The GTM Engineer Podcast

In today's episode, I chat with Leo, founder at Ascend AI, about building AI automation infrastructure with ROI as the actual design constraint—not just shipping chatbots and email sequences, but end-to-end workflows that automate judgment, not just tasks. 

He walks through two campaigns in detail: a B2B SaaS client selling to VP Engineering at mid-market tech companies, where the team built a Clay waterfall using GitHub activity signals—open source dependency issues, legacy migration hiring—to score companies from zero to a hundred on signal density, generate a pain hypothesis for each lead, and show up in the inbox with messaging that referenced what was actually breaking in their engineering stack rather than a generic title-based pitch; and a D2C skincare brand on Shopify struggling with repeat purchase rates, where Leo's team built a post-purchase automation using Make and an AI orchestration layer on GPT-4 to predict next likely purchase, segment customers into education, replenishment, and cross-sell tracks, and trigger personalized emails, UGC sequences, and SMS offers in sequence—pushing repeat purchase rate from 20% to 34% within 40 days, email and SMS revenue per recipient up 62%, and support tickets down 41%. The throughline across both is the same: find the friction point, put intelligence into it, close the loop. Leo's path here is one of the more winding ones—laser engineering degree, left the country, taught himself digital marketing and SEO while freelancing abroad, met a product manager at a cafe in Azerbaijan and fell in love with the discipline on the spot, spent two years in PM working with startups until a growth roadmap he built got featured on Reforge, transitioned into GTM engineering when Clay started gaining traction, and eventually pivoted into AI automation when no-code tools made it possible to bridge the two without a developer background. His prediction: GTM stacks will eventually AB test their own logic autonomously, the GTM engineer role will morph into a hybrid of PM, data engineer, growth marketer, and DevOps, and the most interesting near-term development is models like Claude Opus acting as GTM architects that plan and delegate to other models and human devs underneath. His advice: think from the business owner perspective, not the tool perspective—ask what decision or task is stuck, not what you can build with a given tool—pick one vertical, master one or two tools in it, share your work in public as you go, and fix high-friction points end to end before adding more nodes on top. 

Enjoy 🙂

(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(0:32) What Ascend AI Does: End-to-End AI Automation Infrastructure With ROI in Mind 
(2:25) B2B Campaign: GitHub Signal Scoring, Tech Debt Hypothesis, Waterfall Enrichment for VP Engineering Outreach 
(6:10) Why Signal Work Only Matters If It Shows Up in the Actual Email 
(8:15) D2C Campaign: Shopify Skincare Brand, Post-Purchase AI Layer, Repeat Purchase Rate From 20% to 34% 
(11:22) Automating Judgment, Not Just Tasks: The Core Philosophy Behind the Agency 
(12:34) Leo's Journey: Laser Engineering to Freelance SEO to PM to GTM Engineer to AI Agency Founder 
(18:05) Predictions: Self-Optimizing GTM Stacks, Hybrid Roles, and Claude Opus as GTM Architect 
(21:41) Advice: Fix What's Stuck, Pick One Vertical, Master One Stack, Share in Public

🔗 CONNECT WITH LEO
 
👥 LinkedIn 
💻 Website

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Michael, founder at DFY Meetings, about why channel selection is the diagnosis most cold email agencies skip entirely—and why he regularly talks clients out of cold email and into direct mail or Upwork depending on how competitive their category actually is. 

His framework is straightforward: the more crowded the outreach landscape for a given offer, the more unique the channel needs to be, which is why a bulldozer rental company can still crush it on cold email while a web dev agency has basically no room to stand out there but can own Upwork or direct mail. On segmentation, he breaks it into two types—logical segments (target companies hiring Salesforce developers if you do Salesforce dev) and personal segments (you're an e-commerce agency and an avid mountain biker, so let's go after mountain bike brands and mention it)—both of which get you most of the personalization benefit without burning API credits or hiring writers. The campaign story that stands out most is the direct mail play: handwritten cards, personalized or joke gifts tied to a specific angle, sent to a dream 100 list, followed up by email and phone. One example was sending a branded piggy bank with a note about all the money they were about to make together. No one does it, almost no one will start doing it because it's expensive and painful, and the conversion rate is accordingly ridiculous. Michael's backstory runs through Instagram page networks in high school, a first exit before graduation, a VA agency he built in Bangladesh and sold, another VA business with an international team he also sold, and finally DFY Meetings—all four grown on cold outbound, which is exactly why the agency works. His prediction: cold email isn't dying, costs are just rising the way Google Ads and Facebook Ads costs rose before it, and the real problem isn't that more people are good at it but that more people are in it making noise without being good at it. His advice for anyone starting out: ask your first two or three clients to forward you the cold emails they receive, spend 30 minutes going through them, and just don't sound like any of those. 

Enjoy 🙂

(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(0:30) What DFY Meetings Does: Cold Email, Direct Mail, and Managed Upwork Applications 
(1:19) The Channel Diagnosis: Why Michael Often Talks Clients Out of Cold Email First 
(3:01) Segmentation Framework: Logical Segments vs Personal Segments 
(4:03) Best Performing Campaigns: Wholesale Printer Ink and Why Boring Offers Win on Cold Email 
(4:29) The Direct Mail Play: Handwritten Cards, Personalized Gifts, and Ridiculous Conversion Rates 
(5:44) Cold Email Cost Per Lead Is Rising—And Why Direct Mail Can Actually Be Cheaper at the High End 
(6:57) Michael's Journey: Instagram Pages in High School, Three Exits, and Landing on DFY Meetings 
(9:08) Predictions: Cold Email Won't Die, Costs Will Rise, Noise Will Increase 
(10:33) The History of Cold Email Saturation: From Manual VA Scraping to 99-Dollar Unlimited Sending 
(12:49) Advice: Ask Your Clients to Forward You the Cold Emails They Receive

🔗 CONNECT WITH MICHAEL

👥 LinkedIn
💻 Website
🎥 YouTube 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Helena, GTM engineer at Asksuite, a global hotel tech company bringing AI-driven automations to hotels worldwide. 

Helena works on the inside—revenue operations, data systems, Power BI dashboards, and the automations that connect all the tools together—rather than on the client-facing side, which makes for a genuinely different perspective on what GTM engineering looks like when you're building infrastructure for a company that's been prospecting since 2018. The standout initiative she shares is a Croatia expansion workflow built entirely in Clay: pull hotels from Google Maps, hit a webhook that checks each hotel's website against their internal database, surface all past prospection history, run an AI agent over that context to assign priority tiers, and hand the SDR a ranked call list instead of a raw dump—so the person who picks up the phone is spending their time on the accounts most likely to convert, not the ones who never picked up across eight attempts. The insight underneath it is simple but underused: six-plus years of first-party CRM data is an asset most companies are sitting on without realizing it, and Clay is one of the better environments for finally doing something with it. Helena's path to GTM engineering is probably the most unexpected one on this show so far—she was a martial arts instructor breaking wooden boards for a living, found a revenue operations internship posting at Asksuite while studying information systems, connected the dots between coaching children through karate and designing prospection infrastructure, applied, got in, and now calls it the job she'll do for the rest of her life. More Clay cells, fewer boards. Her prediction: prospection eventually becomes a button—not yet, but close, and what genuinely excites her is that the democratization of these tools means an SDR who can't write a line of code will soon be able to run the same quality campaigns a technical GTM engineer runs today. Her advice: stay curious, keep testing tools outside your current stack, because that's exactly how Clay entered Asksuite in the first place. 

Enjoy 🙂

(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(0:32) What Asksuite Does: AI-Driven Automations for Hotels Worldwide 
(0:44) Helena's Role: Revenue Operations, Dashboards, and GTM Infrastructure From the Inside 
(1:37) The Croatia Expansion Workflow: Google Maps, Webhooks, Past Prospection Data, and AI Priority Tiers 
(4:57) Why First-Party CRM Data Plus Clay Is an Underused Combination 
(6:37) Helena's Journey: Martial Arts Instructor to GTM Engineer 
(8:48) Predictions: Prospection as a Button, and Why Democratization of GTM Tools Matters 
(11:41) Advice: Stay Curious, Keep Testing Outside Your Current Stack

🔗 CONNECT WITH HELENA

👥 LinkedIn 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Danilo, founder at Viralnetix, about why he's deliberately steering away from the oversaturated B2B SaaS and IT services space and into niches most agencies won't touch—insurtech, CPG brands, and others where two-plus years of domain experience becomes the actual differentiator rather than just another Clay workflow. 

He walks through two campaigns in detail: an insurtech ABM play targeting roughly 600 European insurance companies where the team built a full signal-tracking system around leadership changes, new offices, and board movements, then sent automated emails the moment a gap appeared—and where, against conventional wisdom, longer emails outperformed short ones because that's just how insurance people want to be talked to; and a US protein brand campaign where a single SDR was spending his entire day manually building Google Maps lists and sending 20 emails, forgetting to follow up whenever a deal came in, and losing pipeline in both directions—until Viralnetix rebuilt the whole thing in Clay and Instantly, mapped every juice bar and chiropractor in the US, and got him to 2,000 emails a day with his only job now being to call back the positive replies. Danilo's origin story is one of the more entertaining ones I've heard on this show—charging his parents 10% commission on cash at age six, grinding through dropshipping and affiliate marketing failures at 14, building Instagram pages to 100k followers and selling them, launching the first version of Viralnetix as an influencer management company at 19, realizing they were sending manual PDFs for two to three hours per email with nothing to show for it, joining Jeremy at TC9, becoming a partner, burning out hard enough to spend two full months lying on the grass doing nothing, and coming back to restart Viralnetix with Jana. His prediction: Clay tables as a skill will get automated, but the experts who understand the underlying logic will get faster and better because of AI rather than redundant—and Claude Code is already worth watching as an alternative for qualifying records at a scale and cost Clay can't match. His advice: if you're non-technical, go deep on Clay and email infrastructure first; if you're technical, go straight to Claude Code; either way, do it manually by hand first so you actually understand why automating it matters. 

Enjoy 🙂

(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(0:28) What Viralnetix Does: Growth Partner, Not Just a Lead Gen Agency 
(1:05) Niching Into Insurtech and CPG to Escape Agency Saturation 
(3:27) InsurTech Campaign: ABM on 600 European Companies, Signal Tracking, Long Emails That Actually Worked 
(6:42) CPG Campaign: US Protein Brand, 20 Emails a Day to 2,000 a Day, SDR Now Just Closes 
(9:01) The Real Competition Isn't Other Agencies—It's the Manual SDR 
(12:20) Danilo's Journey: 10% Commission at Age Six to Burning Out as a Partner at TC9 
(16:37) Restarting Viralnetix After Two Months of Doing Absolutely Nothing 
(17:17) Predictions: Clay Tables Will Get Automated, Experts Will Survive, Claude Code Is Coming 
(20:01) Advice: Learn Clay End-to-End First, Then Upgrade to Claude Code If You Want to Go Deeper

🔗 CONNECT WITH DANILO
 
👥 LinkedIn 
💻 Website 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Sarvar from CBREX, about building a talent OS that sits between enterprises with complex hiring needs and the specialized recruitment agencies best equipped to serve them—a marketplace model that took 7-8 years of face-to-face credibility building to get right, and one that only works because the team was disciplined enough to say no to agencies and clients who didn't fit the ICP. 

Sarvar walks through how CBREX approaches both sides of the marketplace differently: vendors (agencies) require trust built over time before they'll commit their own resources to a platform, while clients require tight revenue and persona banding to avoid the unit economics collapse that comes from scaling without curation. His GTM journey is one of the more interesting ones I've heard—analyst shadowing a founding team with a hundred-plus years of combined recruitment experience, then customer success, then product, then marketing, then sales, until co-founder Divyashree pointed at GTM engineering and said this is what we should be doing. His prediction: in an AI-saturated world where every tool looks the same, differentiation comes down to the trust and experience you build—illustrated by an 11-month deal with a GCC leader who signed a potentially multi-million dollar annual contract without having personally used the product once. His advice for aspiring GTM engineers: understand that this is a process role, not a tools role, because tools will keep changing and the ones who survive are the ones who can implement the repeatable revenue-generating process regardless of which stack they're handed; experiment relentlessly before automating anything; and—his standout point—offer value upfront with zero expectation, because his own survey outreach to 15 people produced 5 "tell me more" replies and zero selling required. I add my own take at the end: read the classics, learn copywriting at its roots, and condition your AI the same way you'd train a junior employee—give it the Boron Letters, give it Gary Halbert, then let it write. 

Enjoy 🙂

(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(0:30) What CBREX Does: Talent OS for Enterprises With Complex Hiring Needs 
(2:24) GTM for Both Sides: Why Trust Comes Before Everything for Vendor Acquisition 
(4:11) ICP Discipline: Why Growing the Marketplace Too Fast Breaks the Economics 
(6:02) Sarvar's Journey: Analyst to CS to Product to Marketing to GTM Engineering 
(9:13) Predictions: In an AI-Saturated Market, Trust and Experience Are the Differentiator 
(10:03) The 11-Month Deal: Signing a Multi-Million Contract With Someone Who Never Saw the Product 
(13:09) Advice: GTM Is a Process Role, Not a Tools Role 
(14:50) Experiment Before You Automate—Automating Something Broken Just Breaks It Faster 
(16:39) Value-First Outreach: How a Survey Email Got a 33% Reply Rate With No Pitch 
(17:27) Learn Copywriting First: The Boron Letters, Gary Halbert, Mad Men 
(19:14) Most Common Outbound Mistake: Talking Too Much About Yourself

🔗 CONNECT WITH SARVAR

👥 LinkedIn 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Soumya, founder at GTM Walnut, about engineering revenue pipelines through AI-powered GTM automations that span marketing, outbound, CRM, and content. Soumya works primarily with B2B SaaS and services companies from seed to Series C—companies that have found product-market fit and are now trying to scale. 

She walks us through two very different campaign types: one running 100,000+ cold emails a month targeting local businesses like dentists and lawyers, scraped from Google Maps via Clay, Applify, and Surfer Dev, enriched using website content for personalization, and generating 100-120+ positive replies per month; and another hyper-targeted ABM play where they go after just 300 accounts a week using a stack of intent signals—online, offline, and social—to surface the 25 or so that are actually worth reaching with a full multi-channel sequence across email, LinkedIn, direct mail, and WhatsApp. Soumya shares her path from organic growth and SEO at a Series B startup, through two head-of-demand-gen roles at seed-stage companies, to spotting the GTM engineering wave coming and going all-in full-time since April 2025 after her co-founder joined the Clay bootcamp. Her prediction: GTM is moving from people-driven to system-driven, with one GTM engineer supervising the entire system and one SDR handling replies—human in the loop, not human at the center. Her advice for anyone starting out: ignore the noise, get the three basics right (list, messaging, infrastructure), learn one or two tools per segment, and resist the urge to build complexity for its own sake—because your clients don't care how many tools you know, they care about meetings. 

Enjoy 🙂

(0:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(0:20) What GTM Walnut Does: GTM Engineering, Outbound, CRM, and Content 
(1:46) Client Profile: Seed to Series C B2B Companies Ready to Scale 
(2:08) Campaign 1: 100K+ Emails a Month to Local Businesses via Google Maps Scraping 
(3:43) Campaign 2: 300-Account ABM With Intent Signals and Multi-Channel Outreach 
(5:01) Soumya's Journey: SEO to Demand Gen to GTM Engineering Full-Time 
(7:51) Future Predictions: System-Driven GTM, One GTM Engineer, Human in the Loop 
(10:08) Advice: Get the Basics Right, Learn Two Tools Per Segment, Keep It Simple 
(12:11) Why Simplicity Serves the Client Better Than Complexity Ever Will

🔗 CONNECT WITH SOUMYA

👥 LinkedIn 
💻 Website 
📧 Email - [email protected]

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Gerda, from Leadprinter AI, about running end-to-end cold email systems for B2B companies across a surprisingly wide range of niches—SaaS, video agencies, investment firms, solar panels, real estate, conferences—with a bold guarantee of minimum 20 leads per month or extensions and refunds, which has only failed twice out of 200 clients. 

We explore two campaigns: a Bali villa real estate campaign where they scraped relevant Facebook groups and LinkedIn to build a hyper-targeted list, ran a webinar funnel via cold email, booked 350 attendees, and sold the villa; and a Latvian financing company campaign where basic industry and job title filters across a 2,000-company TAM produced 150 leads per month—effectively reaching nearly 10% of the entire market every single month. Gerda's consistent observation: the most effective campaigns are almost always the simplest ones, and over-engineering with Clay enrichments and complex personalization introduces more failure points than value. Her prediction: the real winners going forward will be the ones who learn when not to automate—because if everything is automated, people notice and it starts to feel cold. Gerda shares her path from arts and culture studies to door-to-door sales in the US, to freelance copywriting for coaches and online businesses, to joining V-Design as a project manager before discovering cold email when her Estonian team started experimenting and nobody in Latvia was doing it—building the whole thing herself while living the digital nomad lifestyle across six months of travel and six months of Latvian summers. Her advice: understand your numbers—emails to reply, replies to lead, leads to meeting—because once you know the ratios, cold email becomes predictable and scalable. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:21) What Leadprinter Does: End-to-End Cold Email With a 20-Lead Guarantee 
(01:40) The Refund Model: Extensions First, Refunds Only if Still Short After 60 Days 
(02:51) Bali Villa Campaign: Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Scraping, Webinar Funnel, 350 Attendees 
(04:00) Latvian Financing Campaign: 150 Leads a Month From a 2,000-Company TAM 
(04:37) Simple Always Beats Complex: Fundamentals Over Fancy Clay Tables 
(05:28) Gerda's Journey: Arts Student to Door-to-Door Sales to Copywriter to Cold Email 
(07:34) Building the Whole System Herself While Traveling as a Digital Nomad 
(08:44) Future Predictions: The Winners Will Know When NOT to Automate 
(10:44) Copywriting Background as the Secret Weapon in Cold Email 
(13:27) Advice: Understand Your Numbers—It's a Predictable, Scalable Numbers Game

🔗 CONNECT WITH GERDA

👥 LinkedIn
💻 Website

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Jan Strom, founder of VojVoj, about building a content creator platform that merges the monetization model of OnlyFans and Patreon with the discovery mechanics of TikTok and Meta—replacing the like button with a financial differentiator where every engagement costs real currency, so the algorithm rewards quality over quantity and creators start earning from day one. 

We explore Jan's growth hacking philosophy: maximum output from minimum input, finding blue ocean opportunities, and testing constantly rather than following conventional playbooks. He shares two legendary growth hacks from his past—reading a Norwegian financial newspaper one morning, realizing a new law would force all financial institutions to report transactions above $500, cold calling the CTO of the financial authority to pitch a solution he hadn't built yet, getting the meeting, building it for free, then locking every financial institution in Norway into buying certificates from his company for the next 15+ years; and turning a failing 10-person SSL certificate sales team into 400 consultants selling their white-label click-through solution across Norway's biggest IT consultancies, capturing the entire Norwegian SSL market in 18 months. His prediction: consultants are dead—AI handles strategy, automation handles implementation, and the only remaining edge is creativity. Jan shares his path from direct sales at Shell to being headhunted to build tech sales organizations, to discovering that combining sales psychology with developer resources beats hiring more salespeople every time. His advice: never quit, treat every failure as a gift that adds 10% here and 20% there until you reach 100%, and protect your creativity above everything else. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:20) What VojVoj Does: Replacing the Like Button With Real Currency 
(01:33) Why Quality Beats Quantity: How the Algorithm Actually Works 
(03:43) Growth Hacking as a Mindset: Maximum Output, Minimum Input 
(05:00) Norwegian Financial Authority Story: Cold Calling a CTO Before the Solution Existed 
(07:03) Locking an Entire Country's Financial Institutions Into 15 Years of Certificates 
(07:46) AI Handles Strategy, Automation Handles Implementation: Consultants Are Dead 
(08:08) Jan's Journey: Direct Sales at Shell to SSL White-Label Growth Hack 
(09:25) Capturing the Entire Norwegian SSL Market in 18 Months With 400 Consultants 
(11:43) Building the Creator Monetization System That Became VojVoj 
(12:25) Advice: Never Quit, Treat Failure as a Gift, Protect Your Creativity

🔗 CONNECT WITH JAN

👥 LinkedIn 
🎙️ Podcast 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Felipe Soza, Head of Ops at Outreach Engine, about building GTM systems that go beyond cold email—understanding each client's offer from the core, then building the entire revenue engine around it across whatever channels and methods will actually get results, rather than just running campaigns and calling it done. 

We explore his most engineering-heavy campaign: building a full LinkedIn outbound system for a client targeting US government contractors, pulling the raw company list from the USAspending database (40-50 years of government contracting history), chunking it down in Clay by contractor type, contract size, and fit, then routing each segment to specific SDRs by region with their own localized LinkedIn campaigns—all wired into a single play table that took serious head-banging to get right. He also shares his most honest story: the first fully automated LinkedIn campaign he built, which he was convinced would make him a millionaire, getting zero replies, zero opens, zero everything—and treating that devastation like going to the gym, showing up again, failing again, and building the resilience muscle that eventually made him good. His insight: AI only amplifies what you already know—if you're on the right path it gets you there faster, if not it just makes you confused faster. Felipe shares his path from call center employee in Costa Rica to selling oil for Chevron Phillips and JLL, to e-sales where he initially sucked at cold calling and then became top SDR two years running, to meeting Anthony from Mission Inbox and seeing outbound at scale for the first time, to head of ops at Outreach Engine and VP of ops at TrueDial. His advice: always be aware of how much you don't know, because you're only limited by your capacity to learn those things—but you have to first understand what those things are. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to Outbound Wizards 
(00:20) What Outreach Engine Does: GTM Systems That Go Beyond Cold Email 
(01:47) Why Systems Thinking Is Now Essential, Not Just Nice to Have 
(02:37) Government Contractor Campaign: USAspending Database to Localized SDR LinkedIn Campaigns 
(05:12) The Engineering Complexity of Classifying 50,000 Rows Without Hallucinations 
(06:01) The Zero-Reply Campaign That Almost Made Felipe Quit and What He Did Instead 
(07:09) Treating Failure Like Going to the Gym: The Resilience Muscle 
(07:41) Felipe's Journey: Call Center in Costa Rica to Top SDR to Head of Ops 
(09:13) Jumping Into the AI Bandwagon in 2024 and Watching the Career Explode 
(10:03) Chaos Is a Ladder: Why Fast Career Rises Require Big Disruption 
(11:09) AI Amplifies What You Already Know—It Doesn't Replace the Foundation 
(11:46) Advice: Know What You Don't Know, Because That's Your Only Limit

🔗 CONNECT WITH FELIPE

👥 LinkedIn
🏢 LinkedIn - Outreach Engine 

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.

In today's episode, I chat with Sam, founder at Culture Shock, a language learning platform that uses news content and AI to prepare users for proficiency exams like CEFR, ACTFL, and IELTS—selling primarily to schools, government, and families. 

We explore his seed round fundraising campaign on SalesRobot targeting angel investors, startup investors, and SaaS seed investors globally, which hit nearly 40% reply rate—well above the platform average of 10-20%. The key pivot: instead of asking "are you interested in investing?" which got quick flat-out nos, Sam switched to "do you know anyone who has invested in the education space?"—creating a buying atmosphere with enough space for people to say no without pressure, while simultaneously surfacing the investors who replied "actually, I'm the person you should talk to." He also shares his best-ever campaign: reaching out to university professors asking if they knew students interested in a summer internship—not selling anything, but asking professors to do what they already love (help their students), which produced hundreds of candidates and seeded organic word of mouth. Sam's two things he's most excited about trying next: running multiple accounts simultaneously to test different verticals at 5x the volume, and refining how to use SalesRobot's AI agent for simpler, more contained conversations where the context can be fully baked in. 

Enjoy 🙂

(00:00) Introduction to SalesRobot Customer of the Week 
(00:22) What Culture Shock Does: AI-Powered Language Learning for Proficiency Exams 
(01:15) The Seed Round Campaign: Targeting Angel Investors Globally on LinkedIn 
(02:47) The Pivot That Hit 40% Reply Rate: Ask for a Referral, Not a Meeting 
(03:36) Creating a Buying Atmosphere: Give Them Space to Say No 
(05:07) The Professor Campaign: Asking People to Do What They Already Love 
(07:46) Mistakes Made Early: Being Too Direct Puts Too Much Pressure on the Buyer 
(08:59) What's Next: Multiple Accounts for Volume and Vertical Testing 
(09:29) Using SalesRobot's AI Agent: Where It Works and Where Context Gets Complicated

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAM

👥 LinkedIn  

🔗 CONNECT WITH SAURAV

🎥 YouTube Channel

🐦 X (Twitter)

📸 Instagram

💻 Website

👥 LinkedIn
📧 Email - [email protected]

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts to help others discover the show :)

👋🏼 GET IN TOUCH You can also reach out with any feedback, ideas or thoughts about the lessons you've learned from the episodes.