Frank Sondors on the Death of Templates and the New Outbound Stack

When Frank Sondors, chief executive and co founder of Salesforge and Mailforge, talks about outbound, it feels less like a tool pitch and more like a reality check.

He is blunt, fast, and very clear about what matters.

As he puts it, “There are only two things a startup should do. One person builds. Second person sells. Everything else does not matter.”

That belief sits behind everything he is building at Salesforge and behind his view on the future of sales engagement, cold email, and bootstrapping in a brutal market.

From Google to building Salesforge

Frank grew up in Vilnius, moved to the United Kingdom at sixteen, and later landed his first serious job at Google.

At Google he lived inside the engine room of digital advertising, optimizing Google Ads for the Baltic region. He saw budgets, bids, and performance data at scale. That experience hard wired a certain mindset.

Tools are there to print performance, not to look pretty.

From there he moved through a series of software companies

Similarweb where he helped sell competitive traffic data.

Blackrow where he sold real time conversion intent for ecommerce and got his first real education in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Whatagraph in Vilnius where he led a revenue team from about fifteen to more than forty people and felt directly what is broken in the current sales engagement stack.

During that time he was using classic tools like Outreach and similar platforms.

They worked. But they did not impress him.

Frank remembers looking at them and thinking,

“These tools are good, but they are not wow. I could make this ten times better.”

That thought is the seed that became Salesforge.

Why the old outbound model is broken

Frank is obsessed with efficiency and cost of acquisition. Years of working with chief executives and finance leaders forced him to think in terms of lean growth, not headcount growth.

He explains it simply.

Most forecasting still starts from the wrong place. Heads, not output.

You sit in January and model the year by asking

“How many reps do we need to hit this number”

Frank believes that is backwards.

In his view, the traditional model of one rep one mailbox on one domain is already dead for serious outbound.

He is very direct

“The new reality is one sales rep ten mailboxes. It could even be one hundred. That is the only way you fix deliverability at scale.”

The reason is straightforward. Cybersecurity pressure, spam filters inside Gmail and Outlook, and a flood of low quality outreach make old patterns dangerous. One aggressive SDR can poison an entire company domain. Frank has seen investors and brands where even simple meeting invites drop straight into spam.

His conclusion

If you care about outbound at scale, you need separate infrastructure. Multiple domains, multiple mailboxes, and a system that can warm and rotate them intelligently.

That is exactly the problem Mailforge is designed to solve.

The coming death of templates

Frank’s other main frustration is email content itself.

Most teams still rely on the familiar pattern

Static template, two variable fields, send to thousands.

He explains why that pattern is not just low quality, but actively risky now.

First, the human side. Buyers are numb.

They see the same structure, same phrases, same fake personalization every day. There is template fatigue.

Second, the technical side.

When a single template produces many spam complaints, mailbox providers learn that exact pattern is risky. Variants of that template start going to spam long before the sender even realizes.

Frank predicts something very specific

“We will see the death of templates. We are moving into a world of programmatic sequencing.”

Instead of one template blasted to many leads, he sees a future where every message is assembled uniquely for each prospect. The system pulls from the company site, LinkedIn, public data and combines it with the sender’s value proposition to craft a fresh mail in that person’s language and context.

That is the core of Salesforge

Unique mails at scale using artificial intelligence.

He jokes about past experiments at Whatagraph where one colleague wrote fully custom emails one by one. Conversion went up, but volume collapsed. It was not a scalable winner.

AI, in his view, is how you finally get both.

Multi channel without bloat

Frank is not romantic about channels. For him, email is still the only channel that truly scales from a single seat. But he is clear that conversion is highest when you orchestrate touch points across different lines.

Email for scale.

LinkedIn for presence and direct dialogue.

Calls for high intent contacts with parallel dial.

He describes the future stack he is building very simply

Sequences that bounce between mail, LinkedIn, and calls

Messages that are always unique, never stale templates

One operator driving an army of inboxes, not a huge team doing repetitive tasks

The role of the sales rep in that world changes.

Instead of being a manual sending machine, they become the operator of a high output engine.

How he found his co founders and bootstrapped

Frank is a commercial founder. He had the problem, the insight, and the market experience. What he did not have was the ability to build the product alone.

He is very blunt about that stage

“If you are not technical get somebody that is technical. One person builds second person sells everything else does not matter.”

He went where future founders gather.

Pre seed accelerators like Antler and Entrepreneur First.

The co founder matching platform from Y Combinator.

Through that YC network he met two engineers from Vilnius who had already built successful apps, including a mobile app that reached top spot in Google Play during the pandemic.

They met in a coffee shop in Vilnius. He pitched the idea. One of them said he was ready to start coding that night.

Frank’s reply

Not yet.

They first talked to the market.

Forty five user interviews with sales leaders, operations people, founders, agencies.

They tested ideas, showed early wireframes, explored pains. Then they pushed for real validation.

They sold four prepaid deals before a single line of production code was written.

For Frank, that is not just a nice story. It is a rule.

Cash before code whenever possible.

Bootstrapping from there, they shipped a minimal version in March, did a full launch by June and are now sitting on recurring revenue without having raised a cent from family, angels, or funds.

Y Combinator and the power of not quitting

There is another thread that runs through Frank’s story

Stubbornness.

He has applied to Y Combinator multiple times. He is open about it and almost amused.

“I am one of those guys that never gives up. I write back saying I am back ready to try again.”

Each time he returns with more traction, clearer story, and sharper positioning. He even changed how he frames the company for YC

Instead of talking only about sales engagement, he now describes Salesforge as an autonomous sales execution engine with agents that will operate across email, LinkedIn, and calls.

Whether YC says yes or not, that insistence shows up everywhere in his approach.

Iterate the narrative.

Iterate the product.

Never let one no define the path.

Advice for young salespeople in a changing world

Frank spends a lot of energy on one topic

How young reps should think about their careers as artificial intelligence eats repetitive work.

He does not spin it.

He tells people directly that repetitive sales tasks are under threat.

His suggestion is clear

Become a subject matter expert.

Get close to the tech.

Learn how to use tools like Salesforge, Apollo and parallel dialers rather than compete with them.

Above all, do not sit back and wait to be coached.

His advice to junior SDRs and account executives

Curate your LinkedIn feed with the best sales minds.

Follow your competitors to understand their moves.

Join events like Sell Better and similar communities.

Test something new every quarter in your outreach.

And then there is his core principle

“Be hungry. Always offense. If you are ever in doubt whether you are pushing enough, message me on LinkedIn and I will tell you honestly.”

For Frank, the top one percent in sales are always the same type of person.

They wake up, grab coffee, open the laptop, run ten demos, and repeat.

Discipline and curiosity stacked on top of each other.

In his words,

“If you like that life you will be one of the top earners in your country.”

In a world full of sales tools, Frank Sondors and Salesforge stand out because they do not promise magic. They promise a new structure.

Less headcount.

More output.

No templates.

Real infrastructure.

And a founder who is very clearly not done pushing.