Gamic Media is a B2B outbound GTM agency based in Austin, Texas. They run LinkedIn and cold email campaigns for marketing agencies, financial firms, and SaaS businesses. Founded by Aryan Aryal.
Aryan Aryal did not stumble into cold email.
He picked it deliberately.
When he was building the foundation for Gamic Media, he looked at the channels available to him: paid ads, cold calling, organic content, cold email. He ran the math on each one.
Ads required budget he did not have. Cold calling required the kind of manual, labor-intensive effort that does not scale cleanly. Organic content worked, but slowly. Cold email sat in the middle: automatable, scalable, and not dependent on a large upfront budget to start generating pipeline.
That was around 2023. Today, Gamic Media runs Smartlead as its central outbound platform, has built custom API workflows on top of it, and generated over 300 positive replies for their own business alone in a single quarter, in addition to running campaigns for their full client base.
This is how they built it.
Before Gamic Media could grow, Aryan needed to answer a more fundamental question: which outbound channel actually makes sense for an early-stage B2B agency without a large budget?
"I found cold email to be the best channel that does not break the bank, but at the same time can be automated and sent out at scale. It can scale infinitely."
Cold email gave Aryan the ability to reach decision-makers at marketing agencies, investment banks, M&A firms, and SaaS companies with messaging that could be personalized and tested at volume. It gave him a system where he could measure what worked and improve it, without the manual dependency of cold calling or the budget ceiling of paid media.
Once the channel was decided, the tool selection followed. Aryan was referred to Smartlead by people in his network who said it was the best option for landing in the inbox without paying extra for warmup or extra for additional email accounts. He started using it, and it became the core of Gamic Media's outbound infrastructure.
"Smartlead was the one I heard, at least I was referred by people, and they said this is the best one. And it still is one of the best ones that gets your email in the inbox. You're not going to land in spam. They offer unlimited email accounts, unlimited warmup."
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When Aryan started Gamic Media, he was not a cold email expert. He was learning the channel at the same time he was building the business on top of it. That meant every configuration decision, every deliverability choice, every sequence structure was something he had to figure out on the fly.
What changed that was Smartlead's resource hub. Aryan spent time going through the documentation, blogs, and guides available directly inside the platform, and found that Smartlead was not just a sending tool. It was also a learning system.
"I was able to learn cold email just by going through the docs on Smartlead itself. You guys have a very good database of resources I can use."
Two resources stand out in his memory. The first was the explanation of spintax and how to use it to vary email copy at scale without triggering spam filters. The second was a guide on spam triggers that explained why certain phrases caused deliverability problems, and then pointed directly to Smartlead's built-in spam checker as the tool to fix it.
Both were the same pattern: education about the problem, followed immediately by a practical tool inside Smartlead to solve it. For someone learning the channel in real time, that combination was genuinely useful.
As Gamic Media grew its client base, the operational challenge shifted from learning to systemization. Running LinkedIn and email campaigns for multiple clients simultaneously meant that reporting, lead management, and response handling all needed to work without creating manual overhead for every new account added.
The answer Gamic Media built was custom API workflows on top of Smartlead. Smartlead's API and automation infrastructure gave the team programmatic control over campaign data, so they could automate reporting for clients rather than pulling it manually, enrich leads automatically when positive replies came in, and build subsequence logic that triggered based on lead behavior rather than requiring manual intervention.
"The API is really good. We have some pretty cool backend API stuff. We built out a system where for every interesting response that comes in, it automatically enriches the cold email."
At scale, that kind of automation is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between an operation that grows cleanly and one that creates new manual tasks for every new client.
Deliverability is always the underlying constraint in cold email. As Gamic Media's send volume grew, the risk of any individual campaign degrading inbox placement increased. Maintaining consistent deliverability across a growing number of clients required infrastructure that could hold up under volume, not just during the initial warmup period.
Understanding what Smartlead's email deliverability guide covers in depth, Aryan built deliverability management into his standard operating process from early on, using spintax for copy variation, the spam checker to audit templates before sends, and SmartDelivery to monitor inbox placement when needed.
One of the things Aryan highlights most about Smartlead is the quality of the educational content built around the platform. Unlike tools that document features in isolation, Smartlead's resource hub explains the underlying principles of cold email, then shows exactly how to implement them inside the platform.
The spintax guide is a good example. It explained what spintax is, why it helps with deliverability, and then provided copy-paste ready syntax that Aryan could drop directly into his campaigns. The spam checker guide explained the mechanics of spam filtering, then pointed to the built-in tool.
The pattern across the resource hub is the same: learn the concept, apply it immediately inside Smartlead.
"It not only had this is why you use spintax, but it also had just copy and paste this. It was super, super good and easily integratable."
For someone building an outbound operation from the ground up, this kind of integrated education accelerates the learning curve meaningfully.
The feature Aryan is most enthusiastic about is the API layer, and the custom workflows Gamic Media has built on top of it.
The most notable is a competitor engagement monitor. The team scrapes people engaging with outbound-related content on LinkedIn, sends them a personalized email offering a custom outreach strategy built specifically for their company, and uses Smartlead to manage the sequence logic.
When a lead replies yes, Smartlead automatically marks the lead, enriches it, and triggers the delivery of the custom lead magnet. A follow-up subsequence tracks whether the lead opened the magnet and, if not, adds them to an automated follow-up path.
The results from this workflow speak for themselves. On one run of 984 emails, the campaign generated a 52% positive reply rate. On a broader version of the same lead magnet approach across 17,000 emails, the team generated 57 warm leads at a 16% interest reply rate.
For context on what those numbers represent in the benchmark landscape, Smartlead's B2B cold email response rates guide shows that most well-run campaigns operate between 4 and 12%.
"The API is probably the biggest feature for us. The custom stuff you can make on there is so cool."
Beyond the API, Aryan uses Smartlead's tags and subsequences heavily to manage lead routing and follow-up logic across campaigns.
Custom tags let the team mark leads with specific attributes, whether that is the type of lead magnet they engaged with, where they are in the follow-up process, or whether they need a different path based on their response. Subsequences then route leads into different follow-up tracks based on those tags automatically, without requiring someone to manually move leads between campaigns.
"Tags is another great feature. I love how you can add them to different subsequences or create a custom one with the lead magnet. You can create a no-show subsequence, or maybe a find-phone-number sequence. I love how you can just customize it."
For an agency managing multiple client campaigns with different ICPs and different response logic, this kind of behavioral routing is what keeps the operation organized at volume.
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For clients who want visibility without needing full agency management, Gamic Media uses Smartlead's client access feature to create a lower-tier service offering: done-with-you rather than done-for-you.
In this model, the agency sets everything up, inboxes, warmup, campaigns, sequences, and the client logs into Smartlead's client portal to reply to interested leads and book calls. The client gets a clean, branded interface. The agency gets a scalable service model that does not require as much ongoing management per account.
"I love how you can just have clients log on to Smartlead client access and just reply to the emails, follow up the leads, and book them in. And I love how you can also customize it with the logo and the colors."
This model would not work without a platform that can support multiple clients in isolated, brandable workspaces. Smartlead's white-label client workspaces are what make it operationally feasible.
As the number of campaigns grew, Aryan needed a way to see performance across clients without running separate reports for each one. Smartlead's global analytics view gave him exactly that: a single dashboard where he can filter by campaign, by client, by date range, and pull up the numbers he needs for any review or reporting conversation.
"The global analytics has gotten a lot better. I love how you could just separate by campaign, separate by client, separate by day, and it'll just pull everything up."
This replaced a manual Airtable-based reporting setup for internal review, and made the kind of weekly performance conversations that agencies need to have with clients significantly faster.
Gamic Media's most distinctive campaign is worth examining in detail because it shows what is possible when Smartlead's API, tags, and subsequence logic are used together with a well-thought-out lead strategy.
The concept: identify people engaging with outbound-related content on LinkedIn, which signals they are either thinking about or already running an outbound operation. Reach out with an offer to send them a custom outreach strategy built specifically for their company, not a generic resource but something bespoke.
When someone replies yes, the entire follow-on process is automated inside Smartlead. The lead is marked and enriched. The custom lead magnet is generated and sent. If the lead does not open the magnet within a set window, a follow-up subsequence kicks in automatically.
The result of this approach was a 52% positive reply rate on a 984-email campaign. By any benchmark, that number is exceptional.
"We only literally sent 984 emails and got 10 positive replies. But the positive reply to email ratio rate was 52% positive reply rate, which is really, really good."
For internal Gamic Media outreach across a full quarter, the team generated over 300 positive replies sitting inside Smartlead, all available to be called, followed up with, or added to a subsequence for further nurturing.
1. API and webhooks. The core of Gamic Media's automation stack. Used to automate client reporting, enrich leads on positive replies, and build custom campaign logic that runs without manual input.
2. Tags and subsequences. Custom tags route leads into the right follow-up path based on behavior. Subsequences handle no-shows, lead magnet follow-ups, and intent-based branching automatically.
3. Client access and white-labelling. Enables a done-with-you service model at scale. Clients log in to a branded portal, manage their own replies, and book meetings without needing full agency support. Learn more about white-label options.
4. Global analytics. Cross-campaign, cross-client performance visibility in a single dashboard. Filter by client, campaign, or date to pull up exactly what you need for reporting conversations.
5. Resource hub and community. Smartlead's documentation and guides taught Aryan the fundamentals of cold email while he was building the business. The community is where he hires talent and gets answers to deliverability and infrastructure questions fast.
Gamic Media is continuing to grow its client base and deepen the automation layer on top of Smartlead.
Aryan's philosophy on product is direct: less is more. He would rather have one tool that excels at outbound than a platform that tries to do everything and does most of it mediocrely. Smartlead fits that philosophy. He wants Smartlead to stay focused on being the best outbound and GTM platform available, keep improving the features that agencies and operators depend on, and resist the temptation to expand into areas where it does not have a natural edge.
SmartAgents is the feature he is watching most closely for the future.
"SmartAgents looks really, really good. With AI and all this crazy stuff going on, it's crucial that you're up to date with everything. You guys pushing that tool out and having some type of AI agent in there just shows that you guys are not going to leave the tool as is. You're always constantly looking to upgrade."
The core of the operation is already solid. What comes next is adding more intelligence on top of it.
Ready to build an API-driven outbound operation that generates results like Gamic Media?
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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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