Achieving Unmatched Email Deliverability Exclusively For Cold Emails with Nikita Bykadarov

Andy Splichal:

Welcome back to another episode of the Make Each Click Count podcast. I'm your host, Andy Splichal, and today we have an exciting conversation lined up that's going to be all about scaling your email outreach for business growth. Our guest today is Nikita, the founder of Maildoso, a sales SaaS that's on track for 5 million in revenue this year. Maildoso is making waves in the world of e commerce outreach, automating, domain setup and mailbox creation, helping businesses achieve unmatched deliverability. With Google and Microsoft tightening the reins on cold email practices, Nikita and his team have crafted a platform that maximizes deliverability and simplifies the process of setting up hundreds of domains and emails in minutes. If you are looking to scale your cold outreach program of emails, improve your deliverability, and boost your sales conversion, stay tuned because Nikita is about to share some incredible insights. All right, welcome to the show, Nikita.

Nikita Bykadarov:

Thanks for having me.

Andy Splichal:

So let's start. Can you tell us what inspired you to create Mildoso? And how did you identify the need for a tool like this in the market?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah, that's a good question. So, like, it turns out that if you, instead of sending hundreds or like even thousands of emails from one single mailbox, if you spread this volume across multiple mailboxes and you will send like 20 mails per day maximum, you can get like insane bump in results of your cold email campaigns because your main enemy is a spam filter. And if your open rates are like 20% or less, it means most of your emails went in spam. So you. So we, like in my previous company called backlinkswappers.com, we were using cold email for outreach. And we quickly realized that, okay, so using this tactic, we can get way better outcomes from cold email. And then scaling mailboxes become a real issue because, well, it takes a lot of time to set them up. And also, like, at first we were using Google mailboxes and they were suspending our accounts because, well, they don't allow to use their mailboxes for cold outreach.

Nikita Bykadarov:

So we started developing our own infrastructure. And then I was sharing with my friends how we automatically set up, like, hundreds of mailboxes. We were sending, by the way, over 10,000 emails per day. And we were, and we managed to acquire over 600 customers using only cold email. And I was sharing with my friends, like, how we do cold email, how we automatically set up domains, how we spin up IP addresses and stuff. And there was like, can you teach me how to do the same? I was like all right, well that's going to be like a little bit challenging because like I have to teach. And then I decided to just you know, to make a product to make it, you know, incredibly simple for them. And then we realized that there is a huge demand on the market for services like that.

Nikita Bykadarov:

So we pivoted the company and now we are male dosa.

Andy Splichal:

How long.

Nikita Bykadarov:

When did you guys launch like us male dosso. We launched in October last year.

Andy Splichal:

So October 23rd.

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah, but we were building this infrastructure for one and a half years before we actually became Mail DOSA because like cold email infrastructure, it's incredibly complex thing mostly because of the IP addresses shortage on the market.

Andy Splichal:

So you've launched like a year ago but you, I mean you've hit 5 million year on pace to 5 million in revenue this year. That is, I mean that's huge. So obviously, I mean the market for it, I mean there's demand. Is there anybody else doing this?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah, there is quite a few competitors but they not even, you know, close to in terms of like performance what we provide to our customers, our biggest customers, they send close to hundreds of thousands cold email per day and they literally printing money. They are happiest people on earth. Like honestly like I talk to them and every time like we jump on the call, they like they have white smile, they relax. I know they're, they do.

Andy Splichal:

Okay, so if you, let's say the company abc.com just for example, so you're sending it through other domains. What are the emails? What's the end user sees coming in?

Nikita Bykadarov:

They see, they see mailboxes, you know, like andy@abcteam.com or andy@try abc.com so that type of mailboxes, that type of domains and if they click on your domain in your signature or like they would want to like see, you know, what's the getabc.com they will be redirected to your main domain which is abc.com so.

Andy Splichal:

So I think you had mentioned what if, if you weren't at 30% open rate then you're, you're getting hit with spam. So you're, you're not getting to the. Yeah, you're not getting emails. What percentage are your clients getting as far as their open rates?

Nikita Bykadarov:

We don't know but we actively encourage our customers to reach out to us if their numbers below 50% and we actually help them. We have a dedicated team that does so they basically they do an analytics of the, you know, of the campaign and then give actionable advice on what you can do to improve your cold email and it's most of the things that are. We have the cold email deliverability guide on our website. It's in the footer and there's like a few things that if you do right you will always have insane results and it's not necessary. You need to use mail dosa, you can even if you use like Google to send cold emails, if you follow these rules you always gonna get like good results.

Andy Splichal:

Now cold email can be controversial. If you don't, I mean if you don't have, where do you come from? Do you have the rights to email them? How do you guys ensure compliance practices for outbound marketing with cold emails?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah, so like for sure you want to stay compliant and it's not that difficult to be honest. Like so in the US there is a spam can act that regulates the industry and it requires there is like simple requirements that you need to follow in order to you know, stay compliant. It's totally illegal to cold outreach companies and if you forbidden this like there is, there will be like a ton of industries that will just you know, stop working because well you know there's like certain types of products that people just don't Google. Like how to buy Airbus and instead Airbus sales team have to reach out to their customers proactively. All enterprise sales built around sales team proactively reach out to their customers. So we ask our customers to follow these rules to stay, to stay compliant and I highly encourage everyone to follow these rules.

Andy Splichal:

Now you had mentioned before that you're setting up a ton of emails and you're only sending like 20 emails per thing. Are you reusing those emails or is it a one time use and then they're done.

Nikita Bykadarov:

Do you mean like leads or.

Andy Splichal:

Well no, when you're sending out the emails to cold out.

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah. So you that what most of our customers do, they have let's say 12 or 40 or 100 mailboxes and they warm them up and then they use them for outreach up until the point they get burned. Like at some point if you receive too many spam complaints and well if you do call outreach you will receive some spam complaints that's for sure. Because like people did not expect you to, you know, to email them and then when your inbox get too many spam complaints it becomes burned and then. Well what is going to happen is the Google and Microsoft and that's primary reason you don't want to send emails from your main domain. They gonna place all emails from your domain into spam and there is a simple process of recovering them. So like if you hit into that, you just need to, you know, stop doing cold outreach from these specific mailboxes but keep warming them up for a few weeks and they will recover. So in other words, you can keep using them, you know, for as long as you need.

Andy Splichal:

Now besides cold outreach, I mean I've had clients who maybe they haven't hit their email list in a while, but when they do, they start seeing that their emails are lower. You know, maybe they have a 20% open rate. Even though these are former customers, does that mean that they have been somehow labeled as spam? And can a customer like that use your guy's service?

Nikita Bykadarov:

It's a very interesting like for the opt in email marketing there is no good solution for that. But basically yes. Spam filters of Google and Microsoft filter them out like filter those emails as spam. And vast majority of their customers just don't see them if they have 20% open rate. That's true. So like in ideal situation you want to have like anything about 50. Some of our customers claim they get like 90% open rate.

Andy Splichal:

That's crazy.

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I couldn't believe when they sent this to me, I asked like what's your campaign stats? And he was, and he like a customer sent me a breakdown by their customers. It's a lead gen agency and one of them was like 90%.

Andy Splichal:

How do you track open rates? Is that through your system?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Typically the sending platform that our customers use track open rates.

Andy Splichal:

Got it. So walk me through what's the process like? You get a new client, what's the boarding process?

Nikita Bykadarov:

It's very simple. They select a plan on the website and then we start to ask, we start asking what's your main domain? And we generate a few secondary domain ideas like as I said, like getabc.com or abc team.com and stuff. So they select those domains they want to to buy and then they set up a domain redirect. Then we ask how they want to call their mailboxes and then we also provide them with a mastering box. So we ask like how do you want to call your mastering box that will collect all replies from those emails? Because it could be like thousands of mailboxes. No email client will swipe that. So and then it's done. And in less than five minutes they have like all their mailboxes and domains ready and they can just one click upload them to their sending software.

Andy Splichal:

And yeah, so they're using their own ESP their own email service provider to send these.

Nikita Bykadarov:

They use our. So we are technically email service provider.

Andy Splichal:

Okay.

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah but they use like email automation software like Apollo I.O. or Smart Lead or instantly AI or sales handy or any other. So we integrate that with nine cold email platforms at the moment and the list is growing.

Andy Splichal:

And you said there's other people doing this. What makes Maildoso different than those competitors you have?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah, I think we figure out, we figured out a unique way to send emails. So most of the our competitors they provide with a dedicated IP which is great when you do opt in email marketing but also if you do cold email because when it's blacklisted, that's it, game over, you cannot use it anymore. And we instead of like using. So we realized okay, so we need a solution that won't bother our customers. And our customers don't even know there is IP or it can be blacklisted because their emails being sent from hundreds of IP addresses. And if one of them got blacklisted they don't even notice this. And our system automatically pulled this IP and replace it with a new one and then we just keep rotating these IP addresses and because of that our customers don't have this problem with IP blacklisting.

Andy Splichal:

And how does your system detect if an IP address has been blacklisted?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Oh we have automated checks like that.

Andy Splichal:

Happens every day then just ongoing checking to see if it's blacklisted. So how is your guys fee structure set? Is that per email, per setup fee? How does that work?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah, that's a good question. So we charge per mailbox and we charge on a quarterly basis. So our customers, so like our lowest plan is $99 every three months, so which is effectively 30 bucks a month. And we actually also provide domains for free. So like domain registration cost is included in this price. So this is how it works. And of course it scales. When you need more mailboxes, how many.

Andy Splichal:

Does the basic plan cover? How many emails can you be sending a month with that?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah, with the smallest plan that includes 12 mailboxes and then you can send up to 30 cold emails per day from each. So it's like I do my math.

Andy Splichal:

Or 30 times 12. What's that?

Nikita Bykadarov:

360. 360 cold emails per day. Yep, got it.

Andy Splichal:

Okay, and what kind of, I mean we had mentioned the 50% over 50 and one person over 90 but what kind of other success stories have you heard from clients?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Well we have, as I said we have customers that getting literally like close to a thousand positive Replies each day. Of course they have like large scale acquisition system built in. It took them like a long time to do, but it's certainly possible. We also getting a lot of, you know, positive feedback from our customers and from time to time I get like they send me screenshots with one of the customers just recently sent me a screenshot and there was like 25% reply rate. I was like, it's insane. 25% reply rate. It's huge. More than most people have open rate.

Nikita Bykadarov:

And we get a ton of screenshots like that. We have a internal chat for this so that I share these screenshots with the whole team so that they can see they're doing a great job. And of course we have a ton of positive reviews on G2 and other websites and like people saying about, you know, insane results they start getting with us.

Andy Splichal:

So. So do you think? Yeah, go ahead.

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah. And I was about to say that honestly like in the B2B space, if you like, if you sell something B2B and cold email is not your primary acquisition channel, there's like probably you're doing something wrong and most likely the issue is your tech stack and just tweaking a bit, a few pieces of it, you can just, you know, you can make it insanely effective.

Andy Splichal:

Where are we talking about cold email outreach? Do you help your clients acquire these email lists or do you work as a broker? I mean where are your clients getting these cold emails to do their outreach with?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Like most of people right now use Apollo. So they go to Apollo I.O. and then they purchase leads from them because it's, it's cost efficient, they have a huge database and it's good quality comparing to some other providers. But some of them also use, they scrape LinkedIn, they use different tools for that and they provide them email address of leads. Some use zoom info and other databases but there is like there's quite handful on the market decent ones I also highly recommend so like if you do call the email and essentially you need to know your, you know, what's your total market like if you sell to marketers you need to know like how many marketers out there and ideally you want to have, you know, they're all email addresses in your database and you want to reach out to them every once in a while. The one of the biggest mistakes that people do is that they expert, let's say I don't know, 100 or 200 leads from Apollo and like you know, send them emails and getting you know, one, two positive replies or Close to nothing. And then they don't really scale their campaigns. However, like if their, you know, market is huge in terms of people, it makes sense to kind of increase your volume and like, you know, and, and book a lot of sales meetings.

Andy Splichal:

Now you had mentioned B2B. What about would this work for, for B2C and do you have any B2C clients?

Nikita Bykadarov:

No, we actually like intentionally put this into terms that people cannot use mail DOSA for B2C outreach. So because we primarily a platform for B2B code outreach, there's other services they can find on intranet for B2C.

Andy Splichal:

Why did you make that distinction?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Well, first of all, to stay compliant and secondly, because it's a lot more trickier in like in most of the countries it's illegal to email individuals without their permission, which is not the case for B2B.

Andy Splichal:

So you can, so you can, so you can email businesses but not individuals without permission?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Andy Splichal:

Got it. Okay. Now I guess one last question is do you think is this sustainable? I mean is this something that you think the last five, ten years you'll still be doing this or is this one of those things where you know, you've kind of found the loophole right now, but sooner or later you think Google might, you know, be able to stop this kind of practice?

Nikita Bykadarov:

It based on what? Major email service providers like Google and Microsoft, based on what they do, it's clear that they are very well aware of B2B cold outreach and they are okay with that. There is a lot of pressure on them from the. Because there is like a shortage of IP addresses I mentioned previously. So in blacklisting companies they pressure on them and they effectively can shut down like the whole Google or the whole Microsoft by blacklisting all their IP addresses so that they have to actually also provide pressure on users on the sending side, which they actively do and suspend their accounts. But yeah. So will they increase level of protections, level of protection of users? Yeah, that's for sure. But like email being, you know, been here for many years and will be for many other years I believe if like the spam filters will evolve so as mail dosa and we will keep evolving and helping our customers to get insane results, that's for sure.

Andy Splichal:

So what's, what's next for male dosa? Are there any exciting new features, developments on the horizon that listeners should be on the lookout for?

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah, our backlog is packed with deliverability features. So we plan, we have a huge plans for this year. So we're going to Launch a lot of stuff and probably I might not disclose all of the things but one of the things that we have just rolled out is that we actively checking what Google and Microsoft thinks about your mailbox and how do they like what's the your mailbox reputation and we tell you like if it's good, bad or it's already burned which is nobody does on the market.

Andy Splichal:

Oh that'd be good. Oh that, that would be useful for everybody. B2B and B2C.

Nikita Bykadarov:

Yeah.

Andy Splichal:

Now who is your ideal client? We talked about B2B. I mean what is there a particular niche, is it any niche in the business to business kind of space where what are, what are those people and how can they contact you?

Nikita Bykadarov:

That's a good question. So most of our clients of course it's lead gen agencies just because they actively do cold outreach and they the most educated on like how to do it properly so that you get maximum outcome from cold email. But also we see a lot of software companies using us and in fact like I don't know why but we have a lot of medtech companies which I am extremely proud of because well it makes us basically help, you know, other companies to save more lives. And we have a lot of enterprise sales the companies that sell to enterprises. So basically like it's companies that sells that sell to other businesses and then it can vary either founders of those companies. It's mostly it's small and medium sized businesses or it's somebody who runs sales in the organization or growth managers and they can basically they can Check our website, maildosa.com especially I highly recommend to check our deliverability guide. It's on the website. In the footer.

Nikita Bykadarov:

In the footer. That is extremely helpful. I know a lot of people were surprised by some of the tactics we advised and they were surprised by the results they started getting after applying those.

Andy Splichal:

Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Nikita Bykadarov:

No, it was a very interesting conversation.

Andy Splichal:

Well, thank you. Hey thanks for joining us Nikita for listeners.

Nikita Bykadarov:

Thank you for inviting for listeners.

Andy Splichal:

Remember if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. If you're looking to connect with Nikita or Maildoso. Excuse me. You'll find links to show notes below and we'll link that email deliverability guide as well right in there for you. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center available at podcast.make each click count.com we have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of the contact information in case you would like more information in any of the services discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing. I'll talk to you in the next episode.