Jack Hayward will be the first to tell you that Eludic was built around a constraint.
Not because there was no other way. But because the constraint was the point.
Most cold email agencies charge retainers that only well-funded companies can justify. The startups that need pipeline the most, the pre-seed and seed-stage founders burning runway with no sales team, are exactly the ones priced out of the market.
Jack built Eludic to fix that. Agency-grade cold email, without the agency price tag. The team builds the infrastructure, writes the campaigns, and books the meetings. Clients do nothing but show up to the calls.
That model only works if the infrastructure underneath it is genuinely solid. You cannot offer enterprise-level results at startup-friendly prices if your tools cannot keep up. Every manual step that slips through is a cost. Every deliverability failure is a client at risk.
Jack has been running Eludic on Smartlead's API for three and a half years. He has tested other platforms during that time. None of them replaced it.
His most recent campaign booked 73 qualified demos in a single month. Before that, a startup with five million in funding and zero prior sales experience closed $2.7 million in deals with companies like Volkswagen and Essentia by month three.
Jack Hayward, co-founder of Eludic, has used Smartlead continuously for three and a half years across multiple agencies and over 300 client engagements. Here is what that has produced:
Jack Hayward is an outbound sales copywriter and co-founder who has consulted for over 300 companies, including Cialdini, and generated more than $15M in deals for clients via email. He runs sales and marketing at Eludic, which is backed by SFC Capital and built around a team of three.
Ben Hayward, who handles operations, scaled his previous company to over $30K MRR in six months, sourcing deals with Dell, Mercedes, and Coinbase. James Shelley, the development lead, has built critical infrastructure for the UK Government and FTSE 250 companies.
Together they built a service designed to be better than an agency and simpler than doing it yourself.
The way Eludic works is deliberately simple. A client fills in a form covering their company, target market, and goals. Eludic handles everything from there: domains, warmed inboxes, authentication, lead lists, copy, sending, and reply management. Campaigns go live the same day. The only thing a client does is attend the meetings that land in their calendar.
"We try to work as much as we can with pre-seed or seed level startups that traditionally couldn't afford huge retainers. To do that we have to do a lot of stuff through the API."
That last sentence is where Smartlead comes in.
Jack did not find Smartlead through a comparison site or a paid ad. He found it the way most practitioners find the tools that actually stick: through a community of people who were already using it.
He was involved with Agency Velocity, a cold email training program for agency owners, when the conversations started shifting. One person mentioned moving to Smartlead. Then another. Then the volume became impossible to ignore.
"A lot of people in the group were starting to mention, hey, I'm jumping onto Smartlead, I'm using Smartlead, moving to Smartlead. Eventually the pressure got to me and I thought, hey, I'm gonna try this Smartlead thing. So here I am."
That was around three and a half years ago. He has tested competitors since then. Nothing has replaced it.
Most people evaluate cold email platforms on their interface. Jack evaluates them on their API.
The reason is structural. Making cold email affordable at the scale Eludic operates requires removing every manual step from the process. Custom integrations, automated workflows, client dashboards, reporting layers. None of that is possible with a weak API.
Jack has tried other platforms. He is direct about the comparison.
"Without a doubt the API. Other tools, without naming names, don't have such a great API. The Smartlead API is extremely good. It just does everything. It's great."
This is also why Jack's team does not spend much time inside the Smartlead interface. The platform is the engine. Eludic builds its entire operation on top of it through the API. For a deeper look at how API-powered cold email infrastructure enables agency-scale operations, the architecture is worth understanding before building on top of any platform.
Jack's favourite Smartlead campaign was for an early-stage startup that had not done much outbound before. No existing pipeline. No proven outreach motion.
"This is probably my favourite SmartLead campaign ever. We booked them 73 qualified demos in a single month."
For a startup building its sales motion from scratch, that is a quarter of pipeline compressed into thirty days.
The second campaign tells the fuller story of what Eludic's model can produce at its ceiling.
A funded startup with around five million dollars raised came to Jack wanting to target Fortune 500 enterprise companies. The problem: they had never done B2B sales. Their offer had never been tested. Jack was honest about the ambition.
"They had about five million in funding. They had never done B2B sales ever before. They came to me and said, hey Jack, we wanna run outbound and we wanna target these enterprise Fortune 500 companies. We've never done sales before. So I was like, hey, this is a little bit ambitious. But if you're willing to experiment, I can try and we can see what we can do, because obviously their offer has never been tested before. We tested for about a month. And then by month three we'd booked them two point seven million in deals with companies like Volkswagen and Essentia, some really big brands. So they were very, very pleased with that."
They tested for a month. By month three the results were in.
"We'd booked them $2.7 million in deals with companies like Volkswagen and Essentia. Some really big brands. They were very, very pleased with that."
Zero prior sales history. No proven offer. Fortune 500 contracts by month three. That is what cold email infrastructure built correctly on reliable deliverability can produce when targeting is precise and copy is tight.
The results across Eludic's client portfolio reflect the same pattern at different scales:
Jack has tested other platforms throughout three and a half years in the market. He keeps returning to Smartlead's deliverability stack as the reason performance holds up consistently.
Eludic handles the technical side most cold email gets wrong: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured on every domain, inboxes warmed correctly with ongoing reputation building, real-time bounce and complaint monitoring, and CAN-SPAM and GDPR compliance with unsubscribe handling built in. The platform underneath all of that is Smartlead.
Three features stand out in the transcript specifically.
Visibility into deliverability health before problems compound is the difference between catching an issue and discovering it after a campaign has already suffered. Smartlead's deliverability monitoring gives Jack that without manual audits.
"The custom private servers are something I wanted for a long time. That's a really, really cool idea."
For clients running high-volume outreach, shared infrastructure means shared risk. Private servers remove that variable.
Pool separation by plan tier means quality improves as operations scale, rather than being diluted by lower-volume users on the same infrastructure. For an agency managing multiple client campaigns simultaneously, that distinction matters.
These three features are why Jack gives Smartlead 4.5 out of 5 on deliverability after testing the alternatives.
"SmartLead are doing a really good job of making deliverability as easy as possible. I'd give you a four, but let's go with a four point five, to be fair."
Jack does not need support often. That is a signal in itself.
For an API-first operation where most of the work runs outside the interface, a platform that simply works without requiring intervention is exactly what the model needs.
Eludic books meetings with Fortune 500 companies for startups that have never done B2B sales before. It closes $2.7M in deals by month three for founders who had no existing pipeline. It does that at prices early-stage startups can actually afford.
Jack also shared about UI and marketing updates, I'll tell you what I really like. I'm aware it's the Smartlead anniversary and I'm aware of that because it's just a nice banner at the top. It's not annoying, it's not telling me to do something. It's just, hey, here's this thing, let me know if you want more info. I think that could be a really cool way to push product updates as well. One thing that annoys me with other products is, hey, we have this new feature, I'm gonna make your whole homepage experience focused around that and you have to click on this video and watch. Whereas the banner's quite nice. If I want more information, I can click on that and get it.
The infrastructure that makes it possible is built on Smartlead's API. The same infrastructure is available to every Smartlead user.
Start your free trial on Smartlead and access the API that powers Eludic's campaigns. Read the lead generation guide to understand how the best outbound operations are structured, or explore how AI is changing cold email before your next campaign launch.
Join us to elevate your outreach!
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Founder, StackOptimise
Smartlead's combination of automation, unlimited inboxes, and easy campaign management has completely transformed how we run cold email campaigns.
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Founder, Cold Email Hackers
We have about 15 companies and we use Smartlead for all of them.
Founder, DutchSave Media
One of the things I love about using Smartlead is the deliverability feature. If they landed in the bounce or spam folders, we could resolve this quickly.
Co-Founder, Growth Today
I want to continue to use Smartlead to make operations more seamless - the plan is to bring more clients here and build more SOPs.
Founder, FueltoFly
Smartlead listens to the agencies and customers and builds according to what people want, that has really made things easier for us.
Founder, OutboundSync
We build an infrastructure product, and OutboundSync communicates with Smartlead itself. I love the webhook and API. They're really well done and keep getting better.
Founder, Axoleads
With SmartDelivery, you can put all of that in the hands of the tool. It ensures your emails land in inboxes, and by running a simple test, you can see if you're hitting the mark.
Founder, Claygen
Deliverability is the cornerstone of cold email outreach. You could have the best email copy in the world, but if no one is seeing it, it's useless. I really love the feature where you can actually give client accesses to your clients.
Co-Founder, Cymate
I do not want to switch to another software. Pick a solution you trust, stick with it, and keep refining your copy.
CMO, Avalanche Capital
Managing large volumes of emails through multiple inboxes used to be a logistical nightmare. With Smartlead, the process is seamless. We book thousands of discovery calls through cold emails. These campaigns are generating leads at a scale we never thought possible.
Founder, Growth Engine X
We came for the unlimited inboxes, and we stayed for the API. 1.5M cold emails/month, 7,767+ inboxes managed.
Head of Community & Ecosystem, TxtCart
You cannot replace having 10,000 touches with potential clients. When you have that much distribution and reach, you really start to see incredible results. The simplicity of Smartlead made all the difference. It doesn't require you to be a technical wizard.
Founder, Hyperke
Smartlead has been a game-changer for us. It increased our appointment volume, improved ease of use, and offered valuable features. 80% increase in appointments/month, peak of 276 appointments in a single month.
Founder, Kinetyca
Smartlead has been our cold email backbone from day one. The platform evolves constantly, keeping pace with how deliverability and personalization need to work today. 21% overall reply rate, $175K in 4 months for multiple B2B clients.
Founder, Reachflow
Smartlead is centered around deliverability and constantly evolving. Their API is not like any other platform. Smartlead covers all our needs. The focus on core features like deliverability and API integration is unmatched.
CEO, Halfwarm
Our approach to crafting conversational emails led to reply rates that many of my peers thought were unattainable.
Co-Founder, letstrike
We've grown on zero capital, zero marketing, purely cold emailing - and that's the story we love to tell. The best approach is no approach if you can't handle domain meltdown. The second best is something like Smartlead that's built from the ground up for deliverability at scale.
Founder, Fenixtal
Smartlead's white-labeling and automation let us punch above our weight. The 12M euros sales potential? That's what happens when you combine human creativity with Smartlead's precision.
Co-Founder, Digital Creativs
Nine out of 10. Ninety percent of our clients are on Smartlead unless they come in with an existing setup. That's the default.
Co-Founder, BuildingReach
At the end of the day, you have to take a bet on one tool or another. It was a no-brainer taking that bet on Smartlead. We had to even turn down the volume of our marketing campaigns - Smartlead was capable of driving more volume than our sales team was able to fulfill.
Founder & MD, Prospectiv
Since starting the business in January of this year, we've already generated $200K in sales exclusively from cold email. Smartlead has been central to our operations and has exceeded our expectations.
Founder, Growthlynk
There's so much stuff built on top of it. I would be dead if I had to rebuild it with another tool. I can manage hundreds of senders easily. I can send hundreds of thousands of emails.
Founder, Corebits
The platform's HubSpot integration, real-time Slack updates, and advanced campaign customization have been game changers for our business and our clients'.
Founder, Apex Ascension
From day one, we've never used anything else.
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