Kareem Abukhadra did not reach out because someone asked him to.
He reached out because he wanted to. No prompt, no request, no incentive. Just a founder who felt strongly enough about a product to go out of his way to say so publicly.
That kind of unsolicited gratitude does not come from a product that is merely functional. It comes from a product that has changed how a business operates at a fundamental level.
For Relentless, that change was significant. Smartlead is not a tool they use on the side. It is woven into the core of what they do, both to grow their own business and to deliver results for their customers.
And the numbers behind that are hard to argue with. Over 170,000 replies from leads. Multiple seven figures in top-line revenue. An 86% positive reply rate across tracked campaigns. All of it running through Smartlead.
TL;DR
Relentless, a done-for-you job search accelerator, uses Smartlead in two distinct ways: to acquire new customers for their own business, and to run outreach on behalf of job-seeking candidates as part of their core product. Here is what that has produced:
What Relentless Actually Does
Relentless is a done-for-you job search accelerator. The premise is simple but the execution is operationally intensive: busy professionals who need a new role should not have to spend their evenings cold applying and following up with silence. Relentless does that work for them.
That means identifying the right roles to target, improving resumes, and running direct outreach to hiring managers and decision-makers on the candidate's behalf.
As Himayu, who manages outreach operations at Relentless, describes it: "We mostly describe ourselves as helping job seekers land their next job by doing the job search for them with less effort. Our main target audience is people who are out there seeking the next role."
It is a service that lives or dies on outbound. Not just for growth, but as the actual product being delivered. That distinction matters when you understand how Relentless uses Smartlead.
Most businesses that use a cold email platform use it for one thing. Relentless uses Smartlead for two, and they are fundamentally different from each other.
The first is straightforward: marketing outreach. Smartlead helps Relentless reach the professionals who need their service, converting cold contacts into paying customers. This is cold email infrastructure working in its most traditional sense: find the right people, send the right message, convert them into customers.
The second is more unusual. When a candidate joins Relentless, the team runs outbound campaigns on their behalf, reaching out to hiring managers at companies that match the candidate's target roles. That outreach is also powered by Smartlead.
"We have two usages of Smartlead right now. One is as a marketing tool to reach out to new customers. The other is something we use internally for our product. We do outreach on behalf of the candidates, and to reach those hiring managers and relevant people, we use Smartlead for the candidates as well."
One platform. Two entirely different outbound functions. Both running at scale simultaneously. This kind of dual-purpose infrastructure deployment is exactly what AI-powered outbound systems make possible when the underlying platform is built for flexibility rather than a single use case.
Relentless was already running cold email before Smartlead. They were not starting from zero. But the platform they were using had started to show its ceiling.
"With the other platform, the process felt very much more limited and harder to scale clearly. When you are sending high volume emails, small issues around deliverability or campaign management start becoming expensive quickly."
The recommendation to switch came from their head engineer, someone who had used Smartlead directly and trusted it. The case for switching was not complicated. It came down to infrastructure confidence.
"It felt more of a serious outreach platform, to be honest. The infrastructure gave us more confidence in running campaigns at scale, with better campaign management features and the ability to track deliverability properly."
For teams hitting the limits of basic sending tools, the difference between a platform and proper cold email infrastructure becomes visible fast. Deliverability issues that seem small at low volume become costly at scale.
Himayu is clear about which features drive results for their operation. They are not experimenting with the edges of the platform. They are running core functions at high volume and need them to be reliable every single day.
The foundation of both their marketing and candidate delivery operations. Once a campaign is live, automated sequencing handles the follow-up without manual intervention.
Keeping multiple concurrent campaigns for different candidates and different marketing audiences organized and performing at the same time.
Maintaining sender health across the inboxes powering outreach for both sides of the business. At the volume Relentless operates, inbox health is not optional.
Knowing in real time how campaigns are performing and where leads are engaging. All replies across every mailbox flow into Smartlead's unified master inbox, where they are categorized and routed automatically.
Staying ahead of issues before they affect inbox placement or sender reputation. "Once the campaign is launched, deliverability matters more than anything else for us. Smartlead has helped automate so much of our work that we can focus on what matters."
The numbers Relentless has produced through Smartlead are not incremental improvements over what they had before. They represent a different scale of operation entirely.
Across four visible tracked campaigns, Relentless sent over 33,800 emails with an 86% positive reply rate out of total replies received.
Across their full operation, Smartlead has been responsible for over 170,000 replies from leads and multiple seven figures in top-line revenue.
Kareem Abukhadra, Founder of Relentless, says it plainly:
"Smartlead is responsible for 170,000 replies from leads and multiple seven figures in top-line revenue. As somebody who has tested tens and tens of products for outbound, they are one of the best and have probably been the most impactful for us."
That is not a carefully worded marketing quote. That is a founder who went out of his way to say it without being asked. For context on what drives results like these, email deliverability and inbox placement consistency are almost always the variable separating strong reply rates from average ones.
The Relentless team has never had an unresolved support issue with Smartlead. That is partly because the platform is reliable. And partly because when something does go wrong, the response is immediate.
"Your team is amazing. We have them on WhatsApp, on email. We have never faced issues with support. There have been times when we literally had a crisis with our campaign management and we just reached out. We have your support on WhatsApp groups as well. We never faced any issues."
The interface made a difference too. Most questions never needed to reach support at all because the platform was clear enough to navigate without help.
"The interface was so user friendly that we pretty much figured things out on our own. But whenever we did reach out, there were multiple people just responding instantly."
Kareem puts the support experience in direct terms:
"When things break, and things break with almost any product you are going to use, their support team is super helpful. Akash is super helpful and everybody else on the team is super helpful."
Himayu is not shy about where there is room to grow. The product is strong. But at the volume Relentless operates, attribution and inbox-level visibility become increasingly important.
"As we go further into the outbound world, more visibility around attribution would be helpful. At high volume, we want to better understand exactly what our campaigns are producing and which inboxes are creating higher risk."
It is feedback that only comes from a team that is genuinely pushing the platform. As AI outbound systems continue to evolve, deeper attribution and signal-level reporting are exactly where the next generation of outbound infrastructure is heading.
The detail that says the most about the Relentless relationship with Smartlead is not in the metrics. It is in how the testimonial came about.
Kareem did not respond to an outreach request. He did not fill out a form. He just reached out.
"I actually just reached out to the founder and said, hey, I love your product, it has been super helpful. Huge shoutout to the team. They didn't ask for a testimonial. I just reached out because I wanted to."
When a founder goes out of their way to publicly credit a platform they were never asked to endorse, that is a different kind of validation. It means the product has genuinely changed how they operate, and they wanted someone else to know it.
Relentless runs two separate outbound operations through Smartlead simultaneously, at high volume, across multiple campaigns, with results that have contributed to multiple seven figures in revenue. The infrastructure that makes that possible is the same infrastructure available to every Smartlead user.
Start your free trial on Smartlead and see what consistent inbox placement, automated warmup, and reliable campaign management can do for your outbound operation. Read the lead generation guide to understand how the best outbound operations are structured, or explore how AI is changing cold email outreach before your next campaign launch.
Relentless is a done-for-you job search accelerator that helps busy professionals land their next role with less effort. The company handles everything from identifying target roles and improving resumes to running direct outreach to hiring managers on behalf of candidates.
Relentless uses Smartlead in two ways. First, as a marketing tool to reach potential customers and grow their own client base. Second, as a core part of their product delivery, running cold email campaigns on behalf of job-seeking candidates to reach hiring managers at target companies.
Relentless has sent over 33,800 emails across tracked campaigns with an 86% positive reply rate. Across their full operation, Smartlead has been responsible for more than 170,000 replies from leads and multiple seven figures in top-line revenue.
Their previous cold email platform became too limited and expensive to scale. Deliverability and campaign management issues that were minor at low volume became costly at scale. Smartlead was recommended by their head engineer as a more serious infrastructure-level platform built for high-volume outreach.
The Relentless team relies primarily on automated campaign outreach, campaign sequencing and management, mailbox health monitoring, the unified master inbox for reply tracking, and deliverability monitoring. These are the features that keep their high-volume dual-purpose operation running reliably.
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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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We have about 15 companies and we use Smartlead for all of them.
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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.
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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.
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I do not want to switch to another software. Pick a solution you trust, stick with it, and keep refining your copy.
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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.
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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.
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Our approach to crafting conversational emails led to reply rates that many of my peers thought were unattainable.
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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.
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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.
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