Sign up now and get 50% off on your first month on any plan
Zach Getrost did not set out to build a cold email agency.
He was running marketing for Tave, a Series A-backed startup based in Charlotte, North Carolina. The outbound was underperforming. Not because the team was not working hard, but because the tools they had, Apollo, ZoomInfo, the standard stack, could not create the kind of variation and personalisation that actually moves someone to reply.
“There wasn’t enough personalisation that we were able to do and we weren’t able to create a lot of variance across different emails. That was probably the most fundamental impact from using anything like Apollo or ZoomInfo to do any of our sending.”
The search for a better tool led him to Smartlead. The ability to spin up fifteen to twenty thousand different email variations, get into inboxes, and actually see positive replies start coming in changed everything.
“At that point it was almost so easy to set up campaigns for our clients as well that it was kind of a no-brainer for us to leverage Smartlead to create full outbound motions.”
What started as a marketing function became a data business. The data business became an agency. Two years later, that agency is Visbl: 500+ campaigns launched, 250,000+ replies generated, $85M+ in pipeline driven for clients across financial services, private equity, M&A, lending, insurance, point of sale, and IT.
The infrastructure behind all of it has been Smartlead from day one.
Zach Getrost, Founder and CEO of Visbl, has been running cold email on Smartlead for two years across financial services, private equity, M&A advisory, lending, insurance, and point of sale verticals. Here is what that has produced:
Zach Getrost’s path to founding Visbl ran through a problem most marketers never solve.
At Tave, the outbound motion was there. The intent was there. But the tools available at the time made meaningful personalisation at scale nearly impossible. Every email looked like every other email. Variance was limited. Inbox placement was inconsistent. The results reflected all of that.
“We weren’t able to really create a lot of variance across different emails. We were using Apollo or ZoomInfo for sending and it just wasn’t effective at getting into inboxes.”
When Smartlead came onto his radar, the difference was immediate. Spin syntax alone allowed him to create fifteen to twenty thousand distinct email variations from a single campaign, where before he had been working with near-identical copies. The inbox placement improved. The positive replies started coming in.
The original use case was competitor data outreach: take a software company, identify their competitors’ customers, and put a more compelling offer in front of them. It worked.
“We’d take software companies and basically say, here’s a list of five thousand of your competitors’ leads. You have a better, more compelling offer. Let’s put your offer in front of them. And that was really effective.”
From there the verticals expanded.
Financial services. Lending. Insurance. Point of sale. Business brokers. M&A advisors. Private equity. Zach Getrost was not planning to start an agency. He was selling data sets and using Smartlead to generate replies for buyers of that data. The agency grew out of how well the machine worked.
Visbl today runs on proprietary infrastructure: a warehouse of roughly 30 million businesses enriched down to the owner level, sending domains and inboxes in the client’s own name that the client keeps, continuous A/B testing, daily deliverability monitoring, and AI reply routing that sends only sales-ready conversations to the client.
White-label partners run their own clients through the same infrastructure.
The decision to stay on Smartlead has never been in question. The platform became the backbone of the operation from the first campaign and has remained there through every vertical expansion and client addition since.
Two things define why that commitment has held.
First, the API. Zach Getrost has built a second company using Smartlead’s backend. The API is intuitive enough that his developer contributed to features alongside the Smartlead team. For a founder who runs automation through n8n and Supabase and needs every system to connect cleanly, a platform with a strong API is not a preference. It is a requirement.
“I basically built another company using Smartlead’s backend, because your API was so intuitive. Even some of the features you built out on your API, my developer helped with. It’s really come a long way.”
Second, the warm-up quality. Deliverability at scale is what separates agencies that produce results from agencies that produce volume. Warm-up pool quality determines inbox placement. Inbox placement determines whether the campaigns Zach Getrost builds for clients actually reach anyone.
“You guys have really improved your warm-up tool over the last year or so. It seems like you guys have improved it quite a bit. That’s a pretty good feature.”
Before Smartlead, the tools available to Zach Getrost at Tave produced near-identical emails across every send. Apollo and ZoomInfo served the data function but could not create the kind of variation that drives inbox placement and reply rates. Every campaign looked the same. The results showed it.
“There wasn’t enough personalisation that we were able to do and we weren’t able to create a lot of variance across different emails. That was probably the most fundamental impact from using anything like Apollo or ZoomInfo.”
Email volume without inbox placement is wasted spend. The sending infrastructure available through standard tools was not built around deliverability the way Visbl needed it to be as it scaled to large-volume campaigns for financial services and regulated industry clients.
As Visbl grew from working with friends to managing clients across financial services, lending, insurance, and point of sale, the need for clean campaign attribution per client and per team member became operationally critical. Running everything in one undifferentiated view was not sustainable.
When dealing with tens of thousands of leads across multiple campaigns, a single misconfigured variable field, a wrong sender name, an empty company field, creates problems across an entire send. Catching those errors before campaigns go live required outside tools because there was no internal validation layer.
“There’s a gap in some of our copywriting or the variables that we have set. We’ve had one person that put like the wrong sender first name, sender last name. And leads that are empty and don’t have that variable in them. There’s no way to tell unless you’re an outside person looking in, especially when you’re dealing with tens of thousands of leads.”
The move to Smartlead addressed each of these problems directly and created the infrastructure that Visbl has scaled on for two years.
The ability to create fifteen to twenty thousand email variations from a single campaign template transformed what was possible for Zach Getrost from day one. Every prospect receives something distinct. Fingerprinting is avoided. Inbox placement improves. Reply rates follow.
“Spin syntax is the best. It’s arguably what makes actual good cold email versus copy-paste cold email.”
Smartlead’s warm-up infrastructure, which has improved significantly over the two years Visbl has been on the platform, provides the deliverability foundation that large-volume campaigns require. Campaigns through Smartlead consistently perform one to two percentage points above the cold email average.
“I think you guys have really improved your warm-up tool over the last year or so. It seems like you guys have improved it quite a bit. That’s a pretty good feature.” Most of our campaigns perform pretty baseline. I don’t think they would perform nearly as good if we didn’t use Smartlead.”
Smartlead’s client access feature allowed Zach Getrost to associate campaigns with individual team members, give clients visibility into their own results, and maintain a clean structure across a growing book of business.
“The client access is really useful. The fact that I can have team members come in as well and associate each campaign to each individual team member is pretty useful for us.”
When positive replies come in across multiple client campaigns simultaneously, manual triage creates delays that cost conversions. Smartlead’s AI reply categorisation classifies every incoming response and pushes qualified leads into Slack so Visbl’s team can respond for clients in near real-time.
“The AI categorisation to automatically classify a lead is really useful because then we can push those leads into Slack and make our lead response time for our clients really, really fast.”
Zach Getrost’s developer contributed to features on Smartlead’s API while building Visbl’s internal systems on top of it. He has since built a second company using Smartlead’s backend. The API’s intuitive design made it possible to connect n8n, Supabase, and every other tool in the stack directly.
“I basically built another company using Smartlead’s backend, because your API was so intuitive. Even some of the features you built out on your API, my developer helped with.”
“Onboarding was super, super easy. It was really easy to get a campaign set up. It was really easy to get inboxes connected. And that’s even easier now than when we first started.”
Several factors have compounded into Visbl’s results over two years on Smartlead.
The proprietary data advantage is significant. Visbl’s warehouse of 30 million businesses enriched to owner level reaches decision-makers that standard databases miss entirely. When the list quality is this different from what competitors are working with, the results diverge accordingly.
The infrastructure consistency matters at the volume Visbl operates. Large-scale campaigns for financial services and regulated industry clients cannot tolerate deliverability inconsistency. The warm-up pools and inbox management within Smartlead have held that floor across every vertical.
The API has allowed Zach Getrost to build a system around Smartlead rather than being constrained by what the interface alone offers. That flexibility compounds over time. Every automation, every workflow, every integration runs through the API cleanly.
And the community was important early. When Zach Getrost was first learning the platform, the Smartlead Slack groups gave him direct access to other agency owners sharing what was working.
“When I first started out I was joining the Slack groups and it was really good to hear from other agency owners and what they were doing. It was super helpful when I was learning and figuring out both industry stuff and actually setting up campaigns and learning best practices.”
Zach Getrost has been on the platform long enough to have seen the support quality change. He is direct about both periods.
“Back in the day it was not good. Now it seems that responses are much quicker. It has improved quite a lot in the last couple of weeks. From what my employees say, it seems like they get back to them pretty quickly.”
For an agency running campaigns across multiple clients simultaneously, support that resolves issues fast is not a secondary concern. It is part of the infrastructure.
Zach Getrost has two things to say to anyone who thinks cold email will not work for their business.
First: it will. And it has never been easier to start.
“I think everybody should be doing outbound. It’s never been easier to launch outbound campaigns. So why aren’t you doing outbound? You’re going to generate extra pipeline from it. People that say it’s not going to work for my business just don’t understand outbound.”
Second: the offer is everything.
“It’s all about the offer. Your offering needs to be something compelling that the other person doesn’t have to just give their time for. It needs to be something they actually want or need right now. Those are the best outbound campaigns. If you don’t have a good offer and you’re just trying to book time easily, you’re not going to have a good time running outbound. You need to give some to get some.”
You can replicate these results when you treat cold outreach as a system rather than a guessing game.
Start by fixing deliverability with Smartlead’s automated warm-up.
Use spin syntax to create meaningful variation across every campaign rather than sending identical emails at scale. Build your campaigns around data that reaches decision-makers standard databases miss, and use AI reply categorisation to make sure positive signals reach your team in real time.
The difference between a 3% reply rate and a 20% reply rate is not a better template. It is infrastructure that holds at volume, personalisation built on real data, and an offer that gives the prospect a reason to respond.
Ready to build your own outbound engine?
Start your free trial on Smartlead and use the same infrastructure Zach Getrost has used to generate $85M in pipeline across 500+ campaigns. Review the complete Smartlead pricing breakdown to see how the model scales.
Visbl has run successful campaigns across financial services, private equity, M&A advisory, lending, insurance, point of sale, IT, and software. Zach Getrost’s view is that cold email works for every B2B vertical when the offer is compelling and the infrastructure is correct.
Spin syntax allows you to define multiple variants of words, phrases, and sentences within a single email template. Smartlead generates unique combinations for each send, producing thousands of distinct emails from one campaign. Zach Getrost describes it as the difference between real cold email and copy-paste cold email.
Smartlead’s AI classifies incoming replies automatically and pushes leads that meet defined criteria into Slack notifications. Visbl uses this to deliver only sales-ready conversations to clients, dramatically reducing the time between a positive reply landing and a client making contact.
Standard databases miss owner-level contacts at small and mid-size businesses. Visbl’s warehouse enriches down to the business owner, which means campaigns reach decision-makers that competitors’ campaigns never find. That data advantage compounds across every campaign Visbl runs.
It is foundational. Poor warm-up pool quality leads to degraded inbox reputation over time, which means campaigns that look healthy in setup progressively land in spam. At the volume Visbl operates, warm-up pool quality is a daily operational concern, not a one-time setup task.
Yes. Client access controls, team member permissions, and campaign-level attribution make it possible to run multiple clients through a single Smartlead account while maintaining clean separation between them. Visbl uses this to serve both direct clients and white-label agency partners.
.avif)
.avif)
Founder, StackOptimise
Smartlead's combination of automation, unlimited inboxes, and easy campaign management has completely transformed how we run cold email campaigns.
.jpg)
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.
