Booked Solid · Episode

Eric Nowoslawski on Growing Growth Engine X With Clay and Personal Brand

2024-05-07 · 22:36 · Cold Email Agencies

Eric Nowoslawski runs Growth Engine X, a cold email agency whose tagline is sending the message you'd write after 10 minutes of research, to your entire market. He'd been doing cold email for five years and running an online business for three. Eric explains why getting a job first made him a better agency owner, how documenting instead of preaching changed his personal brand, and how that content became a recruiting engine. He also breaks down how he uses Clay to automate research-driven emails and where he wants to take the business.

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Topics covered

Why a job first can make you a better agency owner
Selling to buyers who are afraid of getting fired
Going from in-house cold email to his own agency
Building a personal brand by documenting
Recruiting through content
Relevance vs personalization in Clay workflows
Eric's goals: enterprise value and the cold email canon

Key takeaways

Working a job before starting a business teaches you how business communication works and what buying feels like from the other side.
Many corporate buyers think, "if this works I get a pat on the back, if it doesn't I get fired". Sell safety as well as ROI.
Safety features like do-not-contact list checks and diversified domains become selling points with larger clients.
For a personal brand, document what you're actually doing instead of repeating guru advice.
Content that teaches attracts people who like to learn, which makes them strong hires.
Use data points for relevance when you can, and fall back to personalization when there's no relevant trigger.
Tactics should match the audience. A line that delights property managers can look like spam to SaaS founders.

Show notes

💼 Why a job first made Eric a better agency owner

Eric started out doing cold email inside a company. He was the first person there to work out how inboxes, list building and sending could come together, so he handled everyone's emails while the sales team focused on cold calling. Michael points out that many of the fastest-growing entrepreneurs he talks to started in a job before building an agency.

Eric agrees. He thinks starting a business straight out of college trades short-term cash for your future. In a job you learn how to send a professional email, how teams and managers work, and above all what it's like to buy something. He shares the lesson from putting together solar deals where the ROI was contractual and obvious, and companies still wouldn't move forward.

“if this works I'm going to get a pat on the back but if this doesn't work I'm going to get fired”
Eric Nowoslawski, 3:19

🛡️ Selling safety to buyers who aren't owners

That fear changes how you sell. If a deal works, the buyer probably doesn't get promoted for it. If it fails, they're on the chopping block. Michael says he learned the same thing as his agency moved from small agencies to larger clients. For someone who isn't an owner, the safety features become selling points: how his team double-checks the do-not-contact list, how they diversify domains and so on. A founder of a small agency usually doesn't care about any of that.

Eric then explains how he went out on his own. He did cold email at a chamber of commerce, then at a tech incubator, where he learned to run it for many different industries. He posted about the work on LinkedIn, people kept asking him to do it for them, and eventually he said yes. He had external clients the day he left.

🎥 Personal brand: document, don't preach

Eric has been posting video content for four or five years. Gary Vaynerchuk was a past board member at the chamber of commerce where he worked, and Eric was a fan. His big mistake was posting business and sales advice at 22 and 23 that echoed what the big business gurus were already saying. He was right, but nobody needed to hear it from him. He shares Alex Hormozi's point that the same index fund advice lands differently coming from Warren Buffett.

What changed things was switching from making content to documenting it. That meant posts like "today I learned how to use GMass and its warm-up service" or "I just scraped Instagram for 5,000 email addresses, here's exactly how I did it".

“so when you're doing personal brand, document, don't just try to create things out of nothing”
Eric Nowoslawski, 9:04

👥 Content as a recruiting engine

The most unexpected benefit of his content was recruiting. Eric says he could probably hire three Clay experts tomorrow, because people reach out every day saying they've watched all his videos. Michael agrees. When applicants were hard to find through Upwork and OnlineJobs.ph, he posted a role for an entry-level list builder on X and got around 150 applicants. The person he hired moved up in the company and was later flown out for a month of in-person training.

Eric likes to hire people who are constantly trying to learn, and following learning content is a good sign of that. Michael adds his own tip: pay attention to the VAs who message you directly, even if their copy isn't perfect, because they've shown ambition by reaching out.

🧪 How Eric uses Clay

Growth Engine X works backwards from the best message you'd send after researching someone by hand, then automates it. Eric separates data points that bring relevance from data points that bring personalization. A relevance trigger might be declining web traffic, which suggests a conversation about SEO. Before Clay, that meant pulling lists from Apollo, deduplicating companies, scraping SimilarWeb with Apify, sorting, validating emails in Debounce, and ending up with about 300 leads before starting over. Now it runs in one workflow, and the Clay tables sync with the Smartlead campaign when they finish running.

When there was no relevant trigger, he defaulted to his favorite first line, based on the prospect's previous company, like "I know you didn't leave Salesforce stoked so that you can organize CRMs". His favorite PS offered a gift card to the top steakhouse near them. Scraping that data with PhantomBuster got his LinkedIn account banned three times, and then Clay's LinkedIn enrichment solved it. He admits he first thought Clay was terrible. He also describes campaigns built with GPT-4, such as suggesting custom ideas for each company's outbound.

“now it's like we can send better emails than we would ever even send manually anyway”
Eric Nowoslawski, 13:41

🧹 Clients, tactics and long-term goals

Most of Eric's clients are SaaS companies, mainly because of his LinkedIn content. One unusual client cleans gutters for apartment buildings and comes back every spring and fall, and the team emails property managers for him. The steakhouse PS that SaaS founders see through as spam reads as one of the best emails property managers have ever received.

His safety goal is to grow enterprise value until the business could produce revenue "if I get hit by a bus". His bigger goal is to share enough content and prove enough results to become part of "the canon of cold email", the way Jeb Blount is for prospecting and John Barrows is for discovery. The best place to find him is LinkedIn, plus his YouTube channel.

About Eric Nowoslawski

Eric Nowoslawski is the founder of Growth Engine X, a cold email agency. He first did cold email in-house, working at a chamber of commerce and then at a tech incubator. People who saw his LinkedIn posts about that work asked him to do the same for them, and he had clients the day he left.

Eric is known for his work with Clay. He spent a year on the Clay team as a full-time employee while running the agency, until the agency got big enough that he chose it. He has posted video content for four to five years and is mainly active on LinkedIn and YouTube.

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