Cold email case study: How Understory Agency found WareSpace roughly 300 positive replies from an ICP not in Apollo

Cold email gets treated as a copy problem. Rewrite the opening line, change the offer, test another subject, and the reply rate moves. That holds for as long as the people you want to reach are already sitting in a database somebody sells. Whole categories of real buyers are not. A company can have revenue, staff, equipment and a physical footprint and still leave almost no trace that a B2B data vendor indexes. When that happens, every general-purpose contact tool goes quiet at the same moment.

WareSpace rents micro-bay warehouse space to small businesses. Eric Golman, its CMO, describes the gap the company fills in one sentence. A warehouse under 2,000 square feet with a loading dock and climate control is close to impossible to find in any city. The businesses that need one are small operators, and many of them have almost no presence online. A large number of them have no website at all.

That is the difficulty in full. A business with no website cannot be found on Apollo, and it will not be usefully findable on LinkedIn either. WareSpace had already reached for the channel twice and stalled twice, both times on the list. Eric Golman ran it himself 18 months earlier while working with the company as a consultant, then put it down for a year. An outbound agency followed, with the infrastructure to send at high volume and almost nobody to send to.

Understory Agency took the engagement in October 2025 and sent the first emails in November. In the first 2 active months the program produced roughly 300 positive replies, from 2 of 7 ICP categories and a handful of markets. One market produced 50 positive replies in 10 days from a 7,200-contact send.

Here is how we built it.

Performance Summary (the first 2 active months, from November 2025)

• Positive replies: roughly 300
• ICP categories activated: 2 of 7, across a handful of markets
• Best single market: 50 positive replies in 10 days from a 7,200-contact send
• Daily sending volume: scaled from 1,200 to over 3,000
• Sending infrastructure: 4 locations at 34 inboxes each
• Geographic targeting: 20-mile radii around each facility, built from roughly 134 Google Maps search terms per market

About WareSpace

Industry: Micro-bay warehouse real estate for small businesses

WareSpace provides small warehouse units to small businesses and is headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, with facilities across several US markets. The product is the size of space almost nobody else builds, warehouses under 2,000 square feet with a loading dock and climate control, in buildings that hold many of them under one roof. Understory Agency has run WareSpace's GTM engineering and cold email program since October 2025.

The Challenge

Understory Agency was hired to fix something that presented as a channel problem and was really a data problem. WareSpace has clear demand behind its product and a category with very little competition in it. What the company did not have was a repeatable way to find the people who need that product.

Eric Golman had run the channel himself 18 months earlier, while working with WareSpace as a consultant. He spun up a sending tool, saw some early results, and hit a ceiling quickly. Reaching the ICP took heavy manual work every single week, because small businesses with little or no web presence do not appear in the tools most outbound teams start from. He switched the channel off for a year.

The second attempt came from an outbound agency. They had the infrastructure to send at high volume. On list building they produced very low quantities of people to contact, in Eric Golman's account of it, and volume is most of what makes cold email work. A sending stack with no list underneath it is not a channel.

By the time WareSpace came to Understory Agency, the working assumption inside the company was that nobody could do this well enough except Eric Golman himself. One more failure would close the channel for good. WareSpace's VP of Marketing had been reading Understory Agency's content on LinkedIn and suggested one last attempt before that happened.

The numbers before we began

Understory Agency starts an outbound engagement on the data, before a single inbox is bought. Here is what the picture looked like at kickoff in October 2025:

👉 Warehouses under 2,000 square feet with a loading dock and climate control, a size of space Eric Golman says is close to impossible to find in any city

👉 An ICP that the standard outbound tools cannot reach, made up of small businesses that often have almost no online presence and in many cases no website

👉 2 previous attempts at the channel, both stalled on list building, 1 run in house and 1 run by an outbound agency

👉 The first attempt 18 months earlier, followed by a full year with the channel switched off

👉 An outbound agency able to send at high volume that produced very low quantities of contacts to send to

👉 Google as WareSpace's primary driver of traffic, a channel that only reaches people who are already searching for warehouse space

The Strategy: A different data source for every segment

The first decision Understory Agency made on this account was to stop using the tools everybody else starts from. Eric Golman's recollection of that conversation is that the answer was to forget Apollo and not even think about Apollo. It sounds like a small thing to say out loud. It removes the single starting point almost every outbound program is built on, and it means the list has to be constructed from scratch for each part of the ICP.

So we went source by source. WareSpace's tenants are not one audience, and the segments leave their traces in completely different places. Ecommerce operators show up in ecommerce-specific data sources, because running a store means running software that is visible from the outside. Contractors and service businesses show up on Google Maps, because a business that takes local jobs needs a local listing far more than it needs a website. Different segment, different scraping strategy. That is the whole method, and it is the part no playbook can supply, because it has to be worked out against one specific business.

WareSpace sells a physical product with a catchment around it, so the list had to be geographic as well as categorical. Understory Agency built the target lists on 20-mile radii around each facility, using roughly 134 Google Maps search terms per market. Running 134 queries against a radius is what gets you from the handful of obvious business types to the full local population of them.

Data pulled this way arrives dirty, and that is the real reason teams stay with a vendor even when the vendor cannot see their buyer. We built a lead-scoring waterfall in Clay that verified website and phone validity before any record was allowed into a sequence. Bad rows are removed at the gate, so the sending infrastructure never carries them.

With a list of that size the constraint moves to sending capacity, and then it moves again to reply capacity. Understory Agency built for both:

• Sending infrastructure across 4 locations, at 34 inboxes each, taking total daily volume from 1,200 to over 3,000.
• A reply-handling layer including an AI drafting assistant, stood up once reply volume outgrew what the team could read.
• CRM sync with instant alerts, and integration into WareSpace's HubSpot instance so that attribution and reporting run off the contact record.

Reply quality showed up in the shape of the replies themselves. Around 50% of the people who wrote back included a phone number in their email signature, which is unusual on a cold channel, and it changed how the replies were worked. Eric Golman has said the software integration was the part he had not thought to ask an outbound agency for, and that things were done for WareSpace he did not know were possible.

The last piece of the strategy is the argument for the channel existing at all. WareSpace's primary driver of traffic was Google, which reaches people who have already decided they need warehouse space and gone looking for it. Cold email reaches the people who have not typed anything yet. Understory Agency treats that difference as the whole point of running outbound alongside search. Eric Golman's evidence for it comes from the replies. People wrote back to say they had not been looking for warehouse space at all, that it sounded like what they needed, and asked when they could come and see one. He describes that as actively generating demand. It is also what makes the investment defensible to him. A channel that reaches only the people already searching adds volume to a market WareSpace was capturing anyway.

The Results (the first 2 active months, from November 2025)

👉 Roughly 300 positive replies in the first 2 active months of sending

👉 2 of 7 ICP categories activated, across a handful of markets, with the rest of the ICP still untouched

👉 50 positive replies in 10 days in a single market, from a 7,200-contact send

👉 Daily sending volume from 1,200 to over 3,000, across 4 locations at 34 inboxes each

👉 Geographic coverage built on 20-mile radii around each facility, from roughly 134 Google Maps search terms per market

👉 Reply volume beyond what the existing team could work, and WareSpace moved to put a dedicated resource on handling it

Key Takeaways

• Cold email fails on data long before it fails on copy. If your buyers do not maintain a web presence, no general B2B database holds them, and no amount of sending infrastructure makes up the difference. The list is the channel.
• Choose the source per segment. Ecommerce operators, contractors and service businesses all leave traces, and they leave them in different places. One vendor for an entire ICP is a constraint you accepted at the start of the project.
• Scraped data needs a verification gate before it reaches a sequence. Checking website and phone validity inside a scoring waterfall is what separates a large list from a large problem.
• Search captures demand that already exists, so its ceiling is the number of people typing the query each month. Outbound is how a company reaches the ones typing nothing at all. It is also the only clean way to show that a new channel produced something the existing channels would have missed.

Conclusion

WareSpace came to Understory Agency with a channel that had been tried twice and shelved twice, both times because the list could not be built. The program that replaced it started on the data. Each ICP segment was sourced from the place that segment actually appears. Every record was verified before it entered a sequence. Sending ran from 4 locations at 34 inboxes each, and daily volume climbed from 1,200 to over 3,000. The first 2 active months produced roughly 300 positive replies from 2 of 7 ICP categories, including 50 in 10 days from a single market on a 7,200-contact send.

The same problem sits under any market the standard B2B databases cannot see. Local operators, trades, independent retailers and small manufacturers all buy real things, and most of them are invisible to a tool built for software buyers with maintained LinkedIn profiles. For those companies there is no list to buy. It has to be built, and it has to be built against one specific business. Understory Agency does that work as the team.

Related reading

• Understory Agency GTM engineering, the service line behind this engagement.
• Best B2B SaaS cold email agencies, the buyer's guide to this category.
• Best outbound marketing agencies for B2B SaaS, for the wider outbound program.
• WareSpace, micro-bay warehouse space for small businesses.
• Forthcoming in the GTM engineering cluster: hapily, Expensify and PatientNow.