He has cold outbound data on 40 million startups. Here's what works. | Daniel Saks, Co-Founder of Landbase and AppDirect

Daniel Saks built AppDirect into a marketplace moving upwards of $10B a year in gross merchandise value. Now he runs Landbase, an AI go-to-market company with data on 40 million startups, and it just raised a $30M Series A. So when he talks about cold outbound, he is not guessing. He is reading what actually happens across millions of messages. He also spent two years in a windowless room building an app store for Bell Canada that launched to crickets. Harley from Shopify messaged him: the Bell business app store has less traffic than my intern's blog.

In this episode, Daniel breaks down what response rates on cold email actually look like today, how to build a living TAM map instead of paying a consulting firm a few hundred thousand for a dead one, and why three touches get you 90% of the result while five gets you flagged as spam.

Why You Should Listen

• Why product market fit is never won once, only re-won in each new niche.
• How a 2% email response rate becomes 8-10% on a tight enough list.
• Why you should not run outbound at all until people can look you up.
• How to hand an agent your CRM and call notes so it tells you who to call today.

Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, Landbase, Daniel Saks, AppDirect, outbound sales, cold email, AI SDR, go-to-market, TAM mapping, agentic AI, sales development, B2B marketplaces

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:02:28 Product Market Fit Is Magnetic Momentum
• 00:04:44 The Bell Launch Nobody Came To
• 00:14:24 Leaving the Company He Built
• 00:16:27 Training a Model on What Outbound Works
• 00:26:36 Start With a Living TAM Map
• 00:34:09 Who Gets Your Time, Who Gets Autopilot
• 00:39:50 The Response Rates to Actually Expect
• 00:49:26 The Biggest Outbound Mistake