I Made Over $200k Redesigning Outdated Business Websites

A lot of people in the web design space keep saying cold email is dead, but I think most people are just doing it badly. Email usage is still growing every year, billions of people use it daily, every business owner checks their inbox, every company relies on email to operate, so I never believed the problem was the channel itself. The real issue is that most outreach emails look exactly the same and business owners are tired of getting the same copy pasted message every single week. When I first started my web design company I used Instantly and started sending thousands of emails to businesses that didn’t have a website. At first the results were honestly terrible. I was getting maybe around a 1% interested reply rate if I was lucky. Over time I got better at writing outreach. I tested different hooks, different subject lines, shorter messages, more personalized intros, more creative angles, and eventually pushed it to around 2.1% interested replies. It was definitely better, but I still felt like something was wrong. Then one day I realized something that completely changed how I looked at outreach. Why was I targeting businesses with no website at all? Most of those businesses don’t even fully understand the value of having a website yet, which means you’re trying to convince them they need something before you can even sell it to them. So instead I changed my strategy completely and started targeting businesses that already had websites, but outdated ones. And once I started paying attention to it, I realized the opportunity was honestly insane. There are so many businesses with websites that look like they were made 10 years ago. Broken mobile layouts, terrible SEO, slow loading pages, outdated designs, messy structures, confusing navigation, old branding everywhere. These businesses already understand the value of having a website because they already invested in one before, they just know deep down that their current one is hurting them. The only problem was