How This $124 Cold Email Setup (Sendy + Amazon SES + Crunchbase) Helped a B2B SaaS Reach $83,333 MRR

Launching a startup on a shoestring budget is hard. But Steven Goh, founder and CEO of Nubela, pulled this off with his startup Proxycurl.

He got to $83,333 in MRR with just $124 budget. He did it using a scrappy cold email system designed for scale, speed, and inbox deliverability.

The Cold Email Constraints: Cheap, Fast, and Spam-Proof

Steven needed a go-to-market plan that wouldn’t break the bank. His approach to cold email was shaped by 4 key constraints:

• It had to be cheap (they were bootstrapped)

• It had to use Amazon SES (the most cost-effective sending option)

• It needed to be quick to implement

• It had to be simple to maintain—no reliance on expensive SaaS tools or outsourced solutions

Out of this came a homegrown cold outreach stack with a $124 all-in price tag.

The $124 “Hack” Stack That Scaled to $83,333 in MRR

Here’s the exact cold-email setup Steven used to reach thousands of prospects:

• Sendy ($69 one-time): A self-hosted newsletter app that integrates with Amazon SES. It lets you send unlimited emails, handles unsubscribes, and gives you full control. The catch? No built-in follow-up automation, so Steven sent follow-ups as separate campaigns.

• Google Workspace ($6/mo): Used to receive emails at a custom domain via Gmail. It also helped with inbox deliverability.

• Custom Domain (e.g., proxycurl.co): Instead of emailing from the company’s main domain (nubela.co), Steven set up a new one—proxycurl.co—to keep his primary email reputation clean. All replies to [email protected] were auto-forwarded to [email protected].

• Amazon SES (few dollars): The actual sending infrastructure. It costs pennies per thousand emails but requires a good sender reputation—hence the need for email verification. There is no solution cheaper than Amazon SES.

• Crunchbase Pro ($49/mo): Used to build a list of target companies with general email addresses. Exported up to 1,000 rows at a time. Steven targeted:

  • Startups in web scraping, HR tech, and sales/marketing automation

  • US-based companies

  • Companies that had raised Series A or later in the past 2 years

• Email verification (price varies): A must-have step to keep bounce rates under 5%—the threshold for Amazon SES compliance. Steven used a few different third-party tools to clean his list but retained catch-all domains (in case a CEO actually read the emails).

Step-by-Step Breakdown of the Cold Email Flow

Step 1: Build the Email List

• Use Crunchbase Pro to filter and export relevant startups.

• Look for general email addresses—info@, contact@, support@, etc.

• Export up to 1,000 rows per batch.

Step 2: Verify and Clean the List

• Use a third-party email verifier to:

  • Remove invalid addresses that would bounce

  • Retain catch-all emails for better chance of reaching decision-makers

Step 3: Upload to Sendy

• Create a list in Sendy and upload the verified contacts.

• Use the Name field to personalize emails with the company name.

Step 4: Write the Cold Email Campaign

Initial Outreach Email looked like:

"Hi [Name,fallback=],

Do you guys scrape Professional Social Network profiles? Can you connect me with your CTO? I can help with scraping 1M Professional Social Network profiles a day.

Let me know!

Steven Goh, Proxycurl."

Follow-up Email 1 looked like:

"Hi! Following up from my last email. Any thoughts about it?"

Follow-up Email 2 looked like:

"Hi! Checking in with you again, any thoughts on my last email?"

Follow-ups boosted Steven’s response rate by 400%.

Step 5: Optimize and Send

• Include a subject line and plain-text version of the email to improve deliverability.

• Test with Mail Tester before launching. Aim for a 10/10 spam score.

Campaign Results: 5% Replies, Zero Spam Flags

Here’s how Steven’s campaign performed with this lean stack:

• 40.96% open rate

• ~5% response rate

• 1.2% unsubscribe rate

• 0% bounce rate

• 0% marked as spam

One campaign booked him two weeks of back-to-back video calls. That single system ultimately helped Proxycurl grow to $83,333 in MRR (around $1M ARR).

Eventually, LinkedIn sued Proxycurl and Steven Goh in federal court. The allegation: creating hundreds of thousands of fake accounts to scrape millions of LinkedIn profiles violated LinkedIn’s terms of service.

Proxycurl was scraping behind LinkedIn’s login wall, using multiple LinkedIn accounts to dodge detection. This level of scraping—versus public data collection—may have been the tipping point for legal action.

Bright Data on the other hand focused on scraping publicly available data, whereas Proxycurl reportedly accessed private or gated profiles.

Eventually, Nubela shut down Proxycurl because they knew they were in the wrong legally.

However, Steven Goh’s cold email system is a masterclass in lean, scalable marketing. For just $124 (plus some sweat), he built a cold outreach engine that delivered real revenue.

His use of Sendy + SES, strategic domain aliasing, and follow-up sequences showed how much can be done with minimal tools.

But there’s a cautionary tale too. Proxycurl’s methods eventually drew legal fire from LinkedIn—an important reminder that scraping, especially behind logins, walks a fine legal line.

Still, the outbound tactic itself is clean and efficient. Worth studying if you’re building something your market is dying for—and want to reach them directly.

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