many startups still flourish using this channel. Success requires a mastery of deliverability, creative content development, and exceptional copywriting to craft compelling subject lines and calls to action.

Sending an email is easy; sending a cold email that converts is exceptionally challenging.

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