Nick Abraham argues against niching down and gifting
Two tactics this crowd keeps selling, both answered from agency economics rather than a test.
Nick Abraham spent the week arguing against two pieces of advice that circulate constantly in outbound circles, and he did it without running a test on either.
The niche argument
Abraham posted that he sees "so many $10k-$100k/mo lead gen agency owners" narrowing into positions like lead gen for financial advisors, while the top few lead gen agencies doing $50M+ per year actively serve all segments of the market. His conclusion is that the riches are in the niches does not apply to this business. If you have a strong offer and great ops, he says, it is in your interest to serve as many customers as possible, and locking into one industry hurts your ability to do that.
the top few lead gen agencies ($50M+/year) actively serve all segments of the market.
That is an argument from agency economics, not from data. He does not name the $50M+ agencies, and he does not offer a set of campaigns showing that generalist positioning books more meetings than a narrow one. What he is describing is a ceiling problem for the agency, not a reply rate problem for the sender. A narrow ICP still makes the copy easier to write. The claim is that it makes the company harder to grow.
The doormat argument
The second post was a reply to @kocalars, who wrote that she refused to send cold emails and instead sent custom doormats to 100+ of the hottest startups, printed with the line "your shoes look good. do your SOCs 2?" She said it got her more responses than weeks of cold emails, without giving a response count, a reply rate, or what the email baseline actually was.
Abraham's answer was that the play pretty much only works if you are VC-backed selling to other VC-backed companies, and that everyone else should be boring but helpful. His line about the buyer on the other end is the part worth keeping.
Jennifer in procurement at ACME corp doesn't want a custom doormat.
For people sending, the useful read is that both of these are opinions from an operator who runs volume, not results from a campaign. The gifting post has the same problem in reverse, a memorable stunt with a real piece of copy attached and no numbers underneath it. Physical gifting at 100 units is also a different cost structure from email at any scale, so more responses than weeks of cold emails tells you nothing about cost per meeting. Treat the segment advice as a note on where agency revenue caps out, and treat the doormat as a proof that a good line travels, not that the channel generalizes to procurement buyers at large companies.