They Hate Indians and We Are India First

I said something out loud on a coaching call recently that I've been thinking about for a while.

I was talking to one of the engineers on the Omni team - a developer based out of Tiruchirappalli, someone who's been heads-down building, fixing bugs at 2 a.m., pushing patches to production, genuinely caring when a user churns. Good guy. Sharp. Passionate about the product in a way that most developers aren't.

And somewhere in the conversation I just said it: "I think a lot of the guys in our space - especially the cold email and sales automation space - actively hate Indians."

He asked me why. I told him I didn't know exactly. But I know I've seen it. And I know that we don't do that. And I told him I'm proud of that.

That exchange stuck with me. Because what I said isn't just a values statement. It's a market strategy. And I want to break it down.

The Bias Is Real and It's Well-Documented

There's a viral Reddit thread that made the rounds where a B2B sales professional admitted he gets better email response rates when he uses a non-Indian name as an alias. He called it his "alter ego." His post title: "Why does nobody want to do business with Indians?"

That's not a fringe complaint. That resonated with thousands of people. It touched a nerve because the experience is widespread.

In the broader tech industry, Indian professionals deal with covert discrimination constantly - the kind that doesn't show up in HR complaints because people don't want to rock the boat. Job listings that literally say "no Indians." Sales tools built by Western founders for Western buyers that treat Indian users as an afterthought, if they think about them at all.

Now take that dynamic and apply it specifically to cold email and sales automation software - tools that are supposed to help people generate business - and you have something particularly painful. The bias isn't just in who gets hired. It's baked into which customers these tools are designed to serve well, which markets the creators care about, and frankly, in the community discourse that surrounds these products.

I'm not going to name names. You've probably already got a few in your head.

What the Market Actually Looks Like

India has one of the largest concentrations of B2B agencies, software development shops, SaaS startups, and outbound sales operations in the world. There are hundreds of thousands of founders and operators in India trying to reach Western clients - using cold email, using LinkedIn outreach, using sales automation. They need these tools to work. They need them to be reliable. They need communities and coaching programs that don't treat them like second-class users.

And right now? A huge chunk of the space they're operating in has signaled - explicitly or by omission - that it doesn't really care about them.

That's not a small market being poorly served. That's a massive, motivated, underserved audience with money to spend and a genuine need. And they're being handed to whoever shows up and says: we built this for you too.

When an entire industry signals hostility toward a demographic, it doesn't eliminate that market. It hands it, pre-loyal, to the first founder willing to say the opposite out loud.

Loyalty Vacuums Are Real and They're Lucrative

I've written before about the difference between chasing attention and building recurring revenue. I used to sell software projects for $150-300k. Most of those clients did one project and walked. It took us years to figure out that the real money isn't in the transaction - it's in the relationship. We eventually shifted to recurring staff placement and took the agency from around $250k a month to well over a million a month. Not overnight. But steadily. All on the back of people who stuck around.

The reason people stick around isn't price. It's not even product quality in isolation. It's whether they feel like the thing was built for them. Whether the team behind it gives a damn about their success.

When you've been ignored or dismissed by every other option in a space, and then one product shows up and actually treats you well - you don't just become a customer. You become an evangelist. You tell your network. You defend the product in forums. You tolerate bugs and rough edges because you feel like you're on the team, not just on the invoice.

That's the loyalty vacuum I'm talking about. The cold email and sales automation space has created a massive one. And Omni is sitting right at the edge of it.

India First Isn't a Charity Decision

Let me be direct: I'm not saying "India first" because it's the right thing to do morally - although I do think it is. I'm saying it because it's the right thing to do strategically. These are not in conflict.

Here's what "India first" actually means in practice for a product like Omni:

• The team is built there. The developers who wake up every day thinking about how to reduce bugs, how to handle edge cases better, how to improve the UX - they're Indian. They understand the product from the inside. When a user from Delhi or Bangalore hits a specific issue, it's not some abstract support ticket. It's personal.
• The users are treated like insiders, not afterthoughts. The tone, the onboarding, the support - none of it carries the subtle condescension that Indian users have been trained to expect from Western SaaS tools.
• The community signal matters. When word gets out that a cold email tool is genuinely India-friendly - not just technically available in India, but actually friendly - that travels fast through networks. Indian founders talk to other Indian founders. That's word-of-mouth at scale.

None of this is soft. This is product-market fit through cultural alignment.

The Numbers Behind the Vision

During the call, the developer I was talking to mentioned something that stuck with me. Around 2,000 users had registered for Omni. Out of those, roughly 20-25% had put in their card details and made it inside the app. And then from there, a smaller number had stuck around for a month or two.

That's a real funnel problem. And it's solvable. But here's the thing most founders miss when they look at those numbers: the solution isn't just UX fixes or better onboarding flows, though those matter. The deeper solution is building a product and a brand that makes the right people feel like they have to be in the room.

When users feel like a product was made for them - when they feel the team behind it shares their context, their ambitions, their frustrations - they push through friction. They tolerate the rough edges. They come back after hitting a bug because they believe in where it's going.

Compare that to a user who signed up because they saw an ad and had no emotional stake in the product. First bug, they're gone.

The numbers game in cold email is the same: we preach volume for a reason. You need a real database of contacts, real sending infrastructure, and the willingness to test at scale. 6,000 emails a month minimum to get signal. But all the volume in the world doesn't help if you're sending into a market that has already decided not to trust you before you even hit send. That's the cultural hostility problem in reverse - and it applies to product building just as much as outbound sales.

The First-Mover Advantage in Cultural Positioning

I've done this before in a different context. With Taplio, we identified that people buy a LinkedIn tool from LinkedIn influencers. So we emailed every influencer we could find, got some of them on board, and the tool grew to 3,000 paying users in three months before we sold it for a few million.

The key insight wasn't the product features. It was understanding who buys this and why.

For Omni, the same thinking applies. Who needs a cold email and sales automation tool and feels actively excluded from the current options? Indian founders. Indian agency owners. Indian B2B operators trying to land Western clients. That's not a niche. That's a massive, motivated market that's been waiting for someone to stop treating them like a problem and start treating them like a customer.

The first tool that fully owns this positioning - not just technically supporting Indian users but genuinely building for them, marketing to them, featuring them in case studies, building community around them - is going to have a moat that's almost impossible to dislodge. Because when you've been the one brand that showed up for someone when everyone else was dismissive, that loyalty doesn't disappear when a competitor drops their price or adds a feature.

That's not theory. That's human nature.

What "India First" Looks Like in Execution

On the call, we talked about what it's going to take to get Omni to where it needs to be. The dev team is working on unit testing, better edge case coverage, more technical discussion before code gets written. The kind of disciplined engineering that reduces production bugs and makes the product more stable for everyone.

That matters because loyalty only works if the product holds up. I've seen the other side of this - I helped a software company generate $70k in pipeline once with a product that couldn't even handle a live demo. We closed about $5k. Then the company shut down. The marketing worked. The sales worked. The product didn't. And that's how you kill everything you built.

So step one is always: make the product work. Fix the churn. Give people a reason to stay.

But step two - and this is what I keep coming back to - is deciding who you're building for. Not just technically. Culturally. Emotionally. Who are you going to stand up for when the rest of the industry is looking the other way?

We've made our call. India first.

And the market's going to reward that in a way that no ad spend can replicate.

The Broader Lesson for Any Founder Reading This

If you're building anything in a crowded space, one of the highest-leverage positioning moves you can make is to find the group that the incumbents are actively ignoring or dismissing - and build for them.

This doesn't mean building an inferior product for an underserved market and hoping nobody notices. It means recognizing that the best customers are often the ones who feel like they've finally found something that gets them. And when an industry's hostility has created a loyalty vacuum, the founder who fills it doesn't just win customers. They win advocates.

Look at your own market. Who's being dismissed? Who's being ignored? Who has money to spend and a real need but keeps bouncing off products that weren't built with them in mind?

That's not a charity case. That's your opening.

If you're thinking about how to build a cold outreach operation that serves markets most tools overlook, start with your lead sourcing. You need real volume and real data. Tools like ScraperCity's B2B email database, email finders, and Google Maps scrapers - alongside Apollo, Clay, and others - give you the infrastructure to test markets at real volume. No rationing. No guessing.

And if you want the full framework for building a lead strategy that actually scales - not just tips, but the actual system - the Best Lead Strategy Guide breaks it down. Or if you're ready to get your cold email infrastructure dialed in, grab the Top 5 Cold Email Scripts and start running real tests.

The opportunity is there. You just have to be willing to see it - and say it out loud.