Faraz Ahmed has spent three and a half years in go-to-market, first at GoMarble, then at enterprise procurement company Zycus, and now as the founder of ThynkGrowth, a GTM agency that runs outbound for marketing agencies, Martech tools, and SaaS companies.
In that time, nearly every tool in his stack has been swapped out.
Clay came and went. So did Apollo and a rotation of LinkedIn outreach tools, dropped as costs changed, experiments ended, or something better came along.
One tool never got replaced: Smartlead.
Today, 90% of ThynkGrowth's clients run on Smartlead, and Faraz's own campaigns consistently pull 59–70% positive reply rates.
That kind of loyalty isn't habit. It's a judgment call, made every time a new tool showed up and didn't quite measure up.
Faraz Ahmed, founder of ThynkGrowth, has used Smartlead continuously since March 2024 across three different organizations before building his own GTM agency. Here is what that has looked like:
Faraz Ahmed has spent three and a half years in go-to-market, starting as a GTM generalist at GoMarble before moving into an enterprise environment at Zycus and eventually founding ThynkGrowth, a GTM agency he now runs full time.
ThynkGrowth works primarily with marketing agencies and Martech tools, a niche Faraz understands deeply from his own background running a D2C startup before moving into GTM. The remaining clients are SaaS platforms and IT service agencies across other industries.
"I'd say eighty percent of our clientele comprises marketing agencies and Martech tools, and then the remaining twenty percent is other SaaS platforms or IT service agencies."
The through-line across all of it is outbound. And the through-line across all of that outbound is Smartlead.
Faraz did not find Smartlead through a review site or a recommendation from a peer. He found it because GoMarble, the company he joined as one of the earliest team members, was already using it.
"2024 March is when I started using Smartlead. That's when I got introduced to SmartLead and also to GTM, to be honest."
He learned cold email and Smartlead at the same time, which means his intuitions about how outbound should work were shaped entirely on the platform. When he eventually looked at alternatives, nothing quite fit.
"I started off from Smartlead and then eventually got such a hang of the platform that I couldn't really adapt to any other platform."
At GoMarble, Faraz helped set up Smartlead from scratch and built his foundational understanding of cold email infrastructure, deliverability, spintax, and personalized copy.
At Zycus, an enterprise-level company with a 70-member BDR team, Smartlead handled centralized cold outreach while other tools managed one-to-one email for the larger team. Even at that scale, Smartlead was the cold outreach infrastructure of choice.
2024 was a turning point for anyone running cold email seriously. Deliverability tightened. Spam filters got smarter. Open rates and click rates became unreliable signals.
Faraz was in the middle of it at GoMarble when it happened.
"In 2024 we saw that crackdown on the whole infrastructure where most emails were going into spam. That's when we realized we should stop tracking open rates and click rates."
The teams that survived that period were the ones who had already built their outreach around deliverability fundamentals rather than volume. Spintax, unique copy, personalized messaging, proper warmup. Faraz learned all of it during that period, and Smartlead's infrastructure was what made it manageable.
That experience shaped how he thinks about email deliverability to this day: it is not a feature you turn on. It is the foundation everything else sits on.
Faraz is not the kind of operator who activates every feature because it exists. He uses what solves real problems and builds from there.
Before auto-tagging, Faraz was manually reading every reply and categorizing it himself. Interested. Not interested. Out of office. Meeting requested. At volume, that becomes a significant time drain.
"What used to happen at least a year ago is I used to manually read the replies and then mark them as interested, not interested. Now things have gotten easier with the auto-tagging feature. I just check whatever is either interested or meeting requested. So I just read through those emails. That's saving me a lot of time."
Speed of reply matters in cold email. A positive response that sits unanswered for three hours is a warm lead going cold. Faraz used to check Smartlead once or twice a day and reply in bulk. The Slack integration changed that entirely.
"I get a notification immediately. I don't have to wait. Before, even if I'd gotten a reply at 10am, I was still replying at 1pm because that's when I was checking SmartLead. Now in five minutes of getting a reply, I'm on it."
That response speed compounds over time. Prospects who hear back quickly convert at higher rates. The multi-channel outreach ecosystem Faraz runs depends on that kind of tight feedback loop.
One of Faraz's more specific observations is about warmup pool quality. Earlier, all accounts shared the same warmup pool regardless of plan, meaning a new user on a basic plan could drag down the reputation of pools used by serious operators.
"Now you have different warmup pool tiers. You have premium, growth, and all of that in terms of the warmup pool. So your warmup pool just keeps improving when you move plans, rather than being on the same pool as everyone else."
For clients running high-stakes outreach in competitive industries, pool quality is not a minor detail. It is part of what keeps emails landing in the primary inbox consistently.
This is the feature that goes unnoticed when it is working, which is most of the time for Faraz.
As he puts it: "When it's not performing, all of us ask why. But when it is performing, it just happens in the background and goes unnoticed." That invisibility is exactly what good infrastructure looks like.
Faraz's own outreach campaigns for ThynkGrowth consistently produce 59 to 70% positive reply rates. That figure reflects both strong deliverability and tight ICP targeting: his lead lists come from Prospeo or Apollo, his messaging is generated with Claude, and Smartlead handles the sending.
"Campaign-wise I'm getting consistent 60 to 70% positives. Volumes are decent. I'm sending a good amount."
Over the most recent three-month period, Faraz generated 45 to 50 positive replies through Smartlead outreach. Of those, 25 to 30 converted into discovery calls.
"That ratio is pretty good. A good 30 meetings have been booked out of 50 positive responses."
Closures from outbound are still maturing. The May to July period was slow across the market and most closures during that time came through inbound. But the meetings, proposals, and discovery conversations that feed that pipeline are coming directly from outbound through Smartlead.
"All of my discoveries, talking to people, sending proposals, all of that volume is purely coming from outbound."
This is a distinction worth understanding. In many outbound operations, the funnel generates meetings that close as inbound-assisted deals. Outbound fills the top, relationship and timing close the bottom.
Faraz has experimented with the SmartAssistant and has a clear-eyed view of where it adds value and where it could go further.
For someone at his experience level, having an AI build a campaign in isolation does not save much time. He can build a campaign himself in five minutes. What would genuinely change his workflow is if the assistant could connect the full picture: suggest a campaign, build a relevant lead list through SmartProspect, and generate the messaging, all in one conversation.
"If I get those three things to start off with, then I can have a few more chats with the bot and finalize the campaign. Right now I'm just getting a campaign built, which is not adding incremental value to me."
He is also actively building out the Smart Reply Agent for his use case, though it is still a work in progress. The potential is there. The configuration for his specific workflow is still being refined.
Faraz has been a consistent presence at Smartlead's weekly Office Hours, particularly in his early months on the platform. He sees it as one of the most underrated parts of the Smartlead ecosystem.
His engagement has evolved naturally. Early on he attended regularly to build his understanding. Now he picks and chooses based on the topic and speaker. That trajectory from regular attendee to selective participant is exactly what a healthy community looks like in practice.
Faraz was recently featured as Smart Leader of the Week, which is actually how he discovered the Slack community existed. Once inside, he finds it a useful space with active conversations, mostly around troubleshooting and platform questions. He expects it to become more valuable over time.
Faraz has run Smartlead across early-stage startups, enterprise BDR teams, and his own agency. Three and a half years in, it is still the only sending tool in his stack that has never been replaced.
The infrastructure that produced consistent 60 to 70% positive reply rates and 30 booked meetings in a single quarter is the same infrastructure available to every Smartlead user.
Start your free trial on Smartlead and see what three years of compounding deliverability, auto-tagging, and Slack-connected reply management can do for your outbound operation.
Read the lead generation guide to understand how serious operators structure their outbound stack, or explore AI-assisted outbound before your next campaign launch.
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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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