Cold Email & Deliverability | Growth | Partner @ Vinna.ai

If you're interested in improving your cold emails, you've come to the right place.

I’ve worked with clients like Discord, HP, Jellysmack, L'Oréal Paris, Fourthwall, Creative Juice, PearPop, and many more — sending over 60 million cold emails across different industries.

I combine cold email and outbound GTM expertise with AI solutions, smart automation, and deliverability optimization to help businesses scale their outreach and consistently book meetings.

My passion is sharing the knowledge I’ve gained from 5+ years in outbound sales, lead generation, and email deliverability with businesses and individuals who want to get the most out of their cold emailing process.

If you think there’s any way we can help each other, feel free to DM me!

Jovan Shojlevski

How most cold emailers clean their lead lists:

1. Export their contact list
2. Upload it to a verification tool
3. Wait
4. Download the results
5. Re-import the clean list
6. Suppress the bounces

That's 2+ hours per week.

8 hours per month.

Almost 100 hours per year.

On something that should take 0 minutes.

And don't get me started if you do crazy sales volume.

I switched to Bouncer AutoClean since it came out.

It: 

1. Connects to your CRM.
2. Verifies new contacts every hour.
3. Reverifies existing ones automatically.
4. Suppresses undeliverable emails on its own.

I haven't touched a verification CSV since.

And my bounce rate has been as low as ever.

Automate the boring stuff.

Spend your time on what actually makes you money.

Landing 1.2M+ cold emails/month in the inbox at Grow Surely

I check 6 things before sending any sales email campaign.

(Skipping even one can destroy your deliverability)

1. DNS setup → MxToolBox

SPF, DKIM, DMARC must be perfect.

If anything is in red, I let the domain warm up for longer.

No exceptions.

2. Domain reputation → Cisco Talos

If a domain's reputation isn't perfect, nothing is sent from it.

3. Email verification → Bouncer

Every email gets verified before it touches a campaign.

It also identifies spam traps, breached addresses, and complainers.

Invalid/untrusted emails = bounces = reputation damage.

4. Copy readability → Hemingway Editor

Grade 7 reading level or below.

If a 14-year-old can't understand it, simplify it.

5. Mailbox warm-up → Instantly.ai

Every mailbox needs at least 14 days of warm up.

I also always leave backup inboxes to warm up for longer.

6. Sequencing → Instantly.ai

Randomized times. Random intervals.

Predictable patterns trigger spam filters.

That's it.

6 checks. <15 minutes. Every campaign.

I track a metric that most cold emailers ignore.

It's not reply rate.

It's not open rate.

It's lead-to-valid-email rate.

Here's what I mean:

You build a list of 1,000 leads.

You run them through an email finder.

Only 400 come back with valid emails.

That's a 40% lead-to-valid-email rate.

Which means 60% of your research was wasted.

I used to deal with this every week.

Hours spent building lists.

Half the leads had no usable contact info.

It was the most frustrating bottleneck in my workflow.

Then I switched how I source leads.

I start with Prospeo.io 

And it's not just for enrichment.

But for the entire list build.

Here's why it changes everything:

→ 280M+ contacts with pre-verified emails
→ I filter by ICP before I ever export
→ Every email is verified at the source
→ My lead-to-valid-email rate went from 40% to 90%+

That means from 1,000 leads, I get 900+ valid emails.

Not 400.

Same effort. More than double the output.

Here's what that looks like in practice:
Old workflow:

→ Scrape leads from 3 different tools
→ Cross-reference in Clay
→ Run emails through a verifier
→ Lose 50-60% of the list
→ 4 hours of work for 400 usable leads

New workflow:

→ Build the list directly in Prospeo
→ Enrich for personalization
→ Push to Instantly.ai
→ few minutes for 900+ usable leads

The best campaigns don't start with better copy.

They start with better data.

If you're losing half your list before you even send, fix the source.

Dhruv Patel

Co-founder @ Saleshandy

Hey there,  

I'm a guy who wears many hats, and I like it that way! 

My marketing journey kicked off at a company where I managed a team of over 25 folks as the Marketing Lead and Operations Manager. 

But my itch for something more took me down the road of content and niche marketing. That's how I ended up co-creating Saleshandy, a place where I'm still enjoying the ride and helping the company grow.

I'm a marketing junkie and a business starter, and I get my kicks from companies that encourage teamwork and don't put up roadblocks to success. I live to meet and exceed what customers want. I keep a close eye on the results and always tinkering with my game plan based on what's needed. When things go south, I don't get bent out of shape; I see it as a chance to learn. I take a good, hard look at what went wrong, figure out why, and then cook up solutions based on the facts.

As a growth hacker and digital marketing buff, I thrive on the hustle and meet life with a never-say-die attitude. My constant grin shows my love for creating strong teams and my readiness to lend a hand at the drop of a hat.

So here I am, a Co-founder at Saleshandy, extending an invitation for you to join me on this wild ride as we take over the marketing world, one success story at a time. 

Let's get together and see how we can help each other grow. What do you say?

Co-Founder

Saleshandy is a cold outreach platform that helps B2B businesses automate and scale their outbound sales efforts. 

» I am the person responsible for
- majority of marketing stuff
- people management
- developing and implementing systems & procedures throughout the organization
- operations

No outbound tool on earth can solve this debate (including Saleshandy).

I saw this exact question pop up on Reddit:

"I tried cold emails and LinkedIn DMs, but neither worked. What tool should I try?"

Here’s the thing: It’s not the tool — it’s your expectations.

Cold email is designed for reach.

LinkedIn is built for visibility.

Cold email requires you to:
> Send in volume
> Use data
> Test fast
> Have new conversations

LinkedIn requires you to:

> Have social proof
> Take a warmer entry
> Use lower volume, but with higher intent
> Provide context before outreach

But here’s the mismatch:

People expect cold email to book meetings in less than an hour.

People expect LinkedIn to scale like ads.

That’s where things break.

Both channels have their risks:

Cold email: Deliverability issues, spam complaints, bad targeting hurts fast.

LinkedIn: Slower scale, inactive users, platform restrictions.

Neither channel is magic.

If you understand the differences, your strategy is simple.

If you don’t, you’ll be stuck blaming tools FOREVER.

Co-founder @ Saleshandy | Automating cold emails to drive lead generation & sales

Most founders don't have a productivity problem.

They have a body problem they've renamed as a productivity problem.

The truth is:

We build systems for everything:

Pipeline. Hiring. Product. Revenue.

But very few real systems for our body.

And here's the dangerous part 

You don’t notice it breaking down in one dramatic moment.

You slowly become:
> Less sharp
>  Slower to decide
> Quicker to snap
>  Less focused after 3pm

You’ll blame it on workload, but it’s not just that.

It’s years of quiet neglect compounding.

Here’s what I now know, and wish I knew at 25:

Your body doesn’t give you one loud warning.

 It gives you a decade of small signals you ignore.

And then one day, you're 30+, dealing with back pain, lower energy, and a 
shorter focus window.

Fitness doesn’t get easier as you age.

Compounding works both ways.

If you’ve been consistent, your baseline stays high.

Recovery is faster. Focus lasts longer. Stress tolerance is higher.

If you haven’t, each year it gets harder to bounce back.

In your 20s, you can neglect your body and recover quickly.

In your 30s, the same neglect starts sending a bill.

I’ve seen founders spend their 30s trying to rebuild what could’ve been maintained in their 20s.

Don’t wait for the wake-up call.

Build systems for your body the same way you build them for your business.

Every cold email expert you follow was once a beginner figuring out who to email and who not to.

They didn’t become experts because they started early. 

They became experts because they moved to the next stage.

The groundwork for all success: Knowing your stage.

There are 3 stages:

Stage 1: 0 Certainty

You don’t know anything. You’re guessing. Your message changes every week.
 
What do most people do?

They rush out of it.

They see 2 replies, assume they’ve found product-market fit, and hire SDRs.

That’s ego, not evidence.

Stage 2: Some Certainty

Now, you see traction. But confirmation bias kicks in.

You only listen to buyers who agree, ignoring those who don’t.

You shape the story to fit your beliefs.

That’s how weak positioning is born.

And most get stuck here, not knowing how to get out.

Stage 3: Scaling 

Scaling isn’t about “doing more.” 

It’s about protecting what works and testing what might work next.

Most teams either experiment forever and never scale, or scale forever and never improve.

The best teams know when to switch gears.

ICP research isn’t a marketing task—it’s decision control.

If you don’t control the stage you’re in, the stage controls you.

And that’s dangerous.

Imagine this: Your prospect is walking a thin line of patience, and you’re piling weight on with every line you send.

How is that fair?

Your prospects aren’t lounging in the Maldives with a cocktail in hand. 

They’re knee-deep in meetings, inbox chaos, and urgent fires.

So, they don’t just read your cold email. They calculate it.

> Cognitive cost: How much effort will this take to understand?
> Social cost: Does replying risk my reputation?
> Opportunity cost: What am I giving up right now to respond?

Here’s the brutal truth: 

If you miss just one of these costs, your email won’t land.

Even one cost too high, and your email is ignored.

All three too high? 

They will remember you for the wrong reasons.

So here’s what works:

 1️⃣ Keep it one idea, one action.
 2️⃣ Make replying safe and frictionless.
 3️⃣ Respect their time and attention — short, clear, valuable.

The secret?

Your email has to be cheap enough to read, but valuable enough to reply.

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The Battle

Jovan Shojlevski

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