# Interview A04: Shopify development agency, 18 staff
Participant: head of business development. Interviewer: our co-founder. 29 minutes, lightly edited.

**Interviewer:** Tell me how new business works for you.

**Participant:** We're a bit unusual for an agency our size. I'm a full-time business-development person, and outbound is about 30% of our new revenue. Referrals and repeat work are still the majority, maybe 40% referrals and the rest partners: Shopify's partner directory and a couple of app companies who send us projects.

**Interviewer:** What does your outbound look like?

**Participant:** We target direct-to-consumer brands doing between two and twenty million a year who are on an old Shopify theme or replatforming. I use Apollo for contacts and Clay to enrich them: tech stack, recent funding, job posts for e-commerce managers. Then I write the first line of each email myself. About sixty new prospects a week.

**Interviewer:** And it works?

**Participant:** It works because of the follow-up, not the first email. The first email gets a reply maybe 4% of the time. What wins deals is that I then send them a teardown of their site, a short video, and I'm on the phone with them within a week. Average deal for us is around twenty-five thousand dollars and it takes two months to close. The AI could save me the research hours, sure. It can't do the call.

**Interviewer:** Would you pay six hundred dollars a month for an AI SDR?

**Participant:** If it replaced Apollo and Clay and the three hours a day I spend researching, yes, that's cheaper than what we spend now. But it would have to plug into HubSpot and let me approve every email. I'm not letting anything send in our name unread. And honestly, most agencies our size don't have someone like me. The owner does sales on the side. They don't have the time to follow up, and the follow-up is the job.

**Interviewer:** How many agencies you know run outbound like this?

**Participant:** Out of the founders I know? A handful. Most tried it once, got burned, and went back to referrals.