LeadEngine.ai Almost Broke Me

I risked going BROKE when I decided to build LeadEngine.ai.

I don’t even mean monetarily, but mentally/emotionally.

We’ve spent almost 17 months of labor between me, my co-founders, and our team while my other product Uptics took a back seat (not neglected, just not front & center).

It’s been a challenge.

But here's why I built it and gambled everything:

Over the years, I’ve coached, serviced, and supported hundreds of SMBs with their cold email.

I kept noticing repeating trends across customers that were breaking points in the cold email process, making it hard to execute.

And none of the current solutions like Smartlead, Instantly, or even my own product Uptics were solving these.

So my goal was simple: Solve each of these challenges one by one.

1️⃣ Shared Infrastructure

As cold email tools scaled, they struggled to maintain good deliverability and a smooth user experience. Why?

The backend infrastructure is shared among all customers. Everyone’s competing for the same resources, creating deliverability and performance issues.

The most common complaints I hear:

→They’re buggy and slow.

→Deliverability has gotten worse.

→The warmup pool is polluted with SMTP accounts.

With LeadEngine, we solved this problem through and through.

Every customer gets a 4-tier dedicated backend server infrastructure.

This means:

→Private/dedicated IPs

→Completely isolated backend for a better user experience

→Reduced bottlenecks in sending/receiving

→Faster speed and higher quality

2️⃣ Fingerprinting

Email providers are constantly improving their algorithms to protect users, which means repeated cold emails get flagged.

We pioneered Spintax in Uptics and saw it get copied by the big guys.

But even that’s no longer enough.

So, I ran a Frankenstein process to test my idea of email fingerprinting and discovered I was losing 2-3x of my positive replies due to detection.

LeadEngine fixes this with 1-to-1 unique cold emails without deep personalization (though that’s possible too).

3️⃣ Stale Campaigns

Mainstream sequencers process leads like cavemen: Start at the top of the list and work their way down.

It’s a joke and it kills campaign success. With AI and ML, there’s a better way.

LeadEngine’s sequencer thinks in real time and optimizes sending, copywriting, and targeting on the fly.

4️⃣ Keeping Momentum

Even when campaigns are working, keeping momentum is a challenge.

One of the biggest pains I’ve seen?

Positive replies sitting in inboxes, unresponded to.

It’s maddening but as a small business owner myself, I get it.

So, we created Autopilot:

→ Intelligently replies within seconds

Managing campaigns is easier too.

The old way:

→Campaign ran out of leads 13 days ago.

→Go to Apollo and search for more leads.

→Export leads.

→Import leads.

→Build a brand new campaign.

The new way:

→Toggle one button on.

→LeadEngine finds the winners in your campaigns.

→Finds lookalike leads.

→Automatically adds them to your campaigns.

→The difference is night and day.

LeadEngine is a complete rethink of how cold outreach should be executed.

I built it because the old way wasn’t cutting it and no one else was stepping up to solve these issues.

Watch the training video: How "Quad Clutch" Training My Cold Email AI 8x'd Conversions In 9 Days While CUTTING Lead Costs