See links in the bio for newsletter and substack content on organic eCommerce growth.

My career began at a startup SEO agency, where I was the first in-house employee and helped scale it to a team of 10 (as much as a graduate can help, that is). The agency expanded its services too rapidly with an undersized team, which led to its decline. I gained exposure to various digital marketing channels, including managing the paid account for our second-largest client.

This agency was sold to another agency. Here, I learned the importance of connecting all elements of SEO into an overall strategy. I also saw firsthand how toxic culture and poor leadership can cause an agency to fail—an experience that shaped my career. The agency's reputation was so damaged that it had to rebrand. However, I met my current business partner, Antonio, during this time (Although we only worked together for about 6–8 months, he stuck around like a pungent smell you can't un-smell). Five years later, this agency's ethics were called into question when they directly copied our NOVOS proposition (I know!).

MADE.com
I moved in-house to MADE.com during its peak growth period. As the sole SEO managing all five markets, I inherited a declining channel after a failed A/B test on a major product category. Over two years, I generated over £20 million in non-brand growth. I also supported MADE through what was, at the time, the largest headless migration in Europe (as far as I’m aware).

Despite this success, I was offered only a £1,500 pay rise. After speaking with all the leading SEO agencies at the time, I knew there was a gap in the SEO market for this niche eCom knowledge.

NOVOS
After a failed attempt at launching a men's accessories website, Antonio and I pivoted to statement.digital. In March 2019 we rebranded to NOVOS and hired our first employee. By the end of this first year, NOVOS had grown to a team of 8. The following year, we doubled to 16, and the year after that, we reached 40.

In early 2022, Antonio and I sold NOVOS to our staff through an Employee Ownership model.

The Living House
In 2023, I invested in The Living House, an interior design studio. I own 20% and support the business's marketing and operations.

NOVOS 2.0
At the beginning of 2024, we launched NOVOS 2.0—a new strategy and direction for the agency. We're still focused on eCommerce but leaning more into our "Organic" expertise. The eCommerce industry is far too focused on short-term paid media for growth, and this is a problem we're aiming to solve with NOVOS 2.0.

If you have made it this far, well done

Samuel Hurley

Tim Carden

We will generate you 1-5 meetings with your ICP before asking for a penny. Link in featured section if you're interested.

Co-Founder

Here's why most cold emails go to spam.

(And what we do differently)

The problem isn't your copy.

It's your infrastructure.

Most founders: 1-2 inboxes, blasting 100+ emails/day.

What happens: Spam filters notice. Domain reputation tanks. Game over.

What we do instead:

1. Multiple inboxes per domain
↳ 3 pre-warmed inboxes (Zapmail) or 2 Google + up to 25 Outlook (ScaledMail)

2. Strict sending limits
↳ 15-20 cold emails per inbox per day. Never more.

3. Warmup ratio locked
↳ 1.5x warmup emails for every cold send

4. Domain-level health monitoring
↳ If ONE inbox drops below 98% health, all inboxes from that domain get pulled

5. Automatic removal
↳ Unhealthy accounts removed from campaigns instantly. No manual checking.

The result: Your emails actually land in the inbox.

Not the promotions tab.

Not spam.

The actual inbox.

Most founders learn this after burning 3 domains.

You don't have to.

---

Want us to book 1-5 meetings for you for free?

Book a call with our team to see if we can help.

Co-Founder @ RevenueFlow. Filling calendars with qualified meetings for high-ticket B2B companies through cold email

No alternative text description for this image

Here's our 10-stage lead enrichment pipeline.

It runs while you sleep.

Most founders manually research leads one-by-one.

Here's what we built instead:

Stage 1: Blocklist check (150 workers)
↳ Filter unsubscribes and complaints instantly

Stage 2: Global dedup
↳ Never email the same person twice

Stage 3: AI ICP classification
↳ Every lead scored against your ideal customer profile

Stage 4: Email cache lookup
↳ 140,000+ emails already stored - no paying twice

Stage 5-8: Email waterfall
↳ 4 patterns tested before spending a penny on paid lookups

Stage 9: Personalization
↳ AI-written copy that doesn't sound like AI

Stage 10: Campaign upload
↳ Ready to send by the time you wake up

We process 4,000-5,000 leads per hour.

Your SDR does maybe 50.

Your competitors aren't hiring more people.

They're building systems like this.

---

Want us to book 1-5 meetings for you for free?

Book a call with our team to see if we can help.

Most founders think they need to hire an SDR.
They don't. They need to automate.
Here's the math:

SDR cost:
- Salary: $50-70K/year
- Tools: $500/month
- Training: 3+ months before productive
- Output: Maybe 50 leads researched per day

Automation cost:
- Infrastructure: Fraction of an SDR salary
- Speed: 4,000-5,000 leads per hour
- Training: Zero
- Consistency: 24/7, no sick days, no ramp time

The gap isn't 2x.

It's 100x.

One SDR working 8 hours might research 400 leads.

Our pipeline does that in 5 minutes.

While you sleep.

While you're in meetings.

While your competitors are still interviewing candidates.

The best GTM teams aren't hiring more people.

They're building systems that don't need people.

Your SDR isn't slow.

The model is slow.

---

Want us to book 1-5 meetings for you for free?

Book a call with our team to see if we can help.

Email verification at $0.0005.

Not $0.05. Not $0.005.

$0.0005.

Here's why that matters:

Most teams verify emails one at a time:
• Find email: $0.02
• Verify email: $0.01
• Total: $0.03 per lead

Our approach:

• Check cache first: $0
• Try 4 patterns at $0.0005 each: $0.002
• Only pay for lookup if patterns fail

For a 10,000 lead campaign:

Traditional: $300 in verification alone
Our pipeline: Under $50

$250 saved. Per campaign.

And those savings compound.

Every email we find gets cached permanently.

Next time that person appears in any campaign, the lookup is instant and free.

140,000+ emails already cached.

Every week you're not caching, you're paying twice for the same people.

---

Want us to book 1-5 meetings for you for free?

Book a call with our team to see if we can help.

Most cold emails get ignored.

  Not because your offer is bad.
  Because you're writing like a stranger.

  Here's the framework that gets 40%+ open rates:

  The secret? Write like you're texting a friend who asked for help.

  Not: "I noticed your company is scaling..."
  But: "Quick question - are you still manually finding leads?"

  Specificity builds trust.
  Brevity shows respect.
  Questions create curiosity.

  What's your current open rate on cold emails?

Clay went from $1M to $100M ARR in 2 years.

They recently hit a $3B valuation. Here's their GTM playbook 👇

1. Six Years of Foundation Work

Clay didn't rush to market.

They spent 6 years building the product before explosive growth hit.

The lesson: Infrastructure matters more than speed.


2. Credit-Based Pricing Model

Every action costs credits:
→ Pull a LinkedIn profile
→ Find contact info
→ Look up a phone number
→ Run an AI prompt

This model scaled with usage. More value = more credits = more revenue.


3. Self-Serve First, Enterprise Later

They built a foundational self-serve customer base first.
Only in early 2024 did they move upmarket.

Now their customers include:
→ OpenAI
→ Canva
→ Anthropic
→ Rippling
→ Perplexity


4. Outbound Use Case as Core Wedge

Clay connects to sequencing tools to automatically create email campaigns from enriched data.

Rippling doubled their cold email performance year-over-year using Clay in 2023.

That's the power of good data + automation.


5. Near-Breakeven Operations

Even at $100M ARR, Clay operates close to breakeven.

They're reinvesting everything into growth rather than optimizing for profit margins.


The timeline:
→ 2018-2022: Building foundation
→ 2022: $500K ARR
→ 2023: 10x to ~$5M ARR
→ 2024: 6x growth
→ 2025: $100M ARR, $3B valuation

From 6 years of patience to 2 years of explosive growth.

P.S: What's your take on credit-based pricing for GTM tools?

We run an 8-stage lead enrichment pipeline.

Here's what happens to every lead in under 3 seconds:

Stage 1: Blocklist Check
• Filter unsubscribes and complaints
• 150 workers running in parallel

Stage 2: Cache Lookup
• Check if we've emailed this person before
• 140,000+ emails already cached

Stage 3: ICP Classification
• AI determines if lead fits your ideal customer profile
• Rejects bad fits before we spend a penny

Stage 4: Email Cache
• Check our database for known emails
• Free lookup for repeat contacts

Stage 5: Pattern Verification
• Try 4 email patterns automatically
• firstname@company, first.last@company, etc.

Stage 6-7: Professional Finders
• Only pay for lookups when needed
• Waterfall through providers

Stage 8: Final Upload
• Clean, verified lead ready for campaign

The result:

4,000-5,000 leads enriched per hour.

Your SDR does 10-15 per hour manually.

That's not an incremental improvement.

---

Want us to book 1-5 meetings for you for free?

Book a call with our team to see if we can help.

Your competitors aren't hiring more SDRs.

They're automating.

While you're posting job listings for $80K/year sales reps:

• They're running 150 parallel workers
• They're processing thousands of leads per hour
• They're paying under $0.02 per enriched lead

The math has changed.

Manual lead research:
• 10-15 leads per SDR per hour
• $80K+ salary + benefits + management
• Weeks to ramp up new hires

Automated pipeline:
• 4,000-5,000 leads per hour
• No sick days, no turnover
• Scales instantly

This isn't about replacing humans.

It's about letting AI handle the grunt work so your team can focus on closing deals.

Every week you wait, competitors are building lead lists you'll never catch up to.

---

Want us to book 1-5 meetings for you for free?

Book a call with our team to see if we can help.

AI agents now book more meetings than your entire SDR team.

For 1/10th the cost.

Here's what the data shows:

→ AI SDRs cost ~$833/month
→ Human SDRs cost $9,000+/month (fully loaded)
→ That's 10 cents on the dollar

The results?

• AI handles 1,000+ contacts per day (no lunch breaks)
• Cost per lead: $39 vs $262 for humans
• 83% of teams using AI saw revenue growth

36% of B2B companies eliminated their SDR teams in 2025.

Not because AI is "better" at everything.

Because the economics of volume prospecting fundamentally changed.

The smartest founders aren't asking "should we use AI?"

They're asking "how fast can we implement it?"

The gap between early adopters and everyone else is widening every month.

You're paying twice for the same email addresses.

And you probably don't know it.

Here's how it happens:

Month 1: You run a campaign. Find 5,000 emails. Cost: $100.

Month 2: You run another campaign. Different list. But 2,000 of those people? You already have their emails.

You just paid for them again.

Month 3: Same thing. Another $40 wasted on emails you already own.

Multiply that by 12 months.

That's $500+ thrown away. Per year. On emails sitting in your own CRM.

What we do differently:

We cache every email permanently.

140,000+ leads in our database.

When a new lead comes in, we check the cache first.

Hit rate? Often 20-30% on mature campaigns.

That's 20-30% of your enrichment costs eliminated instantly.

Before we spend a penny on a paid lookup, we check:
1. Have we seen this person before?
2. Do we already have their verified email?
3. Is the domain a catch-all? (Skip it entirely)

Simple system. Massive savings.

---

Want us to book 1-5 meetings for you for free?

Book a call with our team to see if we can help.

Most founders burn money on email lookups.

We check 4 email patterns before spending a penny.

Here's the waterfall we run:

1. Cache lookup first
• 140,000+ verified emails in our database
• Instant match = $0 cost

2. Pattern verification
• Try firstname@domain
• Try first.last@domain
• Try firstlast@domain
• Try f.last@domain
• Verification costs $0.0005 per check

3. Professional finders (only if needed)
• LeadMagic: ~$0.02/lookup
• Icypeas: ~$0.02/lookup

The result:

Most leads never hit the paid providers.

Our average cost per enriched lead: $0.003 - $0.02

Compare that to paying $0.02 for every single lookup from day one.

The 4-pattern check alone saves 60-70% on email finding costs.

Every cached email is pure profit.

---

Want us to book 1-5 meetings for you for free?

Book a call with our team to see if we can help.

Test batch in minutes. Full campaign in hours.

This is how we launch campaigns:

Step 1: Test batch (20-50 leads)
• Run locally with 10 workers
• Verify domains parse correctly
• Check ICP is accepting the right leads
• Confirm emails are being found

Time: 15-20 minutes

Step 2: Review results
• X/20 enriched successfully
• Y skipped (catch-all domains)
• Z failed (no email found)

If results look good:

Step 3: Trigger cloud run
• 150 workers in parallel
• 4,000-5,000 leads per hour
• Automatic Slack notification when done

Step 4: Review in Email Bison
• All leads uploaded to campaign
• Signatures auto-configured
• Click "Start"

Total time from CSV to live campaign: 2-4 hours

Not days. Not weeks.

Hours.

---

Want us to book 1-5 meetings for you for free?

Book a call with our team to see if we can help.

taplio

The Battle

Samuel Hurley

Tim Carden

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreTim Carden's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Samuel Hurley

Tim Carden

Followers

Posts

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);}Tim Carden's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreTim Carden's LinkedIn Performance