How Zuper built $120K+ in pipeline in 60 days from a TAM scraped from scratch
- Pipeline in 60 days
- $120K+
- Of Zuper's total new pipeline
- ~25%
- Reply-to-interested rate (113 of 171)
- 66.08%
Chris RiesHead of Growth Marketing, Zuper
How Lending Gurus earned 190 interested replies from 88,853 small business owners in three months
A business loan matching platform replaced static scripts with one locked message framework, rewritten by AI for every recipient and reset by a weekly feedback loop: 190 interested replies from 88,853 small business owners in three months.
- Market
- Business loan matching for owner-operators across every vertical
- Client
Scott WesterhofCo-Founder, Lending Gurus
Build the system that finds a new winning script every week.
- Interested replies in three months
- 190
- Positive reply rate on 3,079 replies
- 6.17%
- Small business owners contacted
- 88,853
Lending Gurus had universal demand and a clean infrastructure stack, and every new script stalled within weeks.
Lending Gurus sells working capital, equipment financing, and cash-flow products to small-business owners. The TAM is, on paper, almost everyone: every SMB hits a moment when capital matters.
On paper the campaign was healthy. Deliverability was clean, the list was tight, and sends were landing in the primary inbox.
The real ceiling was the assumption that one script, any script, was the right unit of work.
What we built.
We rebuilt the campaign around three primitives: a locked framework that defines what every email must do, an AI layer that writes the variable parts per prospect, and a weekly feedback loop that decides what the framework should become next.
ScaledMail
EmailBison
Clay
Claude
ChatGPT o3
The offer
Lending is a "yes-waiting-for-a-moment" product sold into a permanently noisy inbox.
Why iteration stalled
The script was the wrong unit of optimization.
What we locked
A messaging skeleton that doesn't move. AI fills the muscle.
Per-prospect AI
Clean structured inputs in. Inbox-ready copy out.
Weekly rebaseline
Reply data decides what the framework becomes next.
Vertical targeting
Segmentation is the sorting that makes the loop converge faster.
The precondition
If sends drift toward spam, the test data is fiction.
Volume
Once the loop is converging, volume is a finance question.
One loop, every week: write, test, rank, promote, scale.
Every variant runs on a cohort of 5K to 10K prospects, and positive replies at 72 hours decide its rank. The winner becomes next week's framework, and the loop starts again.
190 interested replies from 88,853 small business owners. 6.17% of all replies were interested.
In three months of sending, 153,591 emails reached 88,853 small business owners. 3,079 replied, and 190 of those replies were interested.
- Emails sent in three months
- 153,591
- Small business owners contacted
- 88,853
- Replies
- 3,079
- Interested replies
- 190
- Positive reply rate
- 6.17%
- Candidate verticals tested
- 12
More client results.
Different markets, the same system underneath.
Chris RiesHead of Growth Marketing, Zuper
