Co-Founder @StackOptimise | Everything Sales-Tech ⭐️

StackOptimise ⚙️
GTM Engineering Agency

Check below. 

Resources 📚
1️⃣ GTM Newsletter: https://stackoptimise.beehiiv.com/
2️⃣ eBook Library: stackoptimise.com/free-ebook-library
3️⃣ $1M Messages: stackoptimise.com/1m-messages
4️⃣ No.1 GTM Engineer Course: stackoptimise.com/course
5️⃣ Book in a demo: calendly.com/felixfrank/30min

Socials 📲
1️⃣ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/leadgenpenn
2️⃣ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@stackoptimise

Penn Frank ⚙️

Welcome to the world's first GTM Engineering Feed📱

Unbelievably excited to launch this one. 

All the wisdom from all the great operators centralised into one feed, updated in real-time. 

To name a few: 🦾Eric Nowoslawski, Patrick Spychalski, Nick Abraham, Brandon Charleson, 🤖 Jacob Tuwiner, Josh Whitfield, Enzo Carasso 🧲, Adam Robinson, Kellen Casebeer, Mohan Muthoo, Christian Oland. 

Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/ggw_F6bp

10 lessons for anyone interested in building a business: 

1. You do not need a pioneering business idea/eureka moment. 
2. You do not need genius IQ. It's all about action. 
3. Your ideas, plans, goals, vision etc mean very little. 
4. Find a co-founder. 
5. A sustainable co-founder relationship = healthy competition with the ability to roast each other unapologetically.
6. Make growth plays. Don't coast. 
7. Growth comes from big bets, not polishing the edges. 
8. The arrival fallacy is real; problems never disappear, they just evolve, and become more painful and frequent as the business grows. 
9. Build things with intrinsic value that also reinforce other parts of the business.
10. To reiterate, disciplined action and output is everything. You can't talk, think or feel your way through things - just execute, ship fast, learn and grow.

Hiring 2x GTM Engineers 🚀

Apply here: https://tally.so/r/m6a5rY

** You must be able to speak fluent English.

Felix manages our sales process. 

I genuinely believe his output = typical output of 4-6 human sales reps. 

Why? 

Because we've built an AI-first sales engine. 

Outbound, followup, pre-meeting, post-meeting, proposal creation, nurturing, multi-threading = all handled by AI. 

If AI isn’t deeply embedded across your GTM funnel, you will fall behind. It must become a mission critical priority in 2026. 

---------------

If you want guidance on how to architect this end-to-end (without duct tape or hype), book a call and we’ll walk you through what AI-powered actually looks like: https://lnkd.in/e3qxXKmr

This is the best outreach I've ever received. 

Three months ago, Dan told me we were on his radar.

He was waiting for the right moment, while making sure the outreach strategy didn’t just meet the standards of an outreach guy, but exceeded them.

Safe to say, mission accomplished.

Sometimes the most unscalable strategies are the most effective.

Scaling content for business owners with AI & systems | Co-Founder @ Thakos

How far would you be willing to go to impress just ONE prospect? 

(Most people will say 2-3 hours max) 

Well, I am completely insane and do EVERYTHING to impress prospects. 

Penn Frank ⚙️ & Felix Frank ⚙️announced they were looking for a marketing manager, so I knew it was time to do something absurd for them. 

Below is easily the best outreach they will ever see and no doubt the best outreach anyone will ever see. 

Going above & beyond for people (who aren't even my clients!) is just what we do. 

🚨🚨 THE BEST OUTREACH OF ALL TIME 🚨🚨:

339 positive replies in 1 week. 
33 calls booked. 

We only launched the client last week. 

Stop sleeping on cold email. 

With the right growth partner, it is undoubtedly the most powerful, scalable, outbound channel.

Shout out to our Sr GTM Engineer Done for absolutely crushing the execution on his debut campaign at StackOptimise  💪

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If you wanna see our 6-step methodology to crafting the most powerful outreach in the game and accelerating speed-to-value, book in a call with us here: https://lnkd.in/e3qxXKmr

1000 leads generated. 
100 meetings booked.

And we launched 2 weeks ago. 

Beat that for speed-to-value!

All from cold email. 
No fancy lead magnets. 
Just elegantly personalised copy. 

Beautiful team effort on this one Done, Felix, Aicel, Devrim 👊

--------

P.S. If you wanna see how we write emails like no one else, and generate these kind of results, book in a call here: https://lnkd.in/e3qxXKmr

More insane results from the team! 

We launched with a new client last week. 

We instantly identified Message Market Fit with not 1 but all 8 strategies. 

Nolan - Bravo! And it was your debut campaign at StackOptimise...phenomenal execution. 

This is what happens when you run a Message–Market-Fit Methodology truly optimised for speed-to-value.

No waiting months to see a return.
No shipping unvalidated messaging.
No dragging out low-performing strategies.

Your cold email = your buyer’s first impression of you. 

Make it count.

Our GTM Engineering team is now a mighty 10.

We’ve split the team into two focused pods. 

Pod 1 - led by Viktor
Featuring: Zahra, Nayab, Parikshyan and Muhammad

Pod 2- led by myself 
Featuring: Done, Nolan, Joy, Georgi

This is how we will scale without losing quality.

Small, autonomous units.
Intra-pod competition.
Stronger team bonds.

View newsletter: The StackOptimise Newsletter 

Go-To Newsletter for GTM Operators. Every week we share 1 template, 1 tutorial, 1 tool, 1 tip and 1 FREE Gift. This exists to be the most value-packed

Open article: Vol 37.  by Penn Frank ⚙️ • 2 min read

Open article: Vol 36.  by Penn Frank ⚙️ • 2 min read

Roman Hipp

Building BetterContact | Helping early-stage B2B SaaS companies with insights & ready-to-use templates

Currently building BetterContact, a B2B SaaS that aggregates various data sources to find and verify any email and mobile phone number.

Growth Co-Founder

In 2024 alone, BetterContact lost $1.02M ARR to churn. In a fight to save the company, we turned the product into something users actually love. Monthly churn: 31.6% -> 8.4%.

From the beginning, we were solving a painful problem (bad email/phone enrichment quality), but our execution was shaky.

↳ Our contact data accuracy had gaps
↳ The enrichment execution was *super* slow
↳ The UI created friction (and users left quickly again)
↳ And we were missing a key piece: a proper list building engine

We knew that with >30% monthly churn rates, we couldn't build a company (without new customers, we’d lose almost everyone every 3 months).

So we threw everything we had at fixing the foundations:

↳ We ran 100's of A/Z tests on the data providers to refine our algorithm
↳ We invested a ton in our infrastructure to improve execution speed
↳ We onboarded +12 new data providers to close accuracy gaps
↳ We redesigned the entire UI to remove friction

And finally, we launched the first Waterfall Lead Finder - turning us into a full waterfall list building engine.

Super excited for what's to come in 2026, and how quickly we'll reach our target of sub-5% churn!

Building BetterContact | Helping B2B companies win outbound through more and better contact data

🎉 BetterContact officially partnered with Instantly.ai (we just went live!)

This is an especially exciting partnership for us because:
- we have a large joint customer base
- we ourselves are users for over 2 years now
- we’re getting along with the Instantly team very well

The big news for our users now:

You can now find emails from +20 premium data providers bundled in a single provider, directly inside one of the leading cold email sequencers.

The best thing:

They're verified and scored through 4 layers.
If they're invalid/have a low score, there will be 0 charge!

We've been in close contact with the Instantly team for a good while now, and really enjoy working together - kudos to the team for making it happen. 

Big things ahead in 2026!

Every "Find Contacts at Company" API is broken, because too often, the data is outdated. The person simply doesn’t work at that company anymore, or the job title just isn't the right one.

That’s why at BetterContact, we spent the last 8 months fixing it.

The result is the most advanced waterfall “Search People at Company” API endpoint, because:

1. It aggregates data from multiple sources (waterfall) - like we do with our enrichment waterfall + AI-powered web crawling & graph expansion

2. To ensure quality, AI Agents verify things like (in real-time):
- Does this person actually work there?
- Is this really their job title?
- Are they still based in that country?

The best thing: it doesn’t cost anything to source the leads, just the typical email/mobile phone enrichment rates apply (only charges if it’s triple-verified).

We’re opening up the endpoint to the people that comment, before we publicly release it soon.

The guide shows you how to easily set up the API.
(for Clay users, it also includes a template you can just use)

📩 Comment “Live” and I’ll send you the full setup step-by-step.
(And yes, you can use it today)

This is the allbound engine I used to bootstrap BetterContact to a 7-figure ARR SaaS - running 100% of sales and marketing myself with an inbound-led outbound motion.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 1: Gathering Intelligence

The best way I’ve found to truly understand my ICP’s pain points and how they design their workflows is by having real 1:1 conversations with them.

This gives me deep visibility into their exact use cases, while also helping me stay sharp on industry trends and competitor strategies.

This is what I’m using for that:

Call recordings & transcripts: Fathom.ai
Reddit keyword alarms: F5Bot
LinkedIn keyword alarms: Trigify.io

I automatically connect with ICP leads through HeyReach.io, and make sure to track their posts & activity through Breakcold.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 2: CREATE RELEVANT CONTENT

Those conversations directly fuel the ICP-relevant content I publish on LinkedIn.

When I have less skin in the game (i.e. fewer real customer and prospect conversations) the quality of my content drops fast.

That’s why STEP 1 underpins every step that comes after.


𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 3: TRACK ENGAGEMENT

I track profile views, post engagement, and other key signals using Teamfluence™.

This lets me spot people who might be interested in giving our solution a try.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 4: QUALIFY ENGAGEMENT

The engagers are being sent to Clay to qualify & enrich the leads.
(currently also evaluating tools like nRev, BitScale, Baseloop, and Genesy for that)

ZenRows for scraping, GPT o4-mini for ICP-fit scoring, and BuiltWith (occasionally) for technographics and integration angles.

For qualified leads (ICP Tier 1 & 2) I’m enriching the email address with BetterContact, and ICP Tier 1 leads also with mobile numbers.

GPT o4-mini to write personalized email copy.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 5: OUTREACH

My next step is reaching out to the different ICP levels.

The structure & cadence is the same (3 touches), but if there is no reply for ICP Tier 1’s, I try my best to call them. 

For that, I’m using BetterContact to find the mobile number, and Aircall to dial (depending on geography).

Something we recently added is Masterinbox.com to centralize all of our LinkedIn/email messaging (big helper there).

Outreach responses, from highly enthusiastic to openly annoyed, are a huge feedback loop for refining my understanding of the market and my ICP. 

Those insights, in turn, fuel better content, and the cycle repeats.

Would love any feedback on this process, or tool suggestions to make it more efficient 👇

Last week, a VP Sales at a Fortune 500 got personally offended after I told him we wouldn’t build a new feature into BetterContact for them to get onboarded.

Honestly, it was quite hard. Part of me wasn’t even sure if it was the right thing to do.

But looking back, I'm proud - it was the only right thing to do.

Because I knew: They’re currently not our ICP.

Sure, it’s tempting to say yes to a shiny logo like that.

But we've done this too many times in the past.

And ultimately, it always ends up in building the wrong product, for the wrong people, with the wrong priorities.

As our inbound requests increase significantly month-over-month, I'm sure there will be many more of those shiny temptations.

And every time, it's all abount reminding myself (albeit it's *really* hard):
Focus > FOMO

2025 has been a rollercoaster for BetterContact: $1.9M+ ARR in churn, 21% MoM growth, DDoS attacks, and much more. Here are some of our biggest fails and wins.

THE FAILS:

- $1.91M ARR churn (with >28% monthly subscriber churn spikes)
- Our best developer needed to leave due to personal reasons (we onboarded a new one though)
- Burned >$84k on features we couldn’t launch (things like a Sales Navigator extension)
- We still face occasional DDoS attacks which are very resource-intensive to defend against
- Major downtimes in Q1/Q2 that led to big customers churning

THE WINS:

- We kept innovating as first-movers (launched first waterfall lead finder)
- First in-person event co-hosted (Clay x BetterContact Christmas Party)
- Big accuracy boosts, especially with new partnerships like Trestle on the mobile phone side
- First time churn below 10% (currently at 8.2%!)
- Still very lean team with high EBITDA margins 
- We reached full data compliance with GDPR, CCPA, etc.
- Big new partnerships (Clay, Instantly, and a lot of other exciting ones I’ll share more about soon)
- No downtimes in Q4 (we struggled a lot with them in Q1/Q2)

In 2026, we’re doubling down on our mission: finding every discoverable email/mobile number, and thus enabling meaningful, mutually beneficial B2B connections.

Also, a big focus will be on improving & distributing our waterfall lead finder (we already get strong traction there).

Most importantly, we’ll do our best to stay laser-focused on building what our users actually want (and not chasing shiny objects or requests that won’t truly benefit them). 

Excited for the new year!

Six months ago, one of our biggest customer churned from BetterContact.

And honestly (kind of tough to say as the founder): I get why.

Back then:
↳ the UI was scrappy
↳ each enrichment took >5 minutes
↳ we had plenty of bugs and regular downtimes

Fast forward to today, we got this message 👇

“keep building, loving the product”

What makes this so great for us though isn’t the positive feedback itself.

It’s the person that it came from.

It's someone who left our platform when things weren’t good enough back then - and came back a month ago after we rethought and rebuilt the whole product.

Every improvement over the last six months came from moments like those early frustrations from our users. 

Still plenty to do, but moments like this remind me why the grind is worth it!

In the last 12 months, BetterContact grew primarily inbound, driving thousands of demos & signups by word of mouth. 3 weeks ago, we started cold calling again - and I forgot how crazy powerful it is.

The reason why we are picking up dialling again is:
1. AI makes everyone sound the same - but the phone is still where real human nuance can win
2. Our own data sourcing & enrichment is a competitive advantage

Up until now, our growth engine has been primarily inbound (word of mouth). 

But now we want to 10× what’s already working organically by layering cold calling back on top.

Below is a screenshot of our first campaign which went nuts.

65% connect rate (never seen that before - our big focus on mobile validation & scoring inside BetterContact seems to be paying off big time).

Based on those results, it would honestly be silly to *not* triple down on calling (we might put some open positions out there soon).

Are you currently picking up the phone? 👇

How to book a demo with billion-dollar CROs (this worked two timed for me in 2025):

→ build a data company
→ cold call them on their mobile
→ they reply a bit surprised: “I never get cold called - how did you find this number?”
→ they add: “…we actually need this for our sales team”
→ meeting booked

I never expected to get attention *this* way for BetterContact, but not complaining!

“We just launched the most accurate lead database”. And still, it thinks I’m working at my cold company. This is the reason why many outbound set ups are broken (and what we did about it) 

The big problem with these databases is the following:

They only periodically scrape platforms like LinkedIn, and as they need to scrape 10’s of millions of profiles regularly, there is a significant data loss.

Scraping timeouts & omitting data points on purpose to be more efficient (LinkedIn gets better and better at preventing that at scale).

And if someone changed jobs recently, tools like Apollo still have their old info, rendering these prospects useless for your list building.

That’s the reason why 8 months ago, we wanted to fix that at BetterContact (primarily because it was the most requested feature by far).

Based on our +250 beta testers (just quoting some users here):

“It worked very well, especially compared to what the legacy databases can do”
“I’m annoyed with Apollo’s shi*** data. This is a game-changer”
“Definitely the freshest people search API I used so far”

Because this is what our waterfall API does differently:

We waterfall databases in order to solve the issue of the coverage.

And to solve for quality/accuracy, we use AI Agents to crawl the web in order to verify that the person *actually* works at that company/has that job title/lives in that country.

We already have it realeased in the app, and next week we’ll release the API publicly. Keen on every feedback!

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Penn Frank ⚙️

Roman Hipp

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The Battle

Penn Frank ⚙️

Roman Hipp

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Penn Frank ⚙️'s LinkedIn Performance

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