Our first international client came from a cold email nobody expected to work
We sent 40 cold emails. One replied. That reply turned into a six-month engagement and changed how we think about reaching people.
The email
In the early months, referrals were everything. Every project came through someone who knew someone. That felt stable until the day it did not — when the referral pipeline went quiet and we had capacity with no pipeline to fill it.
We wrote 40 cold emails. Not 400. Forty — because we refused to use a template. Each one was researched, specific, and brief. We picked companies whose products we genuinely respected, identified a real friction point in their current design, and wrote one paragraph about it. No portfolio attachment. Just an observation and an offer to talk.
Forty emails. Not because we were lazy. Because quality research on forty targets is more valuable than a blasted template to four hundred.
What happened after
Three replies came back. One was a polite "not now." One was silence after a follow-up. The third was a founder in Germany who had read our email at midnight and wanted to talk the next morning.
We got on the call. They were building a logistics platform for small freight operators in Europe — a niche we knew nothing about. But the design problem they described was one we had seen before in a different form: a power-user tool that had grown so complicated that new users could not figure out where to start. The domain was unfamiliar. The problem was not.
The engagement ran six months. We redesigned their onboarding flow, simplified the core dashboard, and built a new design system that the internal team could maintain without us. On the last call, the founder said the drop-off rate in onboarding had fallen by half. That was the number. That was enough.
What we changed
After that engagement, we changed one thing in how we approach new business: we stopped waiting for referrals to find us and started being specific about who we wanted to work with. The cold email worked because it was not a cold email — it was a researched observation sent to someone who recognised the problem in it.
- Research the company deeply before writing a single word.
- Identify one specific friction point — not a generic "your design could be better."
- Write one paragraph. Not three. Not a deck. One paragraph.
- No attachment. No portfolio link unless they ask. Just the observation.
We still use this approach. The hit rate is not high. It does not need to be. One reply in forty is enough if it is the right reply.
The best outreach does not feel like outreach. It feels like someone paid attention.