Feldman says an offer switch turned one reply into 125 leads
The change was who the offer was for, not how much was sent.
Jay Feldman says a client named Christiaan, who sells AI-powered content services, had run two cold email campaigns and pulled one half-interested reply. After Feldman's team moved the offer to a different audience, Feldman reports 8 interested leads on day one, 13 on day two, 125 in the first month, at a 6.42% reply rate.
The change was the market. Feldman says Christiaan told the team one of the main things he needed help with was "honing down" his offer, and the team recommended AI content for coaches, authors and speakers, a market Feldman says they saw as receptive. He describes it as a total switch in direction. Before the switch, Christiaan had tried cold email, LinkedIn prospecting and cold calling, and Feldman says the lead lists and the offer were never quite right.
What the post does not say
There is no send volume, no list size and no campaign length attached to the 6.42%. That matters, because a reply rate without a denominator cannot be compared to your own. 125 interested leads in a month could come off 2,000 sends or 40,000, and the two imply completely different costs per lead and completely different infrastructure. Feldman also does not say what the new copy looked like, or whether anything else in the setup changed at the same time as the audience.
Feldman flags the limits himself. He writes that these are Christiaan's results, not a guarantee, and he frames the lesson as offer-audience fit rather than a channel win. His two takeaways are to test the offer and the audience before adding volume when outreach gets silence, and to stay open to changing direction. He also says the bottleneck moved from finding interest to having time to serve it, and quotes the client saying he was close to telling the team to stop.
For people sending
This is one account of one client, reported by the agency that ran it, so treat the numbers as a claim rather than a benchmark. The useful part is the diagnosis order. Two dead campaigns in a row is a signal about who is being written to, and more domains and more sends do not fix a list that was never receptive to the offer in the first place. If your sequences are returning near-zero on a defined ICP, the cheaper test is a different buyer with the same service, not a bigger send.
If outreach gets silence, test the offer and audience before adding volume.
I'm this close to telling you guys to stop.
Know what is landing before you burn another domain
One email a day. Under three minutes. What the operators found out yesterday.