SaaS Stories
SaaS Stories is my not-so-secret quest to learn what it truly takes to succeed in the world of SaaS—and I’m inviting you along for the ride! I have the pleasure of sitting down with brilliant minds and industry trailblazers to explore their journeys, uncovering the secrets behind their growth, the gaps they spotted in the market, and what really drives them.
It’s not all smooth sailing—there are challenges, unexpected turns, and moments of reflection where they share what they’d love to change about their journey. Think of it as a candid, insider’s look into the world of SaaS, with just the right amount of curiosity, empathy, and wit.
Join me as I dive deep, selfishly soak up all the insights, and hopefully share a little inspiration with you along the way—one SaaS story at a time.
SaaS Stories
Personalisation at Scale: Cold email lessons from billions sent
"The volume game is over." These powerful words from Jeremy Chatelaine, founder and CEO of QuickMail, set the tone for a conversation that challenges everything you thought you knew about cold outreach. After sending billions of emails over the past decade, Jeremy has discovered what truly works—and it's not what most "influencers" are teaching.
The secret starts with a fundamental mindset shift: send emails people actually want to receive. This means thinking from your recipient's perspective rather than focusing on yourself as a sender. Too many outreach attempts fail because they're fundamentally selfish, packed with "me-focused" language that recipients immediately recognise and reject. By contrast, emails that demonstrate genuine care and thoughtfulness consistently outperform.
Jeremy shares practical wisdom on crafting messages that build trust from the first line. He warns against common mistakes like fake personalisation ("big fan of your podcast") and encourages authentic communication that respects the recipient's time and intelligence. With deliverability becoming increasingly challenging, he reveals QuickMail's innovative approaches—including their "Reword with AI" feature that ensures every email sent is uniquely written without changing the core message.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Jeremy challenges the notion that cold outreach requires choosing between personalisation and scale. His solution? Create multiple small, highly targeted campaigns instead of one massive list. This approach yielded him over 20 meetings from fewer than 100 contacts in a recent campaign—results that mass outreach rarely achieves.
As AI becomes more prevalent in both sending and receiving messages, Jeremy offers a refreshing perspective on maintaining human connection in your outreach. His advice on balancing brevity with credibility, incorporating authority signals, and being transparent about automation will transform how you approach cold outreach in 2025 and beyond.
Spreading harmful messages when it comes to actually doing cold outreach. So I'm trying to educate the market now on how to do it. Well, it will change the whole way of how you approach cold outreach, and the mindset is pretty simple. You should basically send email people want to receive, so you should think about your recipient, not about you as a sender. This is all wrong. In 2025, the volume game is over. You have to think what's my strategy and have the right mindset to write good emails.
Speaker 2:When I get a really long email I switch off on the spot. I feel like this is too long and you know, you kind of see the intro, the bullet points, the conclusion. It's almost like an essay. What's your experience?
Speaker 1:So the less you do, the less chances of making a mistake, and I think it applies perfectly for cold outreach. The less words you add, add, the less chances of screwing something up. You need to build trust, yeah, in your code outreach. A lot of people are wasting that. Their first line is like oh you know, big fan of your podcast, johanna. I'm just like, yeah, right, you know you don't believe us.
Speaker 2:Coming back to deliverability, I'm curious how does quickmail make their deliverability so much more better than, say, all the other enterprise platforms in the world? What's the secret?
Speaker 1:and it's proven to be an absolutely great for deliverability. So, basically, it's a tick box and when you tick it, every email you send, we're going to have ai rewriting it, not losing the meaning, but changing all the words.
Speaker 2:And so you end up with welcome everyone to another episode of sass stories. Today I'm joined by j Chatelain, founder and CEO of Quickmail. Welcome, Jeremy.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Joanna, for having me.
Speaker 2:All the way in Sapporo. Right now. I'm a little bit jealous, but never mind. Let's start with your story. What led you into the world of SaaS? How did Quickmail come to life?
Speaker 1:Well, that's a broad question. I'm going to try to answer it as simply as I can. I was an engineer by trade and I did probably like 15 different projects with none making any money whatsoever, even some losing money, and I was so frustrated I took a course on entrepreneurship, was called the foundation, and after eight months of really grinding it, I basically managed to actually create quickmail. Originally, I was contacting people down under, contacting financial planners in australia, and I had only two hours every day to work on my business. And after after spending an hour and a half on doing email every morning in order to try to arrange some meeting, to go on meeting and for like, oh, there must be a better way. And that's really how I started to create quickmail, basically just because of her need scratching my own itch that's always the case, isn't it?
Speaker 2:I think some of the greatest stories start with. I had a problem that I had to solve. There was nothing fantastic on the market, so I invented it, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:That's exactly what happened. Nowadays, like there are, you know, tons of solutions for that we opened the market. I think we were three people to open the market. It was back in 2014. There was a few solutions down there like yes, we're on stuff, but they were not really doing anything. That needed to be done, which is sending a drip campaign email type of thing.
Speaker 2:So tell us what exactly is Quickmail? What does it do? I know there's direct mail in there, but maybe give us a bit more. It's a name, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we should have started by that, basically. So Quickmail is an automation platform called Outreach and it can do it through email and through LinkedIn automation. So we added LinkedIn a couple of years ago now, which is basically the idea that you need to reach out to a few people and so you will will craft a message, you can personalize it with merge tag and things like that, and then the software will automatically pick up a certain number of people to contact every day and then follow up. If they didn't reply the reply, that stop the sequence. So it's basically a way of you know getting replies, and I use it every day.
Speaker 1:You don't have to do it for cold, you can also do it for your own network. Let's say, for example, you have an, you can also do it for your own network. Let's say, for example, you have an idea that you want to discuss with your own network, certain persons, then you would create your own list and then you will create the message and then you will reach out to them. That's actually what I did lately, like last week. I started doing that for my own network, wanted to reconnect with some founders to ask them some questions, and then, yeah, my week now is absolutely full, full pack of meetings.
Speaker 2:What have you done?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly right. That's basically the core concept of Quickmail.
Speaker 2:And so Quickmail has now been around for a decade, which is rare in SaaS. Well done. Now, aside from that, as a marketing strategy, have you done anything else, or has this pretty much been it and it's been effective throughout? You mean as a personal founder with the software In terms of promoting the software and getting more and more customers on board.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, 10 years is a long time, so you got to try a lot of things and you got to also do a lot of mistakes. And I'm guilty of a lot of mistakes. You know, I'm a first-time founder, so there's a lot of, you know, try and fail, try and error type of approach. But I think seo was really important for us at the time and today, actually, the seo actually transformed into chat gpt questions and that is proven to actually be growing very rapidly. In the last six months, chat gpt has been pretty dominant in terms of creating trials for us.
Speaker 2:Now it's amazing how many blogs chat gpt could write compared to what humans used to do right it's.
Speaker 1:It's more than that actually. I think, jenna, the, the game with chat, gpt is more that people are asking what solution exists out there, more than actually the creation of content.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so if ChatGPT is putting your link forward, then more people are going to use it. Correct? People are just asking like this is a journey.
Speaker 1:When you actually start a new product that no one knows about or no one understands initially, then a lot of the work is to educate the market as to what's a drip campaign, like what's called email. Like you asked that in the past no one knew like what's called email. It's like, well, you know you're reaching out to someone you don't know. It's just as simple as that. Oh, you should do that, yeah, and you can automate it and you can, you know, have follow ups and stuff. So a lot of that is education. Market is educated enough and so it becomes like well, how are you different? And then that's a completely different position and that's a completely different conversations.
Speaker 1:And for us, we've been very strong on deliverability and stats. Right, those were the two really main points. So if you wanted deliverability, then you would come to us. So that's basically the sort of like evolution and and ChatGPG is really good at that because now you just ask like hey, you know how do I got a good deliverability with cold outreach, and then you're gonna oh well, you should try a quick mail.
Speaker 2:That's basically how it works now yeah, I definitely believe in the power of cold email. I mean, I've been in marketing for 20 years plus and um yeah we definitely do it as an approach. I see it working time and time again. Deliverability is a big one, because you now have so many platforms that are out there. You've got hubspot, you've got your salesforce, you've got all the big enterprise ones. I actually find they're not best at deliverability. You actually get more.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're absolutely terrible yeah, well, that's why they are. You know smaller solutions right and and then they're also extremely expensive. If you go to HubSpot sales, for example, people are like paying a fortune for the branded name HubSpot. In terms of results, well, not that great. We have actually very affordable plans now. Like since the beginning of the year, we did what I call a no-brainer plan, which is basically for $9 a month. You have one inbox and one LinkedIn account and then you can do your outreach. So it's super great for people like me who started in the beginning. You know I just want something that does it all, not a lot of investment, and if people like it and they need to grow, then they can move to different plans with us. So, yeah, that's been working pretty well for us.
Speaker 2:No for sure. I definitely see it working well, not just for startups, but also for big companies enterprises. They get a lot of value out of cold email and I feel like cold email is a little bit misunderstood or done poorly.
Speaker 1:So maybe give us some advice.
Speaker 2:You know all of the people out there that are not getting the results that they want. What are the biggest issues, aside from deliverability? How is it done wrong?
Speaker 1:It's a great question and, in fact, I will start by saying there's a lot of influencers out there that are actually spreading harmful messages when it comes to actually doing cold outreach. So I'm trying to educate the market now on how to do it well, which is obviously. I've got like 11 years experience of seeing campaigns Like. I've seen like billions of emails being sent with our platform, and so it's easier for me to say like well, that doesn't quite work. Well, I would say there's a couple of misconceptions, but the first thing I would always try with is to start with the mindset, and that's huge. It will change the whole way of how you approach in cold outreach, and the mindset is pretty simple. You should basically send email people want to receive, so you should think about your recipient, not about you as a sender, cause a lot of people are going to do hey, he's my, he's my stuff, it's great. You know, it's like they're just like very, very selfish emails.
Speaker 1:And what you want to send is actually caring emails. So that's the biggest one. The second one is a strategy. The strategy means, like it's more than who do you go after and what do you say. It's actually the output of a strategy. A strategy really should say, like, what's your angle, like how we're going to approach this outreach right and how we are going to start a conversation with people. Because that's what outreach is about. It's not to try to sell, it's actually try to start a conversation. And so an example would be like hey, we have a $29 a month product. We're going to try to sell it to our audience, to our ICP ideal customer profile.
Speaker 1:Turns out that maybe that's not a great strategy. Maybe a great strategy is actually to go to course creators who actually serve those people. And then you're gonna say, okay, well, how can I bring value to the course creator? Like, is there something that I can reach out to them that will be interesting to them? And that's that's really what a strategy is really about. And a lot of people are skipping all of that and they go straight to like, let me write what, know what my product is about and then reach as many people as I can. This is all wrong. In 2025, the volume game is over you have to think what's my strategy and have the right mindset to write good emails. Does that make?
Speaker 2:sense it does. No, I totally agree with that. Strategy is a big one. I think people all get scared by strategy because they think it needs to be like this massive 50 page deck or something like that. It's just two sentences, just write them up it doesn't have to be big.
Speaker 1:Is that your experience with strategy? It has to make sense.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, I think so. Coming back to deliverability, so one thing I've learned is you know the very first email that you send out, don't put a link in it. What else helps with deliverability?
Speaker 1:Fantastic and very timely question. Actually, I will go against this advice, because here's the thing Nowadays, and that's what I mean by like following harmful. You know influencers so well. It's not the influencers that are harmful, it's more the advice.
Speaker 1:But, basically what they say is like oh, you should send absolutely no image, no link, no, nothing, and then you end up with an email that is absolutely empty and void of anything that has authority based. So basically, it could be one guy, 14 years old guy, in india, in wherever in the world, that send an email, and it could be a second time founder that has success to exit. That is like having like a fantastic product. You look at the two emails like, well, they're the same. Well, how are people receiving those emails? Are going to make a difference? Are going to be able to make to differ between, like, that thing is legit and that thing is not, if you don't put anything?
Speaker 1:And so my advice is different. If you want good deliverability, you just want replies, because that's the best signal you could ever get people replying. So you can try to hack your way around like, oh, plain text, you know, using multiple inboxes, using multiple domain, whatever, only sending one email per domain. Like that's great if you want to send things that people don't want to reply to, but the goal really of cold outreach is to get replies, and so if you have something that has replies, it doesn't matter what you're sending, and so that's really the mindset shift that I want people to have is that if adding your LinkedIn profile is going to make you legit and people treat you more seriously and so on, well, just add it.
Speaker 1:You know, if you actually been on TV, tv or you have links to case study that are absolutely no-brainer for people to figure out that you're legit, you have authority, you're, you're a good service and I should go with you. Absolutely put it, and that's the thing that people don't understand. Like my friend is like multi exit founder, hugely successful. I look at his email and I was like there's nothing about that, like I can't really check you out and realize like, oh, you're serious, you're legit about your email and he was complaining he's got no replies.
Speaker 1:I mean those kinds of those kinds of advice about you know put it as plain as possible to to get great deliverability are actually harmful to good call outreach.
Speaker 2:I'm actually relieved to hear that, because I hate like big blocks of text in an email. I would love to see an image, even a little animation, linked to somewhere.
Speaker 1:It's probably too much for the animation. You may not bring anything.
Speaker 2:That probably will affect the deliverability. What other mistakes are people making with cold outreach and also on LinkedIn? I mean, I think you know we're all kind of scared by accepting that connection request only to get hammered by the sales message straight after.
Speaker 1:This is a lot of thing that people get wrong is you need to build trust in your code outreach. A lot of people are wasting that. Their first line is like oh you know, big fan of your podcast, joanna. I was just like, yeah, right, you know you don't believe us, is it really?
Speaker 1:how you want to start the conversation with something that is not believable? No, of course not. You want to build trust. So people are like saying like, oh well, you know they may consider genuinely your offer and that's exactly what you want. So stay away from attracting subject line or, like you know, flashy subject line or stuff like that. Like no, just do like something super simple with a preview text that makes sense and makes the people want to open if they read that subject line.
Speaker 1:To me I see subject line as a little bit contract right. So, for example, if you want to talk about, let's say, johanna, you want to have some people on your podcast, your subject line doesn't have to be urgent, uh, whatever, or, like you know, lots of really like fancy things and an iteration. No, you could just be like podcast, that's it, that's what you want to talk about, just just like the subject line is podcast. And then if I'm interested in podcast and I may open it and see what does she want about podcasting, and then by just doing this and then having your value proposition around podcasting, then it's just like that person you know, build trust with me at every line. And then the first line could simply be like I've seen you on LinkedIn as an authority on call, email, whatever, and then you tell them where you come from and then they will listen to you and then they will genuinely look at your offer.
Speaker 1:It's much better than trying to be confusing, you know, like trying to keep the mystery and so like no one is up for those riddle games, as you say. You know it's like they're not accepting an invite to just get the pitch right away. But what if the invite is telling you, you know something simple. It's like hey, joanna, you know, would love to be on your podcast. Are you open to connecting? Yeah, then you know what it's about. It's not like oh, there's no mind game behind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like, but it doesn't have to be aggressive, right? It could just be like hey, I want to have a conversation with you, if you want, just accept the connection, and then that way is like both parties are agreeing to go on a conversation journey and then that's it.
Speaker 1:And that way there's no, there's no trade that way. There's no, there's no trick game, there's no, like you know, discussing things when you know they accept and you know the pitch and that's very open. And I much prefer having three percent or like ten percent, you know, reply rate that is like that than having twenty percent or like eighty percent open rates and then no replies at all yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:So be upfront, be clear, you know. Save them time, make them like them, raise their hand themselves, saying like I'm okay for a conversation. That's really what you want that's the key, isn't it?
Speaker 2:there's trust, but there's also save them time, you said, which I thought that's a big one, because people are just no one's bored anymore. We, we have so many things that keep us entertained, we almost have an attention problem.
Speaker 1:So if you're beating around the bush instead of just getting to the point they just switch off.
Speaker 2:They're like no, this is too hard to interpret, I don't even want to look at it 100%.
Speaker 1:And the interesting thing as well is you don't need to be so high tech. So again had a friend, didn't get any results and he said I don't understand. I'm doing this, I'm using this software to generate intro lines. I'm doing this. It's like well, how about you actually just contact 10 people and then you make sure that what you say is thoughtful, instead of using chat, gpt to write a sentence? You don't even know what that sentence is? It's crazy.
Speaker 1:People just blindly trust AI. They basically have AI writing their intro line. They don't know what he writes and they assume it's going to be good. It's like where was the last time you put an intern to write an introduction line and then you don't even verify what they're writing and then you just trust them. It's like I trust you, bro, never going to work. Instead just write.
Speaker 1:So you know, know, a thoughtful intro line. It doesn't have to be really crazy, it just mean like, I find you there, that's. All people want to know is like why are you contacting me? Oh, you know, I find your post on linkedin about you know emails. Oh, okay, that's, you come from linkedin, fine, or it's just, I saw you on that podcast. Okay, cool, you know, and then move on. It doesn't need to be rocket science. And if if you want to be like that, I would say, use a PS, because in a PS you could be about anything. I could be like hey, joanna, by the way, I love your down under, you know, I love the Sydney Opera House, whatever those sort of things they kind of are. They're not really linked to the value proposition but it makes you human.
Speaker 2:So I think it's point are just going to start battling, proving that they haven't used AI, because there's like AI is everywhere in content now and before AI. I'm now seeing a lot of my friends like the way they're writing LinkedIn posts. I'm like that's not you. You're not that close. Go back to who you were.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ghostwriting is a thing as well. Actually, I write my own posts myself, but I know a lot of people who don't, and that's interesting.
Speaker 2:How do you use AI and how does Quickmail use AI as well? Or do you kind of recommend sticking more to the human element and doing that research into the person?
Speaker 1:Obviously, you need research into that person. I think you can use AI to accelerate some of the research bit, which is, I think, that's where AI is good at. It's consuming a lot of volume data and summarizing stuff. I think that's great at it. Writing not so much, so I would recommend you keep writing your stuff instead of relying on an AI to do that, and I believe that you could do very thoughtful message if you actually spend time to do prospecting properly, right?
Speaker 1:If I, for example, if you actually do prospecting for certain small audience, it's much easier to do a thoughtful message for that audience rather than contacting the whole world and then having AI try to figure out what kind of message can I write for that person, right? Yeah, exactly. So let's say, for example, I'm reaching out to bikers in Australia, but you could say, hey, I happen to be on that super great road. You know, have you done that one? And then that's it. And then you can suddenly like, have the same message to 5,000 people, but that's a thoughtful message because it's only for that group, and I think that's probably the best way of doing it. And if you want to use AI, just use AI to vet people, making sure that they actually are those bikers and they're actually active. Those type of thing is great. With AI Writing not so much. I would avoid it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. I think niching is important and knowing your audience and being able to segment like you said, the bikers from the runners from the, you know everybody else.
Speaker 1:Surfer is great. I do reach surfing as well, so people like surfing and I, just like you know, are you planning on catching a wave this, this winter?
Speaker 2:you know it's just great.
Speaker 1:It's a sound, simple, subtle stuff and it works really great. You don't need to catch everyone now that you mentioned it.
Speaker 2:Actually I just remembered and I haven't used this in a while, but my very effective linkedin outreach message to people back in the day I mentioned that I was a skier.
Speaker 1:Not everyone responded but the people that did were skiers and they really got hooked into that one line and they were going to keep chatting just because of that yeah, you're human, I want a connection with you, you know, and the problem with those ai is like it's kind of the uncanny valley, is like you don't trust those lines right why would you want to start a conversation with someone who is, you know, disingenuous?
Speaker 2:let's talk about copy in the all the linkedin messages as well as the direct emails. Short, long, like does it matter? When I get a really long email I switch off on the spot. I feel like this is too long and you know, you kind of see the intro, the bullet points, the conclusion. It's almost like an essay. What's your experience with that? Should we keep it short and simple?
Speaker 1:When I was passing my driving license quite a long time ago, the instructor said something that actually stuck with me. He said, Jeremy, when you're going to pass the exam, do the least possible. I said what do you mean by that? He said because they're not here to assess how good you are, but to pick up on any problem you're going to create. So the less you do, the less chances of making a mistake.
Speaker 1:And I think it applies perfectly for cold outreach the less words you add, the less chances of screwing something up. And so for people doing the essay, it does work, as long as each line is making the reader want to read the next one. And obviously if you start with AI, then obviously you already start handicap, but that's the point. And so you have more chances with smaller email, just for that. It's not really a problem with really the text. It's the length of the text more than it is a problem with the actual content of the text. That said, where you said about like initially, see a wall of text, it's just like ah, I don't want to invest that time in that.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm right.
Speaker 1:So again, shorter works better, but not shorter, to a point that it's. You can't see the difference.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that you can't see the difference from someone just sending you like a one liner and has no background whatsoever. On LinkedIn. You're a bit more advantaged because people can check your profile.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, but on email you have no chance. So a blank email with just a couple of lines. I don't know who you are, are you legit, whether you're authoritative, do you have social proof? All those things don't come across with just one line. So it's an art and a science cool email.
Speaker 2:You have to balance it. It is a little bit of a struggle because, especially when you get chat gpt to write it and it writes you know this much long, long verse and you're like this is really good. I don't know what to cut out from it. But yeah, it's like you said, an art and a science, trying to give value to the person, show them what you're about and really hook them, you know, start the relationship, I suppose 100 coming back to deliverability, I'm curious how does Quickmail make their deliverability so much more better than, say, all the other enterprise platforms in the world?
Speaker 2:What's the secret?
Speaker 1:Secret, I tell you, joanna is working 10 years on it, so you got some ideas. There's a lot of innovation that goes into Quickmail. One example was last year around July, august. Microsoft basically went hard on people sending bulk emails, which is basically recognized by sending always the same type of emails right, all the same text emails and so obviously they're spreading. So you basically use multiple domains and you know you send lower volume from each domain, which in the aggregates, and you the same amount of volume. So we've got inbox rotation that we invented, by the way, in 2019, I think, but anyway, we invented the inbox rotation, which means you have one campaign, you just add multiple inboxes for multiple domains and you send the same volume, but spread across. So it's much harder for spam filter to detect.
Speaker 1:However, last year, my yourself has been pretty good at doing that, and so what we had to come up was how do you make them unique, how do you make each of your emails unique? And in the past we had to came up was how do you make them unique, how do you make each of your emails unique? And in the past we had what we call spin tags. So basically you should say hey, you're going to use this version or this version at random and if you put it enough into your email, you kind of like patch, you know, grab a bit there and grab, but it's really hard to edit and modify because you have like one email that looks very difficult to read because you're gonna get high, then the syntax, and you're gonna hey, hey, and then it's gonna choose between high and hey, it's gonna say you got like whole things, like it's really hard. So what I did? One night I wake up and I say wouldn't that be great? Every email is like completely unique. I'm like, how do you? We should do that with AI. And so I woke up at three o'clock in the morning. I was in Japan and I worked through the entire morning, beginning of the afternoon, and then my team woke up and I say, hey, here's a new feature. You guys test it and it's called Reword with AI and it's proven to be absolutely great for deliverability. So basically and it's proven to be absolutely great for deliverability so basically, it's a tick box and when you tick it, every email you send, we're going to have AI rewriting it, not losing the meaning, but changing all the words, and so you end up with every email is absolutely unique that you're sending, and it's proved to be absolutely brilliant in terms of deliverability. So that's the biggest thing.
Speaker 1:We have other things like deliverability AI, which basically means it's an upgrade of the inbox rotation. So instead of using just five inbox, for example, for your campaign, you will actually have 10 inboxes in your accounts or maybe more, and what Quickmail will do is it will monitor the deliverability of all your inboxes and when the deliverability of one is going down, then it will replace it with a new one, and so now you don't need to do anything anymore. It just like automatically replaces inbox when they actually not performing well, and so you get them like on recovery mode, and then when it goes back, then you know it's ready to go back for prime time, and then people use that with you with. You know, with five inbox you could still do it manually, but when you got like 100 inbox in your campaign, that's a bit more demanding. So those are some examples of what we do for deliverability, but we got, yeah that's really interesting.
Speaker 2:Actually like changing some of the words just to make sure they're a bit more unique. It made me think of personalization as well. So is that maybe one way you can make all the emails different just by having those personalization tags? But they're all related to maybe separate things rather than just your basic ones, which are first name, company name.
Speaker 1:Yes, exactly, most people use. I mean, these are must. The must is the first name. If you want to open a conversation with someone, you have to know their name. If you don't, then it's really hard to open a conversation with someone you don't know the name, at least with email.
Speaker 1:But personalization is like I mentioned if you use AI to personalize the first line, that's great, but you don't know what AI is saying. So you're actually just basically sending random stuff and you're hoping then for volume. Let's hope that AI will get it right at some point. It's just like it's not great, but people are using a lot of personalization that way. But there is smarter personalization, which is the sector, the industry you're in or the activity you could, like I mentioned about the surfer stuff, you should just basically pick a hobby what hobby do they have? And then use that hobby in the personal line.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of things you can do. It doesn't necessarily make your whole message unique and it will be only like places. You could see an email and say this is how we will templatize this email. You can see it. But again, template is not the game anymore. Right, it's more about the strategy and who you want to talk to and what's the message you're going to sell them. That's a bit more successful than just templatized an email so templatized could have worked in the past, but that's why rework with AI works so much better, because you don't need that anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so how do you balance scale with personalization? Can you have both, or is it you kind of have to pick one?
Speaker 1:Yes, I love that question. Yes, the answer is it yes, you kind of have to. Yes, I love that question. Yes, the answer is absolutely yes. What you have to do for is you have to do multiple small lists, and that's what people don't like to do. So you do small campaigns, but a lot of them, and that brings you the volume. Uh, but small campaigns are much better, they're much more successful because you basically know who you're targeting, you know your value offering for that specific target audience. It makes the writing easier, it made the prospecting easier, it makes the campaign easier and you get better results. It's, it's always the case. Personalization is easier on a small scale, right?
Speaker 1:but people somehow they say like yeah, I don't want 200 people campaigns, I want 20 000. Like yeah, but I can bet you you're gonna get the same reply rate as I do, or like the same number of replies as I do, like I think I contacted last week. I contacted about 100 people 97, whatever and I have more than 20 meetings already booked meetings, not talking about the conversion rate right, but it's just like it was a no-brainer it's a great offer.
Speaker 1:People resonate with this. It makes sense for them. So let's just jump on a call. It may not lead anywhere. It may lead anywhere, but the point is that it's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. We've mentioned AI a couple of times in our conversations. I'm just curious where do you see AI and automation going in the next five years? I don't think anyone can truly predict this. No.
Speaker 1:I'm years, I don't think anyone can truly predict this. But no, I'm not in a predicting game, jana. I'm not in a predicting game, jana. But I can see trends and the sad thing about trend is like it's going to be ai talking to ai and so where's the human part in that? That's going to be tricky, because I got a friend working on ai handling of your emails. Right then you have people doing ai sending and it's already happening. You got AI talking to AI. How dumb is that. So I don't have the answer about, like, what's next, but I can bet that people will tune off, like it's already happening, like people are tuning off of social media, which is it's just a lot of chunks. Now I think people are craving for genuity. You know genuine connections, so you know, don't start your email. You know trying to be fake or, like you know, hack your way and if you're coming up front and genuine, people will resonate with that way more, because they're craving this at the moment and I think that's.
Speaker 1:That's what my campaign was about showing a little bit of vulnerability like, hey, I'm struggling with x, could we have a talk? I work super great because you're not trying to cone them into, you know, having a call with you, you're just being genuine and people just love that. It's human to human in the end, and I think ai is just. We're going to have a pendulum swing back at some point, but I think we're still going toward the ai at the moment it's so true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's so true. It made me think of a story. One of the a really good relationship that I formed recently was on the back of me making a spelling mistake in my linkedin outreach. Yes, he's like you're a human yes, it passed.
Speaker 1:That time passed, unfortunately. Unfortunately, like now, people you know did it on purpose, at scale, and I think it's backfiring a little bit, like people say, like you're sending me out because now people know it's outreach. This is a funny thing. So it's like, oh, you're sending me outreach and you're not even, like you know, spending the time to fix your mistakes or whatever, right, so I think it's it's backfiring a little bit. I think you could be very successful with outreach if you assume people know it's going to be automated, because if they know, then you drop the game, there's no game anymore.
Speaker 1:So if I'm sending you an email and you know it's going to be automated, then well, I'm getting rid of all the games and riddles and stuff like that and I'm just trying to be the most honest I can. What's this conversation about? What? What I'd like in that conversation and what's in it for you? I was just like, okay, people want to do like I had. Like you know, I had some replies of you know my calls. I had some replies saying like I bet it's automated but I still want to chat. I was like it was automated and I also want to chat great and and then we went on the chat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just be upfront, I think that's right. Work-life balance what?
Speaker 1:are your thoughts on work-life balance?
Speaker 2:You're traveling quite a bit. You've come from, you're now in Japan. It sounds like you know you do travel quite a bit and work from different places around the world. What are your thoughts on work-life balance?
Speaker 1:Can you be successful in business and still have that balance? I think you can definitely 100. I got some friends who will have more balance than I have, but at the same time, I don't really like this work-life balance idea. I'm not sure I'm the right person to give advice on this, but I think it's all about what gives you energy, right? Like you know, to me, working on my business is giving me energy and having the opportunity to travel and work in different places is it's the best for me, right? It may not be for everyone, but it is for me, so I'm very fortunate to love what I'm doing and spend as much time as I can doing what I love doing, right? I think the people who need work life balance are people who sacrifice things they should not and don't like what they're doing, and it's draining energy from them. That's why they need the other side of the balance.
Speaker 1:I managed to be fortunate enough to have combined my work with my life, and so I get to do, to work all the time, but not necessarily in a bad way, like sometimes it's just thinking about things, right? As a founder, you never really switched off, right? You just can't really. But you can stay away from the computer and stuff. But to me it's just like I travel instead of sticking away, I keep the computer with me. I travel. To me, that's good enough. Like today I'm in sapporo, next week I'm in hokodate, the week after I'm back in tokyo, go back in switzerland, spend a week with my daughter in another european country, then go back for a week at home, then go back for a month in thailand. It's just like yeah, it's fine, it's fun, that's, that's my life, that's what I like. So you know, craft a life you love doesn't matter about work-life balance. In the end. That's, that's my life, that's what I like. So you know, craft a life you love. It doesn't matter about work-life balance in the end.
Speaker 2:I love that. That's my take. It's about energy, I think what energizes you and you know, not everything needs to energize you, because everyone's going to have a set of tasks that they just have to get on with. Yes, of course, but as long as you know a certain percentage of that is energizing, then yeah, absolutely that's right, you don't want to feel miserable, right but I know people who go, for example, who burned out and you know, 20 hours a week, it's not really that right.
Speaker 1:It's just like there was no interest in what he was doing and he was just like not going anywhere with it and so that burns yourself out for sure, jeremy.
Speaker 2:My last question for you. It's a tradition on this podcast. If you could go back in time and give yourself one bit of advice could be personal, could be business, could be any point back in time what would that advice be?
Speaker 1:because it has to be just one, because I need so many you can give two.
Speaker 1:I would think I'd go back and warn myself about spending an unproportionate amount of effort on the product. Basically, I think we have one of the best products in the market technically speaking, but a lot of other products are making way more noise and that's a shame for the consumer in the end. I believe so a lot more people could benefit from knowing Quickmail and I would say the product is important for sure, but find the fastest way possible to get exposure on the market more, because your client deserves it, you know your future client deserves it, and unfortunately that is not how it plays out.
Speaker 1:Some people who are really smart in marketing came into the market and actually swooped a lot of the market and I think that was probably the biggest mistake I made as a founder of this company spending way too much resources and effort on the product and naively thinking that people, word of mouth or whatever would actually work bigger than paying influencers and ads and stuff like that. And I learned quite recently that at that time when this happened, people were spending more on ads and influencers and content and stuff like that than we were getting in terms of revenue from clients. So how would you compete with that? You don't?
Speaker 2:Yeah, some of the best marketing campaigns don't necessarily have the best product, but yeah there's definitely something to it. Thank you so much for being in the show. I hope you enjoy the rest of your trip in Japan.
Speaker 1:I definitely will, but thank you so much for having me today, joanna. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Pleasure.
