Strategic Co-Pilot for B2B Tech & Fintech Founders | I Help You Scale Without Chaos | AI & Data Delivery at Radsody

I am a fintech founder turned Independent Non-Executive Director, working with boards, founders, and investors navigating growth in regulated and high-velocity environments.

Over 15+ years, I have built and scaled fintech and SaaS businesses across the UK, Europe, and MENA — from early-stage startups to regulated financial institutions. My experience spans digital banking, payments, embedded finance, and financial infrastructure, with a strong focus on translating strategy into durable execution.

I currently serve as an Independent Non-Executive Director and board advisor to fintechs and financial institutions, bringing an operator’s perspective to governance, risk, and growth decisions.

Current and recent roles include:
- IFC-nominated Independent Director, TBC Bank Uzbekistan
- Fintech Advisory Board Member, PayU
- Executive Board Director, Fiat Republic

Earlier in my career, I was a founder and operator:
- Founding team member at HelloFresh (NYSE: HFG)
- Launched and scaled the UK arm of digital bank Fidor, supporting its sale to Groupe BPCE
- Co-founded and scaled a regulated payments platform (Fiat Republic)
- Led revenue growth in multi-million-dollar B2B SaaS businesses

I am also the co-author of Embedded Finance (Wiley, 2022).

In the boardroom, I help teams bring clarity to complexity and turn strategy into scalable outcomes.

Sophie Guibaud 👾

First day at IMD for the Mastering Board Governance programme, and genuinely excited to be here.

Didier Cossin defines Governance as 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐨𝐟 𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬, 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬, 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐬.

In real life, those decisions need to be made with incomplete information, competing priorities, and real consequences.

The best directors I know never stop sharpening that skill. The landscape - AI, ESG, regulation, stakeholder expectations - is shifting faster than ever.

So here I am. Taking notes, in a room full of people who take this responsibility seriously.

That's exactly where I want to be.

Sophie Guibaud

Independent Non-Executive Director & Board Advisor | Financial Services

There’s a moment in board discussions where everything has been analysed.

The numbers work. The deck is coherent. The downside has been modelled.

And still, something either sits right… or it doesn’t.

People call that “gut feeling.”

At board level, it isn’t instinct. It’s compressed experience.

It comes from reading the full pack.
From understanding how the business actually makes money.
From knowing your own biases.
From not needing to win the room.

Ego is expensive in governance.

The intuition that matters is pattern recognition + preparation + integrity, especially when pressure builds, and consensus feels convenient.

That feeling isn’t emotion.

It’s what’s left after you’ve done the work.

I recently joined the 100 Women In Finance's 100WFinTech Directory as part of the #100WFinTech Global Initiative.

As fintech matures, the conversation is shifting from pure innovation to questions of governance, risk, capital discipline and long-term value creation. 

Communities that bring together senior operators, investors and board members across financial services are increasingly important in shaping that evolution.

I was on the Fintech Insider podcast this week to dig into something many of us have noticed but not quite put together the way the team at 11:FS has done: the banking battlefield hasn't just evolved, it's gone vertical.

The original Banking Battlefield they framed back then was genuinely useful when it was created. 

But the battlefield it describes? That's not the one we're fighting on anymore.

So we took the time this week to revisit it.

The challengers who everyone wrote off are now posting billion-pound profits, helping write the rules for the next generation of payments infrastructure, and finally getting their UK banking licence (congrats Revolut!).

The real competitive pressure has shifted underground. It's no longer about who has the best app. It's about who controls the infrastructure underneath.

Primacy gets you the customer. Infrastructure keeps them.

We should also be honest: incumbents got a break. High interest rates bought them time: margins recovered, pressure eased, transformation felt less urgent.

That window is closing.

And most incumbents are finding transformation harder than expected.

Not because the will isn't there, it is.

But because the constraint was never really the technology. It's culture and governance, and that starts at the board.

You cannot navigate this battlefield without commercial and product expertise at the top. Not just risk and compliance - though that matters - but people who genuinely understand what it means to compete in this environment.

Without that, transformation is just expensive theatre.

Have a listen, would love to know what resonates 👇
🎧 https://lnkd.in/gcPZ5nGf

Financial services boards are packed with experience. But is it the right kind?

Having spent much of my career working with fintech operators and now spending more time in financial services governance, the difference in operating perspectives is striking.

Across the industry, many bank and payments boardrooms are rich in decades of risk, regulatory, and traditional banking expertise. That experience is invaluable and necessary.

But when career paths around the table look too similar, it can quietly shape how the future is evaluated.

Meanwhile, the industry itself is being reshaped by digital platforms, fintech operators, and entirely new customer expectations.

This is where board skills mapping matters.

When boards honestly assess the expertise around the table against where the institution needs to go (not just where it has been), the gaps often become clear.

Innovation.
Growth.
Digital transformation.
Customer experience.
Technology-led operating models.

These capabilities are still less common around many financial services board tables.

What someone with a fintech or startup operating background brings to a board isn’t disruption for its own sake. It’s a different lens.

In practice, that perspective often changes the questions that get asked in the boardroom.

• 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞. In high-growth environments, slow decisions don’t just cost time, they cost relevance.
• 𝐂𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬. Fintech operators are often used to framing decisions through the lens of the end-to-end customer journey.
 • 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐜 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. Innovation requires bets that won’t all pay off.

The financial institutions that will lead the next decade are already expanding the range of operating experience around the table.

Because boards don’t just govern the present.

Does the expertise around the table reflect where the institution has been, or where it needs to go?

The Bancolombia outage last week has reopened an important conversation, one that goes well beyond a single institution.

When payments move in real time, interdependence increases, and fragility surfaces faster.

This isn't about blame but about architecture.

A few things stand out from a board governance perspective:

𝐀𝐯𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐟𝐢𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐫𝐲. 
Uptime is trust, not only an IT metric. For customers, it's whether salaries arrive. For boards, operational resilience deserves the same seriousness as capital and liquidity.

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐤 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫𝐬. 
Core systems. Cloud providers. Vendors. Instant rails. We tend to assess risk at the institutional level, but increasingly, the real exposure sits in the interconnections.

𝐒𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐨 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐝𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. 
What happens if a major participant in a real-time rail is down for 72 hours? How is liquidity managed? Who coordinates communication? How is contagion contained? Resilience is not a framework. It's a rehearsed capability.

And the stack is expanding.

Stablecoins now operate as parallel settlement layers. They add optionality, particularly cross-border, but introduce new concentration points at issuer and protocol level.

Risk doesn't disappear. It migrates.

The question for boards and regulators is no longer simply: "Is our institution resilient?"

It's: "Is the stack resilient?"
Institution. Rail. Vendor. Issuer. Protocol.

Digital finance will never be risk-free. Resilience must be designed, not assumed. And at the board level, design is governance.

The recent debate in Colombia, highlighted by Marcel van Oost and sparked by comments from Marcela Torres of Nubank Colombia, points to a broader systemic issue.

Open article: Nu Flags Systemic Risk After Bancolombia Hits Bre-B Rails by connectingthedotsinfin.tech

Nu Flags Systemic Risk After Bancolombia Hits Bre-B Rails

Abbas Somji👋🏽

Helping Founders Scale Fast & Create Outbound That Works | Start-Up Advisor 🚀

I'm the co-founder of The Playbook Agency and started the business as we saw so many start-ups & scale ups making avoidable mistakes when it came to their Go-To-Market. 

I managed to become the Head Of Sales of a start-up when I was just 3 years into my career, and have continued to operate as a Fractional Head Of Sales ever since for multiple businesses.

Challenges we solve:

🟣 Your sales team is wasting time on manual research, poor data & not having enough opportunities in pipeline
🟣 You have inconsistent top of funnel resulting in revenue & pipeline spikes 
🟣 You want to instill AI & automation within your process but don’t know where to start
🟣 You’re doing outbound out of a singular domain which is resulting in landing in spam
🟣 Current data providers have “dirty data” which means high bounce rates, leading to blacklisting
🟣 You want to test new markets, before getting sales teams to allocate resource to it

Co-Founder

We help founders get their GTM right, the first time, without having to hire an expensive sales team.

We just launched something I've wanted to build for a while
 
It's called GTM Operators Club
 
Here's why:
 
At InboxKit, we see data from over a billion cold emails a year
 
That means we see what's working, what's dying, and what's about to break - before most people even notice
 
And the best insights we've picked up? They didn't come from reports
 
They came from conversations with other operators in the trenches
 
People running outbound at scale. People breaking deliverability. People testing sequences across 50+ inboxes and figuring out what actually converts in 2026
 
So we built a space for exactly that
 
GTM Operators Club is a group chat for the people actually doing the work
 
Just real operators sharing:
→ What's landing in inboxes right now (and what's getting killed)
→ Deliverability shifts before they hit the mainstream
→ Sequences, frameworks, and workflows that are producing results today
→ Learnings from billions of data points across cold email, LinkedIn, and calling
 
Think of it as your unfair advantage in outbound
 
If you're running cold outreach, building GTM systems, or scaling pipeline - this is where the real conversations will be happening
 
Plus you might even get some deals on GTM products we're building too ;)
 
Comment "operator" and I'll get you in!

We already have some of the top GTME's and operators in there, extended the invite ✌️

CRO of InboxKit | Driving New Revenue for Cold Email Agencies 🛠️

POV: Your co workers after you tell them you're fasting

I came to dodge taxes 

Now I’m dodging missiles 🥲

Jokes aside, for the first time, many of us in the UAE caughlt a tiny tiny glimpse of something too many families around the world live with every single day

We are fortunate to be in the UAE and relatively safe

But in those moments today, many people are juggling with a bunch of “what ifs?”:

What if my child was in danger?
What if my home was hit?
What if this was my reality - not just today, but tomorrow, and the day after?

For far too many people, these aren’t hypotheticals

They are Monday 

And yet - we’ve grown so comfortable consuming conflict as content

We get rage-baited into dehumanising people we’ve never met

We pick sides on wars we’ll never fight, over land we’ll never walk, about lives we’ve never tried to understand

Today we got a tiny tiny grain of that feeling in Dubai where many of us are expats & on holiday etc 

And I hope in all this it has cracked open empathy

For the children in Gaza. In Sudan. In Ukraine. In Yemen and I’m sure many more places 

For every family living in the shadow of a war they never chose and can’t escape

It’s crazy this is all happening in 2026 where we have AI able to replace jobs, but we’re still fighting like cavemen

We are all one “what if” away from their reality & incredibly lucky to be born where we are 

And move where we have 

hope everyone is safe in whatever country they are in & their families too 🙏🏽

UAE has this covered 💪🏽 panicking is an unhelpful trait

No point worrying about things you can’t control

No alternative text description for this image

Day 30 of being a CRO

Here's the honest month 1 review 👇🏽

Day 1 I shared my tech stack and what I was building & now we're all the way at day 30

Month 1 was supposed to be: CS, RevOps, Sales and Marketing all up and running

In my head? Possible

In reality? Not a chance

So here's what actually happened 👇🏽
What we got done
→ Bolstered the CS team - went hardest here, it needed it most 
→ Launched our Creators Program - one of my favourite things we've built so far 
→ Started partnering with some of the top agencies in the space (& converting them, very proud to have them as partners)
→ Built out the CRM, sales strategy and targets from scratch

The stack I landed on (updating you from day 1)
→ Clay - still my first instinct for anything enrichment or list building 
→ Claude - more than I expected. Briefs, copy, meeting notes. Connective tissue for everything 
→ Inboxkit - drinking my own champagne 
→ SendKit - built by one of our ex-engineers. Underrated af. 
→ Attio - Easiest CRM out of the box 
→ Prospeo - for list building & TAM mapping 
→ Calendly - Scheduling 
→ Canva - Visuals and Decks 
→ HeyReach.io -  LinkedIn Automation 

What's still on the table
→ Enablement assets - didn't get there 
→ Prospecting myself - I thought I could do everything. I cannot. Leading from the front on this in month 2 
→ Cultural alignment - still adapting to the team, they're still adapting to me. Not rushing it

My super critical score: 6.5/10

This month I'm aiming for an 11

The trajectory feels right. The team constantly surprises me. 

Getting back on content and in front of customers is part of how I hold myself accountable publicly

Three things I'd love your help with:
→ Guests for the podcast - founders, agency operators, tool builders in the GTM space 
→ Intros to sending platforms, AI SDRs and sequencers open to integration conversations (We already work w the top ones in the space)
→ Agencies doing outbound at scale - let's talk

Month 2, let's go ✌️
________________

My name is Abbas Somji 👋🏽 CRO of InboxKit & exited Clay agency founder

I talk about GTM, AI & Entrepreneurship - follow if you're into it!

Everyone is feeling tool fatigue

Here's my personal "Good, Better, Best" for every tool category in the cold outbound stack 👇🏽

I run GTM for a company that powers infrastructure for 1,000+ agencies, AI SDRs, platforms and sales teams. I see what everyone's using. 

What they're paying. What's actually working. And what's quietly getting replaced.

🟩 DATA ENRICHMENT 
→ Good: Apollo ($99/mo) - solid B2B database. Some stale data but a lot to work from 
→ Better: Prospeo (from $49/mo) - less data, much better quality 
→ Best: FullEnrich or BetterContact ($79/mo) - waterfall enrichment across multiple providers. Best phone numbers right now

🟩 EMAIL VERIFICATION 
→ Good: Reoon Technology - decent. Always a deal on Appsumo but you hit limits quickly 
→ Better: MillionVerifier (~$249 for 500K credits) - cheap, reliable bulk verification 
→ Best: Enrich Labs ($150 for 500K credits) - email finder + verification + company data in one credit pool

🟩 SEQUENCER 
→ Good: Smartlead ($39/mo) - ol' reliable 
→ Better: Instantly.ai ($37/mo) - honestly neck and neck with Smartlead 
→ Best: EmailBison ($599/mo) - better warmup and deliverability. More agency focused. Steeper learning curve

🟩 EMAIL INFRASTRUCTURE 
There's only one option for me: 

→ Best: Inboxkit(from $2.50/inbox) - Google and Microsoft Cloud Partner, private warm-up pools, 17+ integrations, domain isolation. 

I'm CRO here so I'm biased - but we manage 1,000,000+ inboxes for 1,000+ customers

🟩 INTENT SIGNALS 
→ Good/Better: Trigify.io, @teamfluence , RB2B, Kenobi - all getting solid reviews (but haven't experienced them much yet!)
→ Best: Clay (from $149/mo) - nothing else chains signals like Clay does

🟩 CRM 
→ Good: Pipedrive (from $14/mo) 
→ Better: HubSpot (free to $$$) 
→ Best: Attio ($29/mo) - built for modern GTM teams

🟩 LINKEDIN OUTREACH 
→ Good: @dripify ($59/mo) 
→ Better: Sendpilot.ai - on Appsumo right now 
→ Best: HeyReach.io ($79/mo) - multi-account, built for agencies

Most teams are paying $$$$$/mo for worse results because they've stacked 15+ tools over the years. The bloat is real.

Remember good for me might be best for you and vice versa, these are just my experiences! 

What am I missing? Drop a comment - genuinely want to know what's working for you.

__________________

I'm Abbas Somji 👋🏽 CRO of InboxKit Sharing everything I learn scaling from $12M to $100M ARR

Good Better Best - GTM Tools

I'm back podcasting! 

Life got super busy at the end and start of this year as many of you know

But my favourite part of running my agency was the conversations with founders, leaders and other agency owners alike

Now I've settled in a little bit (4th week at InboxKit) it's time to crank it up a gear 

The podcast is focused on one thing: real conversations with the people actually building the GTM space

Top agency founders. Tool builders. The operators behind the companies who are arming the next wave of sellers and how they'll be enabled

If you're building something serious in the GTM world - an agency, a tool, a product that sales and marketing teams depend on - I want to talk to you!

Drop a comment, DM me, or tag someone who should be on

I've already got some mind blowing guests lined up & looking forward to some epic conversations

Everyone keeps asking me "how's it going?"

And normally I have a really laser focussed response

But this time the honest answer is: everything's going 😅

The last 60 days have been some of the fullest of my life

On one side: 
→ Spinning up multiple projects at Inboxkit (partner programmes, creator programmes, CS overhauls (our CSAT increased 30% in 2 weeks!), RevOps, sales campaigns and more
→  Watching the amazing team step up into new levels of responsibility & being the support where I can
→ Meeting amazing people & growing a network of builders

On the other side: 
→ Life has thrown curveballs I didn't see coming, the kind you just have to sit with

And somewhere in the middle, I'm sat at lunch alone at a restaurant on a random Monday feeling completely at peace with it

A friend (shoutout Jordan) recently gifted me Robin Sharma's "The Wealth Money Can't Buy" and one of his habits for living a genuinely rich life stuck with me

Sharma says: eat alone at restaurants. Regularly.

Not because you have to. Because most people won't.

Sitting in a crowded restaurant, no phone, no escape route, surrounded by people laughing and connecting - it forces you to be comfortable with just yourself

And being okay / fearless in one small area trains you to be like that in every area

Here's the thing — I've been doing this since my final year of uni - I chose to commute to lock in on self improvement & most of my friends had either dropped out, or were on their placement year

On the way out of the train station I'd grab a quick scran on my own, and same on my way back home 

Turns out that habit quietly taught me something I keep coming back to:

If you can sit with yourself when everything is quiet, you can handle it all when everything is loud.

And right now? Everything is loud. But it's a good loud.

You don't have to feel one thing

You can be grateful and challenged. Excited and exhausted. Building and processing at the same time.

So if you ask me "how's it going?"

Everything's going, and I'm going with it 🫡

____________

Back to regularly scheduled tactical content for tomw - but sometimes I use this as a live journal because I want to show what it's really like building in public ✌️

One of the reasons I was able to sell my agency 

Was churn 

Most agencies treat email infrastructure like a utility bill

Most cold email agencies see their tech stack as a COGS (Just a cost of doing business) 

They look at their Smartlead, Instantly, Clay and email infra bills and try to minimise them

They’re missing the biggest opportunity in the game

Infrastructure isn't a cost. It’s a revenue engine.

When I was building The Playbook Agency (Acquired by Inboxkit), one of the core reasons our exit was so successful was our churn or rather, the lack of it. 

We didn't just "lose" clients when they finished their high-ticket GTM engagements.

We turned churn into a profit center.

How? By understanding that even if a client stops their full-service retainer, they still need the foundation:
→ The aged domains
→ The deliverability setup
→ The warming protocols.
→ The reduced headache of monitoring it all for them

Instead of a "goodbye" email, we offered them Managed Infrastructure

It became our most powerful downsell.

If a prospect wasn't ready for a full-service GTM build, we sold them the infra. 

If a client was off-boarding, we kept the foundation running for them.

The result: 
→ We stayed "sticky" within their organization. 
→ We maintained high-margin MRR  
→ We kept the "heartbeat" of their outbound alive so we were the first choice when they wanted to scale again

We’re now empowering the top 1% of agencies to do exactly this. 

We’ve scaled from $0 to $12M ARR in 7 months because we don’t just provide servers - we provide a way for agencies to build enterprise value through resalable infrastructure.

My advice to agency owners: 
Stop looking for ways to cut your infrastructure costs. 

Start looking for ways to productise them.

Infrastructure is your retention strategy. 
It’s your downsell. It’s your next revenue stream.

With that I'm excited to say we've started partnering with some of the best in the business & giving them the tools to help build this service line 

I'm partnering with just 5 agencies this quarter, and 10 total this year 

If you're running over $1M ARR - would love to speak - I can help you add 20-30% to your bottom line 

________________

P.S New merch dropping for InboxKit customers - comment if you want a hat! 

________________

My name is Abbas Somji👋🏽 a 28 yo CRO of Inboxkit & exited agency founder 

I talk about all things GTM, AI & Entrepreneurship - follow if you're into it!

Same offer
 
Two replies on the same day:
 
Reply 1: "this is a pretty cringe email to be completely honest. Not interested, thanks."
Reply 2: "That's relevant. Interesting timing, as we are currently looking for our official email infrastructure outbound partner. We could partner."
 
One called us cringe
 
The other became a partner
 
This is cold email
 
This is sales
 
This is putting anything out into the world
 
Some people will hate what you do no matter how good it is
 
And some people were waiting for exactly that message at exactly that moment
 
I've been selling since I was 12, 16+ years now
 
I've been told to f*** off more times than I can count
 
Called cringe. Called spam. Called every name
 
And I still send
 
Because for every person who hates it there's someone on the other side going "wow, perfect timing"
 
That applies to cold email
 
It applies to posting on LinkedIn
 
It applies to building in public
 
It applies to literally anything worth doing
 
If you're not getting some negative responses you're probably not putting yourself out there enough
 
The people who never get called cringe are the people who never send anything
 
And they're the ones wondering why nothing's happening
 
Go send the email. Post the content. Make the call
 
Some will hate it. Who cares

The ones who don't will change your business
✌️

P.S If you are setting up Cold Email -> Might want to check out InboxKit - everything you need to set up cold email infra in a box

____________________

I'm Abbas Somji 👋🏽 CRO of InboxKit

I'm sharing everything I learn as I build the GTM function and get the team from $12M to $100M ARR

Same email, 2 different responses

Last year I got this watch completely free

And it was kind of an accident 👇🏽

When I was running my agency I set up affiliate links with pretty much every tool we used

Then I forgot about them. Completely...

6 months later I checked the dashboards on a whim

The commissions had stacked up enough to buy this watch outright

I didn't promote anything I wasn't using, didn't build a landing page

Just literally suggested the tools I was already using to people who asked.

The best affiliate income comes from products you'd recommend anyway..

So now we're doing the same thing at Inboxkit 🫡

Here's what most people don't realise about our customers - they don't stay small

Someone starts with 50 inboxes. 6 months later they're at 500. A year in? 

We've seen accounts scale to 50,000+!

And you don't just earn on the first sale

You earn on every single upsell that customer makes. For life.

That's the bit people miss

It's not a one-time referral fee. Your earnings grow as your referrals grow 🌴

Most of you reading this are already recommending cold email tools to your network

Agencies, consultants, sales teams - you're already having the conversation

They'll do their own research and find that we're the best solution anyway 

Why not get in on the action early? 

One GTME is now now earning $3k a month passive as he just mentioned us to his team & resulted in a single sizeable deal 

85% of our revenue comes from organic expansion and word of mouth, so feel free to get in on the action 

Then you can spend you $$$$'s on anything you want 

Comment below if you want to know more or alternatively..

I'll drop the link in the comments - book a call with my team and they'll walk you through everything

Happy Friday & apologies for the douchebaggy photo 

_____________________

I'm Abbas Somji 👋🏽 CRO of InboxKit

I'm sharing everything I learn as I build the GTM function and get the team to $100M ARR

Welcome to roast my email copy ep 1 🦃🍗

First up to bat is Instantly.ai 

I love Instantly it's a great tool, but the cold email I received, could do with a lil love 

Here's what they got wrong and how I'd fix it 👇🏽

I'm not here to bully anyone

I've definitely sent shockers in my time too

Probably got emails in people's inboxes right now making them cringe 😅

But after 8 years in sales and running a cold email agency for 3 years, a now a billion sends at Inboxkit - I notice things

Here's what I changed and why:

🟩 Show me you know me
→ Original: "We're looking to align with a small number of agencies / operators"

→ Rewrite: "Seen you've been approaching 15k followers on LI & most of your audience are cold email freaks"

→ Takes 30 seconds in Clay. No excuse not to do it

🟩 Name the pain directly

→ Original talked about "core software" and "recurring commissions" generically
→ Rewrite said "a lot of them are already using Instantly & have probably converted via your content but you're not getting paid"
→ That's a real pain point

🟩 Use a case study with a name
→ Original: "Partners earn recurring commissions on both"
→ Rewrite: "Tom at Red Lion Agency earns up to 40% per referral and cashed out circa $6k last month passively"
→ Specific name. Specific number. Specific outcome. That's what gets replies.

🟩 Kill the corporate fluff
→ "We handle execution. You keep the relationship. We align incentives properly."
→ Three lines saying the same thing. Say it once and move on!

🟩 Dangle a second carrot in the P.S.
→ Original had no P.S.
→ Rewrite: "P.S. We're doing a roundtable for agency pros in Europe - lmk if you'd like to be on"
→ Most read line in any email. Give them another reason to reply

🟩 The Dorito rule
→ My old co-founder Leo always said a great cold email looks like a Dorito
→ Starts simple. Gets a bit wider in the middle. Simplifies at the end.
→ The original was just a block of text with bullet points. No shape to it.

And the subject line? "Abbas and Instantly.ai" isn't terrible if you're a known brand

But "Abbas - you forgot $6k" would get me to actually open it

Watch the full breakdown in the video 🫡

_________________________

Who's up for being roasted next week? 

I'm Abbas Somji👋🏽 CRO of Inboxkit

I recently sold my cold email agency to be on this rocketship 🚀

Sharing everything I learn as we scale to $100M ARR

I sat with my thoughts yesterday around luckiness, "woe is me" and the war

There are missiles flying over our heads in Dubai right now

And anyone who tells you they're not at least a little shook when that 3am alert hits your phone is lying, that vibration will wake the dead lol 

But then everything passes

I had an incredible iftar, made myself a great coffee, went to the gym

Meanwhile people not far from here didn't get that same evening

And it hit me again, the same thing that's been hitting me for 5 or 6 years now:

I am insanely lucky

Not because things are perfect

Obviously not. But at some point I stopped comparing my life to people who have more and started comparing it to what it could have been

Most of who you are.. your beliefs, your worldview, your opportunities.. comes down to where you were born

You didn't earn your starting position & neither did I

Once I actually sat with that, something shifted

The victim mentality I carried in certain areas just dissolved. I stopped feeling owed. I started noticing how much I actually have

I don't really have a grand point here. 

I just know that calling myself lucky has been the single biggest unlock for my own happiness over the past few years. And this week reminded me of it again

Everyone is lucky on something, sometimes the luck is current as in soemthing that happened today, other times the luck came into where you were born & so on 

But view yourself as lucky, moment I did things just started clicking 

Wrote more about this on my blog if anyone's curious [abbas(.)wtf]

Cold email personalisation is a scam
 
Most people sending it have never actually tested the alternative 👇🏽
 
Everyone in outbound is obsessed with "personalisation at scale"
 
First line about their LinkedIn post from 3 weeks ago

A sentence about their dog

A reference to their company's Series B

And it takes hours and hours in Clay to build or again hours to do it DIY
 
I've watched sellers spend countless time just to write openers that prospects clock immediately
 
"Hey I noticed you posted about X" - they know you didn't notice anything
 
A VP of Sales at a mid-market SaaS told me last month:

"The personalised ones feel the creepiest. I hope a human didn't write that & if they did it's a bit odd."
 
And that's the thing - a lot of personalisation feels extremely creepy 

The emails that get replies aren't the ones with fake personalisation
 
They're the ones with a sharp, relevant offer sent to the right person at the right time
 
Relevance is not the same as personalisation
 
Knowing your ICP well enough to write one email that resonates with 100's of people - that's the skill
 
Not scraping someone's podcast appearance to mention it in line 1
 
The obsession with personalisation is a distraction from the harder work
 
Which is actually understanding who you're selling to
 
Segment a great list that has a similar pain, then create an offer that resolves that pain through your product

The LIST is THE PAIN is THE PERSONALISATION
 
Am I wrong? 

Did you ever buy anything from a hyper personalised email, or a relevant message - can an email be both?

Drop your thoughts below 👇🏽
________________________

I'm Abbas Somji👋🏽 and I talk all things cold email, GTM & entreprenuership

Sharing what I've learned having seen 1 billion emails sent via our platform Inboxkit

Here's what no one will show you about cold email

Everyone posts their highlight reel

The "we booked 30 meetings in a week" screenshots

Here's a realistic view instead

Last month we sent 13,898 emails across 11 campaigns

We got 164 total replies and 80 positive responses - we used 0 personalisation & AI. 

If you talk to any cold email "expert" they'll tell you that's a failure

1.18% reply rate? Terrible. 0.5% positive reply rate? Shut it down

But here's what they won't tell you:

Who cares?

Seriously. Who the hell cares whether you send 100 emails to get the pipeline or 10,000 emails to get the pipeline?

Cold email is the cheapest channel to scale. Period.

If you have a large TAM - and most B2B companies do - the math works at almost any reply rate as long as the pipeline value is there.

And in this scenario? We created real pipeline. Targeting different ICPs. 

Testing messaging across segments. Getting live data on what resonates and what doesn't

That's the fastest way to test messaging & find people in-market, today. 

Actual market feedback at scale

This is the first time I've run a SaaS sales function without cold callers

We're a cold email and LinkedIn-first company

We're drinking our own Kool-Aid. Using our own tooling. Running everything through Inboxkit

The advantage? We spin up new inboxes in minutes

Not days. We proactively monitor the health of every single inbox in real time. 

That's how we maintain high deliverability even at this volume

We keep it super simple

1️⃣ Calculate how many positives we need to get our bookings and therefore how many inboxes

2️⃣ Buy double the inboxes we need and get infra across Google and Azure inboxes

3️⃣ Use Set A for 14 day warm up and Set B for long term warm up (ready to slot in when mailboxes burn out) 

4️⃣ Build lead lists on Clay & some great copy (0 personalisation) 

5️⃣ Launch & watch the leads come in! Answer positives within 3 minutes

—
________________

My name is Abbas Somji 👋🏽 CRO of InboxKit & exited Clay agency founder

I talk about GTM, AI & Entrepreneurship - follow if you're into it!

Here's everything I do to make sure my cold emails land

Step by step. No fluff. 👇🏽

Cold email isn't dead - it's just v different to what it was 

Most people blame copy and volume.

But then they just say the channel is dead when they feel like both are fine - that's when you need to look at infra

Here's my exact checklist:

🟩 Calculate Your Volume
→ Start with how many people you want to contact per month
→ Work backwards to meetings needed, then inboxes needed
→ Google: 15-20 emails/day per inbox. Max 2 inboxes per domain.
→ Azure: 2-5 emails/day per inbox. Up to 50 inboxes per domain.
→ Two providers = no single point of failure
I have a calculator for this - I'll drop the link in the comments!

🟩 Find A Vendor & Buy Inboxes - I do this through InboxKit. Done in 5 minutes

But here's what to look for with any vendor:
→ Are they an official Google Cloud or Microsoft partner?
→ Are they reselling trial or edu panel accounts? If yes - your deliverability tanks, or inboxes go down. You lose momentum.
→ Is setup automated? Some vendors look like platforms but deliver in 2 days. We deliver in 30 minutes.
→ Pre-screened domains. Blacklist checks before purchase. US IP allocation.
→ Buy 1.5-2x the inboxes you think you need. If a domain gets blacklisted you've got backups ready

🟩 Warm-Up
→ 14 days minimum before sending anything cold
→ Use a tool with an isolated warm-up pool. Not your sequencer's public pool.
→ Public pools mean other senders' bad behaviour drags your reputation down
→ Private pool = faster ramp and more reliable placement

🟩 Copy & Sending
→ Spintax everything. Subject lines. Opening lines. CTAs.
→ No two emails should read identically
→ No links in cold emails. They hurt deliverability.
→ Turn off tracking. Open tracking kills inbox placement.
→ Plain text. No HTML templates. If it looks like marketing it'll be treated like marketing.

🟩 Validate Your List
→ Whichever database you pulled from - always validate before sending
→ Run it through an email validation tool (we have one built in) or use MillionVerifier etc
→ Bad data = bounces = destroyed sender reputation
→ This takes 2 minutes and saves you from landing on blacklists
→ I also sort by inbox provider - Google inboxes at the top, secure enterprise grade at the bottom. Deliverability builds as it gets to the hardest emails.

🟩 Monitor Everything (most people skip this)
→ Inbox placement tests weekly. Know if you're hitting primary or spam.
→ Blacklist monitoring on every domain. Proactive not reactive.
→ I use InfraGuard (inside InboxKit) for this - blacklist monitor, placement tests, health alerts all in one. Slack reports arrive weekly.

What am I missing? Drop your checklist in the comments 👇🏽
_______________________

I'm Abbas Somji 👋🏽 CRO of InboxKit
Sharing everything I'm learning scaling from $12M to $100M ARR

Journalling has been something that has helped me tremendously over the past few years 

I've also been blogging too on Medium & some of you may or may not have enjoyed my weekend blogs

However I noticed with AI becoming my day to day norm, my creativity was rotting

The one place my creativity comes back is when I write my thoughts down without any intervention 

So I wanted to create my own space online - where I could put together "notes from the middle" 

I feel like everyone writes their "book" in the past tense, but not many write as they're going, their learnings etc. 

As I'm in the middle of my (hopefully) never ending journey to improve - I feel like it's the write time to start recording everything I can

It's where I talk openly about anything I want to - be it entrepreneurship, mindset, frameworks I find helpful and everything in between

So feel free to tune in - I just wrote my thoughts on why it's the easiest and hardest time in history to succeed - seems fitting w/ everything going on this week 

The path you go down is up to you 

Website is abbas (.) wtf 

Because sometimes life be wtf (and also because I couldn't justify the price of a .com) - the real reason

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taplio

The Battle

Sophie Guibaud 👾

Abbas Somji👋🏽

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);}Sophie Guibaud 👾's LinkedIn Performance

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