Frank Sondors On The Future of Outbound Cold Email Deliverability and Bootstrapped Startups

In this episode of Startup Sales Talks I sat down with Frank Sondors CEO and cofounder of Salesforge and Mailforge.

Frank has sold at Google Similarweb Blackrow and Watagraph. Today he is building one of the most talked about outbound and deliverability platforms in Europe without raising a cent of venture money.

We spoke about how outbound has changed why most teams are still stuck in the old model why templates are quietly killing your sender reputation and why modern sales leaders need to think in terms of infrastructure not just scripts and sequences.

This is not theory. Frank is running more than one hundred and fifty demos in a few weeks as a solo founder using his own system.

If you care about outbound this is one you want to study line by line.

From Vilnius to Google to founding Salesforge

Frank grew up in a small Lithuanian city called Viesvile before moving to the UK as a teenager. After a degree in international relations and a short stop at the European Commission he realised the bureaucracy was not for him and jumped into tech at Google.

Google became his digital academy. He worked on Google Ads for the Baltic region helping advertisers grow their spend while still hitting performance targets. That was the first time he saw at scale

• how automation drives revenue
• how data reveals patterns that humans do not see
• how conversion rate optimisation actually works in the real world

From there he moved to Similarweb where he sold competitive traffic and market data then to Blackrow where he sold machine learning that predicted real time conversion intent on ecommerce sites.

Blackrow was his first direct exposure to applied AI. He had to understand input and output data garbage in garbage out and how to sell something that sounds like a buzzword but has to deliver real lift.

Later he moved back to Vilnius with his family and joined Watagraph leading revenue. There he scaled the team from about fifteen to around forty five people across regions and built one of the most automated Salesforce instances in the Baltics.

That experience planted the seed.

I was always looking for needle movers. People and process were strong. The weak point was the tech. The tools were good but not wow. And I kept thinking I can build this ten times better.

At some point that thought stops being a thought and becomes a decision.

Why he walked away from a safe leadership role

When Frank left Watagraph he already had a lucrative head of sales offer on the table.

Good base strong OTE friendly younger founder from Canada. Comfort zone.

But there was a problem. It would still be selling someone elses software.

I asked myself do I really want to be a head of sales again or is it time to sell my own software. I like to stay out of my comfort zone so I gave myself a few months. If my idea failed I would go back.

He never went back.

Instead he decided to attack the problem that had been frustrating him for years inside sales teams

• sales engagement tools that assumed success equals hiring more reps
• deliverability that falls apart once you start scaling
• templates and sequences that look efficient on paper but underperform in the real world

Salesforge was born from that frustration and from one very simple belief

Your tech stack should let a small lean team outperform a bloated one.

One builds one sells

Frank has a very simple model for early stage companies

There are only two things a startup should do. One person builds. One person sells. Everything else can be outsourced.

He is not technical. So problem number one was obvious and brutal. He needed technical cofounders.

Instead of waiting for luck he went where ambitious founders hang out

• pre seed accelerators
• the YC cofounder matching platform
• local founder networks in Vilnius

Two Lithuanian engineers who had built and launched several projects together reached out to him through the YC platform.

They met in a cafe in Vilnius. Frank pitched the idea. They immediately wanted to start coding that evening.

He stopped them.

You are not writing a single line of code yet. First we talk to customers. Then we scope. Then we build.

They ran around forty five user interviews with sales leaders founders and agencies. They showed early wireframes and asked brutal questions about problems around outbound durability and infrastructure.

From those interviews three things became obvious

• Everyone was struggling with durability once they tried to scale email.
• Everyone was improvising silly setups with extra inboxes domains and warmup tools.
• Nobody had a simple system that combined copy personalisation and infrastructure in one place.

Only then did they build the first MVP. Before any code shipped they already had four customers who had literally paid in advance for a product that did not exist yet.

If people pull out the credit card before you have anything that is the strongest validation you can get.

That story later impressed investors and helped them ship fast without outside funding.

What is Salesforge and Mailforge actually doing

Salesforge is a sales engagement platform built around one principle

Make one rep with the right stack more productive than ten reps with the wrong stack.

Instead of asking you to write a perfect template and blast it from one mailbox Salesforge

• looks at what you sell and your value proposition
• crawls the site and LinkedIn of each prospect
• uses AI to craft a unique email for each person in any language
• runs this through a custom deliverability infrastructure that uses many inboxes and domains per rep

Mailforge is the infrastructure layer. It solves the part most teams hate and avoid the messy setup of extra domains and inboxes.

Frank saw founders and heads of sales wasting hours connecting domains managing DNS tweaking warmup tools and still having their sender reputation nuked.

Mailforge turns that into a few minutes of setup. Connect your primary account bring your domains and it will create and manage the right pool of mailboxes for you.

Instead of one rep one inbox the new pattern is one rep many inboxes.

Back in the day a rep could blast a hundred emails from one inbox. Today that will burn your main domain and get your investor emails into spam. The new world is one rep ten or even one hundred inboxes.

That is not a nice to have detail. It is the difference between twenty percent open rate and your entire outbound engine disappearing into the spam folder.

Why the old outbound model is quietly dying

At most companies the outbound model is still built around three assumptions

More reps equals more pipeline

One mailbox per rep is fine

Templates are efficient

Frank thinks all three are broken.

One mailbox is a liability

When a rep sends the same template to hundreds or thousands of prospects every month the signal these inbox providers see is

same content

low engagement

growing number of spam reports

Gmail and Outlook do not care that the rep feels busy. They adjust reputation at the domain and mailbox level.

Soon even warm replies and calendar invites land in spam. Frank has literally had to show prospects screenshots where their own investor emails were in the spam folder because some rep had hammered cold outreach from the primary domain.

His rule is simple

Separate cold email infra from your main domain. Always.

Use multiple domains and mailboxes per rep spread volume and take deliverability seriously before you scale.

Templates create spam at internet scale

Most companies send templatized emails where only the name and company field change. Multiply that by millions of senders and billions of messages and you have a pattern that filters can spot instantly.

Frank believes we are entering the age of what he calls the death of templates. Not because copywriters stop writing them but because inbox providers will continuously punish mass reuse of the same text.

That is why Salesforge randomises content and increasingly leans on AI to generate unique emails for every prospect.

Half baked personalisation is not enough anymore. The structure of the message itself has to vary.

Humans should not be doing repetitive work

Frank is not saying reps are obsolete. He is saying the repetitive parts of their job are.

Researching one prospect at a time writing a slightly modified version of the same message plugging it into a sequence copying data between tools those are all tasks that can be handled by software today.

The role of the rep is shifting to

choosing the right targets

defining the value proposition

running experiments

handling live conversations and negotiations

I think we are moving into a world where humans support the automation instead of automation supporting bloated human teams.

Programmatic outbound and the next wave of sales engagement

Frank uses a phrase that comes from the marketing world programmatic workflows.

In advertising programmatic means automated buying based on data and rules instead of manual placements. In outbound programmatic is starting to mean

infrastructure that distributes sending across many domains and inboxes

AI generated copy per prospect based on real data

sequencing across channels that reacts to signals in real time

Salesforge already does this on email. The longer term vision is to extend the same idea to

LinkedIn messages

parallel dialling on the phone

other channels where B2B buyers engage

Imagine this chain

your system detects a buying signal

auto generates a tailored email touching the right pain

if there is no reply it books a parallel dial window for the rep

in parallel it sends a first touch on LinkedIn written in a different voice but anchored in the same insight

All of this without the rep writing a single line of templated outreach.

That is the direction Frank is building toward autonomous execution across the sales cycle. Not removing humans but removing the manual glue that slows them down.

Bootstrapping in a crowded category

One of the most surprising facts about Salesforge and Mailforge is that they are fully bootstrapped in one of the most competitive categories in B2B tech.

Investors have told Frank straight that sales engagement and email is a horrible space crowded and noisy.

He does not disagree. He just believes they can out execute.

They launched their MVP in March twenty twenty three and fully launched in June. By early twenty twenty five they were around one hundred customers and five figures in monthly recurring revenue.

They have already launched on Product Hunt and finished second for the day behind a YC backed competitor in the same space.

All of this with a team of three. Two technical founders one commercial founder. No funding.

The main levers

obsession with conversion rate on the website and in trials

relentless testing of messaging and positioning

asking every new user where they heard of Salesforge and doubling down on the channels that actually work

Right now cold email is still the biggest driver of their own pipeline. He literally sells Salesforge with Salesforge.

Over the last three weeks one guy me ran one hundred and fifty demos using our own stack. Ask yourself how many SDRs you would need to do that with a traditional setup.

How Frank thinks about channel selection

When I asked how a young founder should choose a sales engagement platform Frank gave a different answer.

Before picking tools you need to know what you are optimising for and which channels can scale infinitely for you.

In the early stage he likes to see one or two channels that can scale almost without limit. It might be

cold email

programmatic SEO

some very specific type of community or content distribution

Ads are the last thing he would use in a cash constrained startup. They are expensive and extremely unforgiving if your funnel is not already tight.

He also recommends some classic but underused moves

build landing pages that target alternative searches like alternative to X and bid on those terms

always ask in your sign up form where did you hear about us so you can see the real picture instead of trusting attribution software alone

For him the answers are clear. Seventy percent of signups mention Franks emails directly when asked. That makes doubling down on outbound an easy choice.

Why most founders under estimate activity

One theme that came up again and again in our conversation was activity.

Frank talks to many founders who tell him outbound does not work or that they have tried everything.

When he looks under the hood he finds

tiny send volumes

no testing of different offers

no real deliverability strategy

a lot of waiting and hoping

Most startups die because they are not proactive. The activity level is tiny compared to what it should be. If you are ever in doubt ping me on LinkedIn and I will tell you honestly whether you are pushing or not.

His advice is simple

be hungry

experiment constantly

do not wait for a manager or investor to tell you what to do

In his words always be on offence.

Advice for young SDRs and sales reps

At the end of the episode I asked Frank what he would say to a young SDR just starting out.

His answer had almost nothing to do with tools.

He recommended one book Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss to deepen your understanding of negotiation. Then he moved straight into mindset and learning habits.

Follow top operators on LinkedIn. Engineer your feed so that every scroll is learning not fluff.

Watch good sales webinars. Learn the basics of copy psychology and negotiation.

Most importantly cultivate hunger and discipline.

The top one percent of sales people in any country are usually in the top earners overall. If you are hungry for cash and impact sales is still one of the best careers you can choose. But you need that inner drive.

If your work can be fully automated by AI you are in danger. So build a profile that is hard to replace

deep market and product knowledge

strong communication and negotiation

real creativity and problem solving

Those are the skills that will still matter even as tools like Salesforge take away repetitive tasks.

Closing thoughts

Frank Sondors is a good example of where outbound is heading.

Lean teams instead of bloated headcount.

Real infrastructure instead of wishful thinking.

AI assisted personalisation instead of lazy templates.

And above all a founder mindset that is willing to do the unscalable work while building the systems that make it scale.

If you are a founder or sales leader and your outbound still looks like one rep one inbox one template this episode is your invitation to rethink the whole model.

Run experiments. Treat deliverability as a product problem not an IT chore.

Build a stack that lets one hungry person do the work of ten.

That is where the future of outbound is already being built.

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