Validating a Cold Email Tool

I've been doing the work on validating ideas before building them out too much, here's how I did an "Email Deliverability Tool:"

Problem - Cold email at scale quickly goes to spam if you're not careful. There's a ton of quirks that aren't documented anywhere, you learn the hard way. I saw a tweet that rotating sending settings (how many emails an inbox can send per day, sending times, etc) appears more human to Google and Microsoft and can defeat spam blockers.

I opened up Instantly, my sending tool, and used the network tab to see what requests got sent when I made changes. I copied those requests into a rough Node JS server. I kept sniffing these requests until I had a rough flow where I could take anyone, have them hook Instantly to this server, set upper and lower bounds for randomization, and use a cron job to tweak each sending account daily.

At this point I could have put up pricing pages, landing pages, etc. But I wanted to see

• A, if this delivered an improvement in sending
• B, if people wanted it I set up a cold email campaign to cold email agency owners. I tweeted here. I posted in Instantly's facebook group. I dm'ed people on Reddit that I found through Gummysearch.

In the first week, I had 7 people trying the tool. It was randomizing all of their sending patterns. I asked them for their reply rates before we started. After 2 weeks of letting this run for them, there was no material increase in reply rate (not even for myself).

So, idea killed. But figuring out how to use cold email in this process is much better than the launch - wait - launch - wait cycle a lot of indiehackers do.