How I Built a $650K/Month Ecommerce Email Marketing Agency Starting From Zero

From $7K to $650K a Month — Here's What Actually Happened I started freelancing between my freshman and sophomore year of college in mid-2022. I was a broke sophomore doing email marketing for side cash, too scared to invest in coaching even though I had $30–40K sitting in my bank account. I literally ended a sales call because I couldn't pull the trigger on a five-figure investment. A few months of "watching free content" later, I had barely moved. Eventually I booked another call, committed, and everything changed. By the end of that year, I went from $7K a month to $40K a month in about eight months. Now we're at roughly $650,000 a month doing email, SMS, and retention marketing for ecommerce brands. Here's what the journey actually looked like. --- ## How I Got My First Clients With Zero Experience The biggest mindset shift early on was realizing that most business owners are overwhelmed and don't care if you're an expert — they just need someone to figure it out for them. My first line in every proposal and cold outreach was literally: "I am not an expert." I'd tell brands: there are probably safer, more expensive options out there, but what you get with me is someone hungry, cheaper, and ready to work harder than anyone else. People responded to that authenticity way more than when I was pretending to be some direct-response guru. I started by doing work for free or on an hourly basis through Upwork. I treated it as getting paid to learn. I also recreated emails for brands I wanted to work with — welcome flows, abandoned cart sequences — and used those as portfolio pieces. Then I'd send the mock-up directly to the brand and say, "Made this for you. If you like it, hit me up." That approach got me real conversations and a few actual deals. --- ## Getting Good at the Actual Skill I didn't spend months studying before starting. I spent a couple weeks getting base-level knowledge on YouTube, set up a fake Klaviyo store to click around, and then jumped straight into outreach. The speed of learning when you're hands-on is incomparably faster than watching videos. I also committed to recreating two emails a day from brands I admired. They were bad at first. They got better. And they became material I could show prospects. If you've been at this for six months and you're not making thousands of dollars, you're simply not putting in eight to ten hours a day. That's the honest truth. --- ## Scaling From Freelancer to Agency From $5K to $10K a month, I was a solo freelancer. One mistake I see constantly is charging $1,000 a month and maxing out at eight clients with no margin left to hire. I started at $3,000 a month minimum. That gave me breathing room. When I got overloaded, I didn't panic. I just started hiring part-time contractors one role at a time — first a designer paid per email, then a Klaviyo technician, then an account manager. Each hire freed up my time so I could focus on sales and content. That's how the first pod organically formed: copywriter, designer, Klaviyo tech, and account manager handling six to eight clients. My rule was always: sign the client first, figure out the fulfillment later. --- ## How Organic Content Changed Everything I started posting on Twitter and then YouTube almost from day one — just documenting the journey. In September 2023, I was studying abroad in Prague and took a sales call on a beach in Croatia. The brand said they'd been watching my YouTube tutorials and were ready to buy. That one moment changed everything. I went all-in on content after that. Nobody was posting about email marketing on YouTube or Instagram at the time. I started signing three to four clients a month purely from YouTube. Some months I closed eight to ten brands on recurring contracts just from organic video. The format that kept working: recreating emails for big recognizable brands. I'd open with "[Brand]'s email marketing sucks" and it grabbed everyone's attention — not just email marketers. The algorithm pushed it wide, and my expertise still came through in the actual content. Instagram became my number one lead source. It now drives over 50% of new clients. --- ## The Sales Process at Scale I did founder-led sales until we hit around $100K a month — at least six hours a day of calls. Then I hired a closer who I trained obsessively on email marketing. Our minimum price is $5,000 a month, and we filter the intake form so anyone under $50K/month revenue or without that budget doesn't get to book. About 50% of deals close on one call. The other 50% go through a free audit that I record personally, which my closer uses to run a follow-up call. Show rates on that second call are nearly 100% because we make it clear my time is on the line. --- ## Client Retention: What Actually Moves the Needle We run month-to-month contracts and maintain about 95% monthly client retention. The average churned client stayed about eight months. Results matter, but relationships matter more. The worst churns are the ones you don't see coming — and that happens when clients don't trust you enough to tell you there's a problem. A few things we do that make a real difference: - Daily updates during onboarding for the first 14 days, even when there's nothing to show yet

• Automated stat reports every Monday, manual qualitative reports every Tuesday

• Random unprompted wins shared in the client Slack — if we increase a pop-up opt-in rate by 50%, that goes to the client immediately, not just our internal channel The scheduled cadence builds trust. The random stuff builds loyalty. --- ## Final Thought The formula isn't complicated. Get good at the skill, charge real prices from the start, build your content presence before you need it, and treat your team like the actual product — because client retention lives or dies with your people. If you want to follow along with what we're building, find me on Instagram and YouTube where I post about ecom email marketing every day.