The Fuck Yeah Test

I was on an onboarding call with a guy I was coaching. He'd been grinding away at cold email for over a year alongside a full-time job. One client. Barely any revenue. He was stuck in biotech - not because he knew biotech, not because he had results there, but because it was the first industry on a list he found on Twitter one day and somehow never left.

We spent most of the call rebuilding his niche from scratch. But somewhere in the middle, we started talking about his current client - a pre-revenue biotech company working on an immunotherapy product that modulates the allergy response in dogs and cats. Patent filed. Early clinical trials. Nobel-level scientific credentials behind it.

I drafted a version of the cold email live on the call. And when I read it back out loud, I said something I didn't plan to say:

"I read that, I'm like - fuck yeah, dude. I'll talk to this guy. He's curing all allergies. Why not?"

That sentence is the entire point of this post.

Most Cold Emails Fail the One Test That Actually Matters

There's no shortage of benchmarks floating around out there. Average B2B cold email response rates hover somewhere between 1% and 8% depending on who you ask and what data set they're pulling from. People obsess over open rates, subject line character counts, best days to send, follow-up timing. All of it is real. None of it is the thing.

The thing is this: would the person who wrote the email actually respond to it?

Not "would it probably convert at 3%." Not "is the subject line under 50 characters." Would you - the person who built this offer, who knows this niche, who's been staring at this draft for two days - would you stop what you're doing and reply to this email if it hit your inbox cold?

Most people can't answer that honestly anymore because they've read their own email too many times. They've talked themselves into "good enough." The copy is familiar. The offer sounds fine. They've been living with this draft for so long it stopped being readable. They can no longer see it the way a stranger sees it.

That's the problem the Fuck Yeah Test solves. It forces you to step outside your own head and answer one simple question before you hit send: would this make me want to get on a call?

If the answer is anything less than a genuine yes - not "yeah maybe" or "I think so" - you're not done writing yet.

What Made the Live-Drafted Email Pass the Test

Let me break down what I actually wrote on that call, because the anatomy of it matters.

Here's the rough version, drafted live in about 90 seconds:

Hey Dr. Michaels - I'm a scientist with [X] years of experience in the biotech space, and I wanted to share a potential opportunity with you. We're close to a breakthrough on a new immunotherapy that modulates the allergy response in dogs and cats. It basically counteracts all allergic reactions, and it's showing results in early clinical trials. Quick chat?

Now let me tell you exactly why this email passes the test and most cold emails don't.

1. The Credibility Signal Is Immediate and Specific

The email opens with a real identity claim: scientist, biotech background, years of experience. It's not "I'm a marketing expert" or "I help companies grow." It's something that places this person in a specific world the recipient already lives in.

When a veterinarian or animal health researcher gets this email, the sender isn't a stranger pitching from the outside. They're a peer. That changes everything about how the email lands.

Most cold emails fail this right away. They open with something generic - "I help companies like yours" - and in doing so, they signal that the sender has no actual stake in the recipient's world. The reader's guard goes up. They reach for delete.

2. The Claim Creates a Genuine Curiosity Gap

"We're close to a breakthrough" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It doesn't say "we have a product." It doesn't say "we've launched a solution." It says breakthrough. That word means something. It creates an open loop in the reader's brain that's hard to ignore.

Curiosity gaps work in cold email because they respect the reader's intelligence. You're not giving them everything up front - you're giving them just enough to want to know more. The call closes the loop. That's the whole game.

Compare this to the way most people write case study lines: "We helped Company X increase revenue by 20%." Fine. But 20% revenue growth is abstract. It doesn't create urgency. "Counteracts all allergic reactions in early clinical trials" - that's a result people can picture. Dog owners exist. Vets treat allergic animals every single day. Anyone in that world reads that line and thinks: wait, really?

3. There's a Real Result Attached

Early clinical trials. That's not a vague promise. It's a stage. It's a milestone. The product exists in a verifiable place in the world, and the email says so. This is the difference between an email that sounds like a pitch and an email that sounds like a conversation.

You don't need a Harvard Business School case study with named logos to write a compelling result into a cold email. You need specificity. A stage, a number, a named outcome - something that proves this isn't hypothetical.

4. The Ask Is Almost Insultingly Small

Quick chat. Two words. Not "I'd love to schedule a 30-minute discovery call to discuss synergies." Two words. Low friction. No commitment. Easy yes.

This is something I hammer on constantly: the call to action in a cold email should require almost no effort to say yes to. You're not asking them to buy. You're asking them to talk. Make the ask match the relationship, which at this stage is zero.

The Real Reason His Emails Weren't Working Before

Here's what was actually happening with this guy before we got on the call. He'd been sending emails for over a year. He had one client - a pre-revenue biotech company - and he'd been doing an enormous amount of work for that client that wasn't his job. Connecting tools. Building the CRM flow. Structuring lead batches. Basically building the client's internal systems for them.

He'd also been getting paid on close. Not on meetings booked - on actual revenue closed by the client. Which meant he had no control over his own income. He could book 50 meetings and earn nothing if the client couldn't close. That's a trap a lot of people running lead gen fall into early on, and it destroys your ability to think clearly about your own business.

When you're grinding that hard for someone else's results and not getting paid, you stop being able to evaluate your own work objectively. You're too close to it. You've been staring at the same emails for months. You've convinced yourself the problem is the niche, or the deliverability, or the list quality - when actually the problem is that the emails themselves wouldn't pass the Fuck Yeah Test if they landed in your own inbox.

The fix wasn't just better copy. The fix was stepping back far enough to see the work like a stranger would.

The Niche Problem Is Actually the Same Problem in Disguise

We also spent real time on the call identifying his actual niche, because this is where a lot of people waste years. He'd been targeting biotech companies because biotech was the first item on a list he'd found online. Not because he had results there. Not because he knew the space. Just because he'd started there and never left.

The thing is - he did have results. He could book meetings with veterinarians. He'd proven it. He'd built the lists. He knew what worked. He just hadn't framed it as an asset.

So here's what I told him: stop trying to sell to biotech companies. Start selling to companies that sell to vets. Animal health manufacturers. Veterinary practice management companies. Pet medicine distributors. Anyone whose customer is a vet office. Because his pitch to those companies isn't theoretical - it's:

"My last client booked meetings with over 46 vet offices in a 60-day period. We charge per meeting booked, no setup fee. Quick chat?"

Read that. Does it pass the Fuck Yeah Test? If I sold veterinary diagnostic equipment and that email hit my inbox, I'm replying. I don't know who this person is. Doesn't matter. If those numbers are real, I need to know more.

That's the test. That's all the test is.

How to Apply This Before Every Send

Here's the practical process. Before you send any cold email campaign - before you click the button in Smartlead or Instantly or wherever you're sending from - do this:

Print the email. Or paste it into a blank doc. Remove your name from it. Pretend it just landed in your inbox from someone you've never met. Now read it.

Does your gut say fuck yeah? Or does your gut say eh, maybe, I guess this is fine?

If it's the latter, you're not done. Go back and ask yourself what's missing. Usually it's one of four things:

• The credibility signal is vague. "I help companies grow" is not a credibility signal. "I'm a scientist with 12 years in immunotherapy" is a credibility signal. Make it specific to the world the reader lives in.
• The result isn't concrete. "We've helped similar companies" is not a result. "We booked 46 vet office meetings in 60 days" is a result. Attach a number, a stage, a named outcome.
• There's no curiosity gap. If the email answers every question the reader might have, they have no reason to reply. Leave something open. Give them just enough to want more.
• The ask is too big. If the first contact asks for a 45-minute demo, a signed NDA, and a decision-maker on the line - you've killed the email. Ask for a quick chat. That's it.

This applies whether you're writing the email for your own agency or writing it for a client's campaign. The person writing the email has to want to respond to it. If they don't, the recipient definitely won't.

The Bigger Problem: Too Much Time in Your Own Head

There's a meta-skill underneath all of this that most cold email advice completely ignores: the ability to evaluate your own work like a stranger.

The longer you work on something, the worse you get at seeing it clearly. This is true for cold emails, for landing pages, for sales scripts, for offers. Familiarity breeds blindness. You stop seeing what's actually on the page and start seeing what you intended to write.

One of the most valuable things about getting your email reviewed by someone else - in a community, on a coaching call, anywhere - is that they haven't read it thirty times. They see it the way your prospect sees it: cold, for the first time, with no context. Their gut reaction is the data you actually need.

On the call, I read a two-sentence summary of the immunotherapy offer out loud and my gut reaction was immediate and genuine. Fuck yeah, I'll talk to this guy. That's the reaction you're trying to engineer. And you can't engineer it if you've been staring at the same draft long enough to have rationalized every awkward line into something you've decided to live with.

If you want frameworks and templates to run this test on, I'd start with the Top 5 Cold Email Scripts - those are the actual structures that have generated meetings across dozens of niches. And if you want to go deeper on the whole system, the Cold Email Manifesto is the full playbook.

On Building the List That Gets the Email in Front of the Right Person

None of this matters if the email lands in front of the wrong person. A "fuck yeah" email sent to the wrong niche is still a 0% response rate.

For local business targets like vet offices, the workflow I walked through on the call is: Google Maps scrape → extract business name → Google search for owner name → find their LinkedIn → scrape email from LinkedIn profile. Tools like Apify handle the scraping layer. N8N or Zapier handle the automation flow between steps. ChatGPT handles the data parsing - feed it raw Google search results and ask it to extract a name. Once you have the LinkedIn URL, you can pull the email for about a penny per lead using tools like Apify's LinkedIn email enrichment actor.

For company-level prospecting - if you're targeting the animal health distributors or vet practice management companies who sell to vets rather than the vet offices themselves - Apollo is still a solid starting point. I use the Apollo scraper via ScraperCity to pull leads at around $1.20 per thousand. For finding verified emails you can also run your list through Findymail, which is one of the more accurate verification tools I've tested.

The cost target I aim for: under four cents per verified, enriched lead. The workflow above gets you there - Google Maps scrape plus LinkedIn enrichment plus verification runs you right around two to three cents per contact. At that cost, a list of a thousand targeted leads runs you $20-$30 all in. That's not a budget problem. That's a copy problem. Which brings us back to the test.

One More Thing About Payment Structure

I want to come back to something from the call because it connects directly to this. The reason this guy had spent a year grinding on cold email without meaningful results wasn't just about copy or niche. It was also about payment structure.

He was getting paid on close. His client closed zero deals out of roughly 700 emails sent. None of that was his fault - he was booking meetings, the client just couldn't convert them. But he had no income to show for a year of work.

I'm glad he finally moved to getting paid per meeting booked. Here's why this matters for the Fuck Yeah Test: when you're paid per meeting, your entire job is to write an email compelling enough that someone says yes to a call. That's it. You control that outcome. You can optimize for it. You can run the test on it.

When you're paid on close, you're optimizing for something you have zero control over. And when you can't control the outcome, you stop being able to evaluate your inputs clearly. You start blaming the niche instead of the email. You start looking at deliverability instead of the copy. The payment structure was hiding the real problem.

If you're running cold email as a service and you're on a performance deal, make sure you're being measured on the thing you actually control: meetings booked.

The Summary, As Short As I Can Make It

Write the email. Read it back cold. Ask yourself: if this landed in my inbox from a stranger, would I respond?

If the answer is yes - send it.

If the answer is anything else - you're not done yet.

That's the whole test. Everything else is just optimization on top of it.

If you want to build the kind of cold email system that actually passes this test consistently - from list building to copy to follow-up - check out the Best Lead Strategy Guide or apply for Galadon Gold if you want to work through it with coaches who are running campaigns live right now.