Timoté Chanut on Building a $300K/Month TikTok Agency With Cold Email
Timoté Chanut grew his TikTok agency to over $300,000 a month and his personal TikTok to over 3 million followers, all by age 23. His agency has worked with brands like Shopify, Duolingo and Gymshark, and it has a team of more than 30 people. Timoté tells Michael how one viral video turned Shopify into his first client, how cold email took the agency from $50K to around $250K a month, and why he values sending volume and meetings booked over vanity metrics. He also covers handing off sales, traveling while running a team, and building a company he could sell.
Watch the episode
Topics covered
- From dropshipping to an Instagram agency to TikTok
- How a viral video made Shopify his first client
- Productizing the offer
- Upwork, then cold email, then ads
- Cold email at high volume and keeping the North Star
- TikTok for e-commerce brands
- Handing off sales and building to sell
Key takeaways
- Dropshipping teaches you many skills, which helps you find what you're best at and double down on it.
- A strong personal brand can open doors you couldn't open with outreach. One viral video led to Shopify as a client.
- A single flagship offer makes it easier to productize your deliverables and build a team around them.
- In cold email, get the basics and deliverability right first, and judge everything by meetings booked and revenue, not response rate.
- Volume matters. Cold email is cheap compared with paid ads, so you can keep buying fresh domains and inboxes and grow predictably.
- Don't change countries more than once a week, or you'll spend your time catching up instead of building.
- Handing off sales is hard and took Timoté a full year, but it freed him from back-to-back calls.
Show notes
🛍️ From dropshipping to TikTok
Timoté got onto TikTok in 2019 and was one of the first entrepreneur creators on the platform, which is how he and Michael met. TikTok wasn't his first venture. He started with dropshipping, and the only way he made money there was through his Instagram theme page, so he turned growing Instagram pages into a service. After his personal brand blew up, he moved all his focus to TikTok.
He thinks dropshipping is a great start because it forces you to learn many skills, including web design, sourcing, marketing, customer support and payment processing. That helps you work out what you're best at.
📱 A viral video and a call with Shopify
One of Timoté's videos about Shopify got around 10 million views in 24 hours. A few days later, Shopify emailed him asking for a call. On the call was Shopify's CEO and founder, who told him their website had crashed and they couldn't work out where the traffic was coming from. An employee showed him Timoté's video, and he couldn't believe it came from TikTok.
Shopify hired Timoté to take over its TikTok, and he was the first person to work on TikTok for the company, handling content, influencer relations and ads. Because he did a good job, Shopify introduced him to Duolingo, Gymshark and other big companies. Once he had to split his attention across clients, he chose to build a company instead of staying a consultant. About two years before this interview, Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers helped him build one flagship productized offer, which he calls a pivotal moment for the agency.
✉️ Cold email: basics, North Star and volume
Different channels worked at different stages. From $0 to $50K a month, a lot of the work came from Upwork. Cracking cold email early took the agency from about $50K to around $250K a month, and at the time of recording they were testing ads.
His first lesson is to do the basics really well, especially deliverability. He hired consultants to improve the response rate, and they did, but meetings booked actually went down. So keep your eye on the North Star. His second lesson is volume. Timoté says they send about 3 to 5 times more than most people doing cold email, at least 20,000 emails a day, and book roughly 100 to 120 meetings a week.
Michael agrees that revenue is the North Star. In a recent audit, one client campaign needed 200 prospects per lead and another needed 1,500, but the second one produced two seven-figure deals. He also sees many people run tiny campaigns of 500 prospects for fear of burning their market, making in a year the progress they could make in a week.
“at the end of the day the only thing I care about is the end result, right, not really how they got to that point”
Timoté Chanut, 8:03
📈 Why cold email is a linear system
To manage deliverability at that scale, Timoté says you can contact leads again from different addresses and with different email bodies. Because the cost per acquisition is negligible compared with Facebook ads, you can buy new domains and inboxes every other month and keep deliverability fresh.
He likes that cold email grows in a straight line: send more and you book more meetings, unlike organic reach or a YouTube channel, which grow exponentially. His approach is simpler than many of the hacks he sees on YouTube. They target e-commerce brands broadly because that's where they have the most case studies, the market is more willing to take risks, and it's easier to deliver a return there than for SaaS.
“what I really like about cold email is that it's a linear sort of growth or process. The more emails you send, you can very predictably tell how many meetings you're going to book”
Timoté Chanut, 10:46
🎬 TikTok for brands, and for Timoté
Every e-commerce client ultimately wants revenue, so that's the focus, but Timoté sets expectations. Unlike Facebook ads, TikTok isn't a system where you put in $1 and get $2 back the same day. It's a longer-term play. Still, he says they have an extensive track record of lowering CPA compared with Meta, because once you crack TikTok it's much cheaper to market there.
His own content is mostly tech reviews, so it doesn't bring in much agency business directly, but it's an incredible tool for social proof. He even runs separate cold email campaigns for his personal brand to land brand deals.
🧭 Travel, handing off sales and building to sell
His travel tip is not to change countries more than once a week. Otherwise you spend more time commuting and catching up on emails and Slack messages than innovating and building.
On team management, he says externalizing sales was no walk in the park. It took a full year from deciding to do it, and buying a sales training, to being fully out with a manager running the team. Before that he was on six or seven calls a day while managing fulfillment and follow-ups. Now he takes two or three calls a day at most. He also learned that leading sales and leading fulfillment are different, one being offense and the other defense.
His goal is to build to sell: a business that doesn't depend on him, with repeatable services, diverse acquisition channels and no concentration in a few big clients. He thinks he'd probably sell to start something bigger, though he admits his view might change in six months.
“it's the most liberating step I think in the agency journey”
Timoté Chanut, 16:45
About Timoté Chanut
Timoté Chanut describes himself as a hybrid between a TikTok influencer and a TikTok agency owner. His agency helps e-commerce brands create content, work with TikTok influencers and run TikTok ads. He has been on TikTok since 2019, which is how he and Michael met, and has grown his personal following to over 3 million.
Before TikTok, he did dropshipping and then ran an Instagram agency. His agency, Young With Solutions, has a team of more than 30 people and has worked with Shopify, Duolingo and Gymshark. He's on LinkedIn for business, TikTok for entertainment and Instagram for his personal life.
Episode links
Want cold email that books meetings without the guesswork?
Michael’s team at DFY Meetings has worked with 500+ companies and booked 5k+ calls.
Book a call →