The hottest founders are the worst cold email targets: which industries respond best to cold email

Sunny Ray · Mar 11, 2026 · 5 min read

The founders everyone wants to reach are the ones everyone is already emailing. In the boring industries, your invite is the only one in the inbox.

On our team call on March 11, we pulled up the dashboard for a campaign aimed at founders of AI companies that had just raised. It was underperforming badly. Someone on the call summed it up: the campaign sort of sucks.

Twenty minutes later we had two new verticals to test and a theory I now believe more strongly than when we said it.

Check the mailboxes before you blame the list

The first thing we did was rule out infrastructure. When a campaign underperforms, the lazy answer is copy and the scary answer is deliverability. You have to check deliverability first, because if your emails are not landing, nothing else you learn means anything.

Mailbox health was mostly fine. One mailbox needed more warmup. The rest were healthy. That meant the emails were arriving. People were reading them, or at least seeing them, and choosing not to answer.

So the problem was who we were sending to.

Busy and successful means unreachable

The read on the call was simple. AI-funded founders care less about a podcast "because they're already like successful and busy." They have just raised. Their inbox is full of investors, recruiters, vendors, journalists and other podcasters. Every tool company in the world wants them as a logo.

An invitation to a show is a strong offer for most people. For a founder who gets three of them a week, it is noise. You are not competing with silence. You are competing with everyone else who read the same funding announcement.

This is the trap of targeting by heat. The signals that make a prospect attractive, fresh funding and a hot category, are the same signals every other sender filters on. The best-looking list on paper is often the most saturated inbox in practice.

Boring industries get less of the love

The pivot we agreed on was toward more traditional industries, "because they don't get as much of the love." The phrase someone used on the call stuck with me: boring industries, boring money.

Think about a founder running an energy services company or a mid-sized industrial business. Nobody is sending them podcast invitations. Nobody is asking about their story. When an invitation arrives, it is the only one, and it lands as a compliment, not a chore.

And boring money spends. These businesses often have real revenue and real budgets, and fewer vendors fighting for them.

Not every boring industry works

We did not just flip to "anything unsexy." The debate on the call was honest about the differences.

Fintech came up first. The concern was compliance. As it was put on the call, it is compliance hell for fintech founders. People working under heavy regulation are careful about what they say in public, and a recorded conversation is exactly the kind of thing their legal team worries about. Fintech went on the list to test, with open eyes.

Energy, oil and gas looked more promising. And there was a bonus: one of our partners has a corporate background in energy and audit and offered to front the energy outreach himself. That matters. A sender who knows the industry writes a different email, and gets a different reply, than a generalist who just learned the vocabulary.

There was a related point on the same call about stage. We had come to prefer Series A and later companies over seed-stage ones as clients, because they retained better, paid more reliably and closed faster. The same logic applies to targeting. The flashiest stage is not the best customer. The company with an established business and a real budget is.

Match the sender to the vertical

That last point is underrated. Most founders pick a vertical and then write to it from whoever happens to run the campaign. Flip it. If someone on your team has lived inside an industry, that industry should be on your test list, and that person's name should be on the From line. Shared background shows up in the first two sentences, and the reader feels it.

Train the replies on the new verticals

The same call covered what happens after people reply. Charles was building an AI responder for campaign replies. I would answer the current replies by hand first, and those answers would train the AI before it took over in a couple of days. Different campaigns need different reply styles: a podcast invitation reply links to the show, a fundraising reply links the deck and calendar. And every reply starts with a look at the person's LinkedIn profile. A new vertical means new questions, so the human pass matters even more when you change who you send to.

What we expected

With four campaigns running across the new verticals, the expectation on the call was five to ten replies per day overall. That is a number, not a promise, but it is the kind of target you need before you start. Otherwise you cannot tell whether the pivot worked.

How to pick your next vertical

Look at where your offer is rare, not where your targets are famous. Ask who gets the fewest invitations, pitches and requests, and still has budget. Check deliverability first so you know you are testing the list, not the mailboxes. Run regulated industries with caution and a clear compliance angle. And put your best-matched sender on each vertical.

Sometimes the most valuable inbox is the one nobody else bothers to write to. See how a show gets you in front of the buyers others ignore.

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