Case Study: Selling His $70k/mo Cold Email Agency for $700,000 Cash

What's up everybody? I got Tyler over here who is inside of Client Ascension slash AI Assisted Agency. And this is a very interesting one because Tyler, if I'm correct and for the audience is aware, you built a cold email agency from $0 to $70,000 a month in about a year and a half. And then you just sold the agency for $700,000 in cash. Is that right?

Correct. Yep.

Nice. So that's really interesting. That's pretty unique. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people watching this have a lot of different questions about this. Let's kind of take it from the beginning. Walk us through like how you guys got into this and how it was building this business And then we can get into like the exit stuff later.

I ran this business with a partner and we had a bunch of side hustles before, about like 2, 3 years ago. And it was in high school trying out a bunch of stuff. Like we were big in crypto. Uh, we had like a group that like sold like NFT, like calls, basically all that kind of stuff. And then we kind of just decided like, let's do something like bigger. Let's do something bigger. Let's do something a little bit more, less on the crypto side, a little bit something more like less volatile. We did cold email. We started with pay-per-call. So like, it was just like, as it was, it's pay-as-you-go model, pay us per booked call, per showed appointment. You know, it was obviously very hard to get people to define what a qualified call was. It was a mess.

As you're walking through this, I kind of want to like walk through people like and guide them if they're in that specific situation. So like, for instance, like just so everyone's aware, like the reason why you were doing paper calls, you didn't have case studies and that's all that you're able to warrant in the beginning without case studies, correct?

Yeah.

Okay. Having the clients pay a tech fee to cover the cost, correct?

Honestly, we were just eating it. It was like $200 a month because it was like with like 10 email accounts. Like it was, this was like 2 and a half years ago. So like, yeah, like it was, we were kind of covering the cost on that, hoping that would pay a good amount for the calls because it was like $500 per booked call.

2 and a half years ago. But you said that you started the agency a year and a half ago. So like it was just like kind of like freelance shit you were doing independently before?

I consider like actually starting the agency is when we actually did retainers and started to scale like that. Like I wouldn't, It was a website for the first year, you know what I mean?

Okay. Okay.

We had no case studies. There was obviously no way of us getting clients besides me and my partner had like a decent like Twitter presence because we were just posting random content. We had a few people coming through there. We obviously did cold email for ourselves, pretty much the same infrastructure we still used until we sold the agency. Apollo, you know, email accounts, like resold our reseller accounts, all that kind of stuff. Essentially, we were doing pay-per-call. We had the realization that People were paying way too much, or people were complaining, our clients were complaining that they were paying too much at the end of the month because we were getting them too many like calls that the end retainer would be like for them, like $7,000 to $8,000. So we were like, okay, like if we can have a more predictable source for us of income, which is going to be a monthly retainer, and also they know that they don't have to pay like $8,000 at the end of the month for these calls that, you know, who knows if they close, we just decided to go retainer route. And that's when everything for us, we went from like maybe $10,000 to $15,000 a month to about like $30,000, $35,000 in the first like 2 months of just doing retainers. We literally pitched it to our exact clients, like the same ones who were like, instead of doing pay-per-call, let's do $3,500 a month. And we kept doing that.

Is the reason that you were able to start getting people to pay you retainers because at this point you had case studies and you could show new cold traffic people like, hey, I get results. So they were more comfortable actually paying you money upfront?

Correct. Yeah, exactly. So like everyone we would mention on the sales calls, this and that, it was like we would just show our screen, we would show our process and just basically explain what we do. And one of our bigger selling points is like we used to do a pay-per-call model, but we would get our clients that like at the end of the month they would make an $8,000 bill. But we just decided to do $3,000 a month and it's more consistent for you guys and it was more consistent for us. And that was like a selling point on the sales calls as well. And then we kept doing that. We kept scaling it up. We were very stagnant in revenue. It was like the same, like $30,000 to $40,000 a month for like Honestly, almost like a year. We just never knew the problem. We were obviously like a little bit newer into business at that point. Like not, we weren't so like vetted in business. So like the problems we were trying to solve, we were trying to figure out, okay, you know, should we do ads? Should we do this? There was so many opportunities to look into. And then actually that's when we went to your event. So when we went to your event in, I think it was in Tampa or Coral Gables, it was in Fort Lauderdale.

Fort Lauderdale. Yeah.

We went to your event and then me and my partner were like obviously listening to everyone and you kept mentioning this thing of like paying Charging upfront for 3 months for the same service. And for me, that was crazy. It's like, there's no way someone's going to pay me like $9,000 to $12,000 upfront for like cold email. There's no way. I was talking to my partner. He even, he was like, I don't know, like maybe let's just try it. As soon as we started pitching it, it was just sale after sale after sale. It was actually insane because people don't want to pay a monthly price. Like they have these people, these business owners, they'll have whatever, $100,000, $200,000 in their business account. And it's like, okay, it's $9,000 less, it's fine. But when they think about how much they're making in monthly revenue, it's obviously a little bit different. So after we started to introduce that, it was very good for us because then we had so much extra cash to put into other things for acquisition, which is when we got into ads. We got into ads. And then from there, that was, that's all when it like, we got from the 30, broke that ceiling of the 30 because we were having such high cash flow off of the upfront payments. And then we essentially went to about 55 to 60. At that point, we were scrolling. This is kind of more gearing towards how we actually sold the business or like we first heard about it.

Yep.

It was around that time when we were at the event. We came back from the event and, and my partner was scrolling on his phone and he saw someone, uh, like it was an ad. It was like, if you're an agency between $20,000 to $80,000 a month, you could sell for all cash upfront. So we were like, okay, let's look into this. Like we love the business. But we definitely knew that we, number one, we knew that we could do the business separately because my role was fulfillment and operations and his role was sales. And I already outsourced my part and by hiring someone to do it and he already outsourced his part. So we kind of had the realization that, listen, we're taking 50% equity each. We outsourced him for all commission role and we outsourced me for a $5,000 a month role. So for me, it didn't make sense for us to be partners moving forward. So we kind of had discussions of, okay, let's maybe look into this. This could be like a good option for us. We can have it all cash offer. We can do our separate things, maybe make other cold email agencies separately, whatever. So long story short, we spoke to them. We booked on a call with that company and they gave us an offer that we didn't like. It was like for like 3 months of, 3 months of profit, which was like at the time, $30,000 a month in profit. It was like $90,000. So we obviously just didn't want to do that. Didn't, just didn't make sense for us to go through all of that, the paper work, the time, the effort for $90,000, which again, would have been $45,000 each. So what we ended up doing is we ended up just saying no to that. And then we kind of just took that as a realization of, okay, we could potentially sell this in the future, but let's just build up our revenue. Let's get to about $100,000, $150,000 a month in profit. And let's go and maybe look into selling in the future at a higher revenue. Because we just didn't think like, we got an offer of $90,000. It's not that intriguing for people to buy. So what we did, we were consistently operating the business for the next few months, again, staying pretty stagnant at the $60,000. And then we got a call from the exact same company that said, hey, do you guys want to sell again? And we were like, not for $90,000. So they called us, they said, all right, if we can give you a better offer, would you guys be willing to do it? We're like, sure, like, we want to sell it, we want to sell it. The objection of do we want to sell it, that's not there. The thing is, the objection is the price of what you guys want to, you know, sell us or buy us for. So we had a discussion with them. They gave us a much better offer. They gave us a range between like $500,000 to $700,000. That was like the range of how much it could be for. After we look at our numbers, because we're just telling them our revenue, they don't actually know our profit and all that kind of stuff. We had a discussion with them. The end number was around, it was $500,000. And during the whole process of us going forward and they sent over like a, uh, LOI, like all the nice stuff, we were growing like monthly revenue-wise and like, like very, very fast because that's the point when we were really scaling with ads. We're spending like around like $10,000 a month on ads. We were super niche in one specific niche. It was going really well. So we had a discussion with them. We're like, guys, like our revenue is going up like 50% every month, 30% every month. Like we're making a lot more money now. Like we don't even know if we want to sell for this exact amount. Back and forth constantly. There was tons of just back and forth with their team. There's late fees. Everything came to basically us agreeing on something that we both were okay with, which was that $700,000 mark. And then—

Here's how I can help you. The first link in the description, that's for the AI Assisted Agency Program. We show you what to sell, who to sell it to, how to get clients, and how to fulfill for the clients by using AI. If you want to see that and see all the offers that people inside that program are actively running right now and how they're getting clients, click the first link in the description, go opt in for that, and you will see absolutely everything of how it works and how you can run that business successfully yourself. I'll see you over there. Literally took from whenever we got back from the event, maybe that was September 2025.

Yeah. So like September, like they gave us the call in September of like we started the process on September for like the $90,000. Then we paused it. Then they called us again around December time. It was like right by Christmas. It was December 20th was the exact day. And then from December 20th until literally July 1st. So like a month ago.

Yeah. It's nice.

Yeah. Like it was literally like every single week it was like, oh, we're going to, this is going to happen. It was just a whole thing. But again, they sent it off and, um, yeah, now I'm building it up again.

Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Just 6 months later. So what I think would be useful is you're talking about all different ways that you're getting clients. It was kind of like a freelance thing before. And then, then you got it up to 30 and then from 30 you started ads. Could you walk through like How did you get your first like one or two or three clients? And then from that phase up to thirty k a month, how were you getting clients then? If you could walk me through like how this occurred over time, like how somebody can even get their business to these revenue levels in the first place. It's what I teach inside of AI agency. But if you could walk us through it, that'd be awesome.

When we first started the business, the first few clients they just came from us reaching out to people on Twitter because we had a decent presence. So if people someone clicked on my profile that would say whatever, it was a couple thousand followers. I have some nice posts. So it was just through DMing people, like as we made like a list of people on Twitter that we thought were, you know, good candidates. It was mostly like they were not the best businesses, but also it kind of matched up because we were a beginner business. So like with a beginning business with no case studies, we literally just didn't even know what we were doing until we obviously did it with them. So we kind of just DM them asking them, do you guys want cold email services? We only charge per booked call. We used to do those. We did like 100 per day, each of us on multiple accounts. That's how we actually got our first ever client. He did like LinkedIn automation for people. So like we just reached out to him, we did that. And then as soon as we got our first few clients, what we ended up doing, because we got the case studies from doing the per call, because obviously it's a good offer. So you're gonna have a lot more clients and more case studies came through that. After we refined our fulfillment, all that kind of stuff, we went and then we did the cold email to get the clients. Which was doing scraping data from Apollo. At the time we were using SmartLead to send off emails. We had about like 400 email accounts, maybe 300 email accounts. We were just sending off emails to tons of different B2B companies. So software companies, marketing agencies, financial companies, like so many different types of companies. That's when we started to pick up from not doing the per book call to all the way doing the monthly retainers. Because that's when that picked up as far as like signing better quality people that can, are able to do the retainer. And then after that, that's when we were at that stage for a few months, the $30,000 per month. We kept doing emails. We were also doing the Twitter as well. And then shortly after that event, which would take us to about, yeah, about a year of being stagnant after that event with you, that's when we started to do the ads maybe a month after. So maybe like October 2025, October, November-ish is when we started to do ads because we had a lot more budget now because we were charging $9,000 to $12,000 upfront for a 90-day sprint. That's when we started to do ads.

Walk me through the funnel and like what the budgets were and like kind of what you learned doing that.

So this is obviously something that you probably know well. And like, this is something for like all beginners, like with ads, you kind of get blessed in your first like few weeks with, with very low budget. When we launched ads the first time, it was like $100 a day. And it was specifically towards a type of business that we know worked, which was business loans. So essentially we were the company connecting the business owners to the business lenders who would give money to the business owner. And we would obviously contact business loan— the proper word is business loan brokerages— and say, you know, we can get you more business owners to be able to fund, right? To give, provide them capital. And they paid us a monthly retainer for doing that, whatever, or the upfront fee for the 3 months. And with ads, when you're starting, it's a fresh ad account. Facebook almost like wants you to get really good results. It's kind of like you're in a casino and like you win like $10,000 off $1,000 and now you're like addicted. That's how it felt, honestly. We were spending $100 a day. It was a really simple, like, perspective funnel. It was just like, do you own a business loan brokerage? How many reps do you have? Different things that we pulled from our sales calls that deemed the person qualified or not. And then yeah, we're running at $100 a day. Just a simple call funnel, no VSL, nothing, just like a quick, basically a quiz funnel. And it was straight to booked call. No videos, no, no post-booking video, no VSL, no, nothing like that. Because though, like, I'm not, I'm not saying this isn't something you need, like, for Spending a lot more money because we do have that now, or like towards the end of the agency. But in the beginning, we spent maybe $30,000 with none of that. It was just working. Like it was literally $100 a day. Maybe we scaled it to $200 a day, like within like maybe a month or two, but it just kept working because whether the case may be, no one's doing specifically cold email for this industry. Maybe it was just luck, whatever it is, but it was a super low budget to get a lot of booked calls, a lot of closed deals. We were literally like, our ROAS was like 8x super consistently. Like very consistently.

Yeah. Yep. Good stuff, bro. That's awesome. I love to hear that. Start as a freelancer doing some like whatever, yada, whatever. Probably takes you a year to get up to like $30K a month. And then from $30K a month up to $70K a month, that's about another year. And then you end up selling for $700,000. And how old are you?

19.

Yeah. So you're 19 years old. That's pretty crazy to do that at that young. So what's next?

So right now I'm pretty much building up the exact same agency I was doing. The only difference is I'm not Using cold email as the fulfillment mechanism. It's ads. It's like different channels of ads, but Google, YouTube. I really like the business loan space. Like that's something I actually want to do in the future. I want to own my own brokerage, but right now I'm just kind of doing like more of like a pay-per-lead model where they just pay me upfront for 100, 200, 300 leads. It's like a fixed cost per lead. And I just source them leads at a cheaper price and sell them at the different, make money at the difference.

So. Yep. Nice. Awesome. And like you own the platform, right? You're generating leads from your own page, I guess you could say. Okay. Yep.

Nice.

Yeah. Nice. Super interesting, bro. Very insightful. And thank you for sharing all of it. Imagine there's like some agency owner watching this right now or somebody, or even just a person who's just trying to make money on the internet at all. What pieces of advice would you give to them in order to make that happen quicker?

Honestly, I would say the best advice is like, it might not be something that a lot of people want to hear at that range as a beginner, but it takes time. Like things take time. And I think that's the biggest thing. I wanted to hit such high revenue because I saw everyone on Instagram and YouTube hitting it so quickly. It's like, oh my God, $100,000 a month in revenue. I'm 16 years old. It's like, oh my God, I need to hit high such revenue at such a quick time. But with any business, not just agencies, especially when you're a beginner, it takes time. Like you're going to hit plateaus. You're going to have months maybe in the negative. You're going to have months that, you know, you want to hit these certain revenue marks, but you're just not there and you're going to stay for a long time. It just happens. So I would say, especially in my case, that I had such a a stagnant kind of revenue mark and then just a lump sum at once. I can definitely confidently say that the more that I, the more time that I put, the more, I guess, time I put my head down and just worked on the same thing constantly, the better it got. So that's what I would say. It's just the fact of not looking at it so in such a close timeframe, just kind of expanding your time horizon and even building up that goal of, oh, I can build this up and sell it in the future. And me putting our head down and me putting me and my partner's head down and just consistently working at it and consistently doing it is exactly what got us there to that point. That's what I would say is just really put your head down and just like put all your effort into doing something big in the future and not looking so small as far as like $10K a month of revenue. You know what I mean?

So do you have anything else you want to add before I do like a quick outro?

I would honestly say this is more like tactical advice. This is more like specific agency advice, but something I wish I knew because me and my partner were going through loops constantly of like, what market should we go after? What offer should we do? If you run an agency and you only work with a business that has really small TAM, meaning like you just work with a business that has like very little people in it and your offer is like mediocre, it's going to be very hard to succeed. With us, we were struggling so much for months and that's why I know we hit that plateau because we were trying to work with a business that was super, super niche and it just wasn't working. Also, our offer just wasn't good. There's ways to do it if you have a very small TAM but a really good offer. You can sign a lot of clients and scale very successfully. But for us, We had no guarantee. It was just cold email services in a very small niche. And that's why we plateaued. We kind of had that realization of you need a good offer and a big TAM. And that's how we were able to scale, especially with outbound. There's limited data with outbound. So it's obviously important to have that information.

Yeah. Nice. Good stuff, bro. I appreciate you coming on and sharing all this. And everybody watching this, if you're interested in connecting with Tyler, I'm going to leave links to all of his stuff in the description. And if you want to join the same program that he was in that helped him get results, that's called AI Assisted Agency. And that'll also be at a link in the description. That's my thing. And probably Come to some of the events that he came to as well. So appreciate you coming on, bro. And, uh, this is a really awesome story. Thank you so much for sharing it.

Of course. Thank you. Appreciate it.