Would you invest in an AI powered cold email outreach startup?

Here is why you shouldn't:

1. The market for sales enablement tools is too crowded

2. Gen AI is overhyped

3. There is a new sales tool born every day (just think how many times you've seen yet another AI powered sales SDR tool pop up)

Talk about bad ideas.. We at BADideas.fund just did that - invested in the Salesforge ?? - all-in-one sales super app that helps you send unique and personalized emails at scale.

Why? Because we believe they will be the next Pipedrive .

Here's a sneak peak into the scoring system at BADideas.fund for each team we evaluate:

- Team (1-4): 50% weight (energy, team cohesion & complementary skills, domain expertise, coachability)

- Market (1-4): 20% weight (revenue potential and defensibility)

- Product/Traction (1-4): 15% weight ($ traction, signals of retention and PMF)

- Distribution: (1-4): 15% weight (diversity of and confidence in user acquisition channels)

We were first in touch with V. Frank Sondors ?? , CEO and cofounder of Salesforge ?? , last spring, but were skeptical and had the doubts listed above. Then we had a chance to watch him in action in BADideas.fund Fundraising School (where 90 teams went through an 8 w program and pitched to dozens of investors in command of €700M). That changed everything.

Here is why we are excited to be joining the round and the team in the journey:

1. Ambition: The team has truly big ambitions. Surprisingly, you don't see this often enough.
2. Speed: The small team, V. Frank Sondors ?? , Daniel Grek Sanchez Castellanos , Dovydas Volodko , was blazing fast to build a product, and after a couple of months, the product already worked better than competition in many aspects. Oh, and it is so easy to use.
3. Customer feedback: We spoke to their customers who were not only raving about the product, but they said they'd be happy to pay more. Always a great sign.
4. Smart GTM: A solid product and a talented team is not enough if you are going after a saturated market like sales tools. The team is going to the market with an offering that is just impossible for established competition to beat without cannibalizing their own business. Plus, they bring a unique feature set that addresses a big pain for a segment of the market that no one else has done. This unlocks scale and more market segments.
5. Momentum: V. Frank Sondors ?? is a machine! His principle is dogfooding - he believes in their product so much that he uses it as the main channel to get customers for Salesforge. He sends 6000 (!) cold emails per day personally, gets 75-80% open rate (industry avg <30%), and does 80 meetings per week. The results speak for themselves: They showed €20K MRR when we first evaluated them, kept growing at >50% MoM ??, and are now beyond €100K MRR.

All of this does not change the objections:

1. The market for sales enablement tools is too crowded

2. Gen AI is overhyped

3. There is a new sales tool born every day

But they become irrelevant when you look at a team like Salesforge ?? .

By the way, to all the founders out there - you need to be doing cold outreach. It still is the most cost-efficient way to get customers, especially before you are able to rank high on SEO, drive organic traffic or have made a name for yourself.

Highly suggest you try out Salesforge . ??