The storyHow they got there
Ryan Doyle built Magic Sales Bot as a SaaS product, then watched it struggle. When he pivoted to Sales.co — a tech-enabled cold-email service — the insight was counterintuitive: don't sell the software, sell the outcome. Be the service, then build the software around what you learn.
The first dozen clients were worked manually. Ryan's team sent emails by hand, learned what subject lines converted, which data sources produced the best prospects, and what follow-up cadences didn't feel spammy. Every manual insight became a feature.
Sales.co used its own product to acquire customers — dogfooding cold email outreach to find companies that needed cold email outreach. Ryan cut burn by moving from Palo Alto back to his family farm. Monthly subscriptions ran $3,000–$30,000.
Channel MixWhere the growth actually came from
Most case studies hand-wave channels. Here's the rough allocation — not in dollars spent, but in users acquired — across the routes that actually mattered.