Daniel Fazio makes about $500,000 a month.
Not from five clever businesses. From one cold email funnel that feeds a course, a SaaS, and a coaching program, all pointed at the same buyer.
Brett from The Brett Way sat him down for an hour and 43 minutes and asked the question I always want asked: how does the machine actually work?
Fazio answered in more detail than most paid courses. I took notes on the full interview so you can steal the structure for your own SaaS.
Watch it here:
Quick context. This interview is from December 2023, so the numbers you'll hear are a snapshot. Since then, Fazio has written that Client Ascension and ListKit together passed $1M a month, and that the founding team has done over $30M across their businesses. The playbook below is what got them there.
The $500K a Month Machine, in One Sentence
Brett opens with "how much money do you make?" and Fazio just answers. About $500,000 a month across all offers. Around $6M a year.
Then he immediately corrects the fantasy version of that number.
There are about 47 people on the team across the businesses. It is not 100% profit margin. Nobody making real revenue keeps all of it.
The offers all live in one vertical: helping B2B companies grow with outbound. Cold email mostly, plus some cold calls and cold DMs.
One market, one skill, and five different ways to pay him for it.
It Started With a 30-Minute Course
In 2020, Fazio launched Cold Email Mastery. He sold it to about 8,000 people, and estimates it got pirated by another 50,000.
His claim in the interview is bold: roughly 80% of the cold email advice you see online traces back to that course, either from him or from someone he taught.
The part I love is how anti-guru the product was.
The whole course ran about 30 minutes. Loom screen shares. Click this button, click this button. No 70-hour curriculum, no "systems and processes" filler.
His logic: a 20-minute YouTube video gets finished, a 2-hour one doesn't. Completion beats content volume, because a student who finishes actually sends emails. And a student who sends emails becomes a customer for everything else he sells later.
The intro video was Fazio yelling at the camera: some of you will try to get cute and change the steps, don't, I already tested it. Some of you will overthink and do nothing, and then nothing will happen, and that part is on you.
Sounds aggressive. It worked, because buyers of a course are rarely buying information.
They're buying permission. Permission to just do the obvious thing without second-guessing it. Fazio says people constantly ask him "should I do this?" already knowing the answer. The course was 30 minutes of instructions and one loud dose of permission.
Then He Cloned the Tools He Was Recommending
Here is the move that turns a course business into a SaaS business.
Cold Email Mastery told students to use six specific software tools. Thousands of students, plus 50,000 pirates, all signing up for other people's products on his instruction.
Fazio's reaction: "that's really dumb and I should capture all of that revenue."
So over about two years he replicated all six tools. One survived: ListKit, a B2B lead database where you pull verified prospect lists instead of wrestling with filters.
The growth curve he gives Brett, month by month: $40K, then $60K, then $100K, then $125K a month. It hit $100K within 90 days and never dipped. He'd checked the dashboard two hours before recording: $125K a month.
Think about why it worked that fast. He didn't launch a SaaS and then go hunting for users. He'd spent three years manufacturing the exact user the SaaS needed.
The Funnel That Creates Its Own Customers
This is the core idea of the whole interview, and it applies directly to your SaaS.
Fazio's products stack like a ladder:
- Low-ticket products: his best-performing scripts, recordings of real sales calls ($49 order bump), inbox management training
- Cold Email Mastery, the course
- ListKit, the software
- Client Ascension, the coaching program
- Done-for-you services and recruitment at the top
He calls it one marketing campaign, not five businesses.
The only people who buy cold email software are people who actively send cold emails. Most SaaS founders would go try to poach those people from competitors. Fazio makes them instead. Every course sale creates a cold emailer, and every cold emailer is a future ListKit subscriber.
He's blunt about the contrast: you can scalp users from other corners of the internet, or you can build a self-liquidating funnel that creates your total addressable market from scratch. The low-ticket sales pay for the ads and content that recruit the next wave.
My favorite detail: an hour after you buy the course, he emails you a surprise. A free 5-day training called Seven Figure Rev Ops that he never mentioned on the sales page, teaching you how to build an offer people actually want. Unannounced extra value, delivered while the purchase still feels fresh.
If you're building your own outbound machine, I broke down the tactical side in how to build a SaaS lead generation system. Fazio's funnel is that system with three extra floors on top.
Lamborghini Offers and the Scammer Test
Before any email gets sent, Fazio makes students fix their offer. He calls the framework Lamborghini offers, and it has three components:
→ The promised result. A raw, quantified outcome the buyer receives.
→ The risk reversal. What happens if you don't deliver. The guarantee.
→ The evidence. Proof you've done it before.
Most beginners have zero evidence because they genuinely haven't done it yet. His answer: then your risk reversal has to carry the offer until you have receipts.
And he walks through what actually happens when your cold email lands. The prospect's first question is "are you a scammer?"
They copy your sending domain into the address bar. Where does it go? Is there a real website? A video? At least a picture of you? Do you exist on LinkedIn?
If you don't exist anywhere on the internet, nobody on the planet sends you money. Harsh, and correct.
He extends the same logic to pricing: if you want a client's $5,000 a month and you can't credibly make them more than $5,000 a month, no script will save you. People don't buy emails, they buy more money. Everyone presented with a machine that turns $1 into $5 presses the button infinitely. Your job is making them believe you are that machine.
From 800 Followers to 132,000
Distribution came before all of it.
Fazio built the Cold Email Wizard account on Twitter to 132,000 followers at the time of recording. He gave away the course content in free threads the entire time, on purpose. The threads were the ads.
How he started from zero: pick 30 to 100 accounts you genuinely enjoy, comment on their posts constantly, and turn the authors into actual friends. Comments boost posts back to the top of the timeline, so good replies get you seen by someone else's audience for free.
Then the growth hack that made me laugh. At around 800 followers, he posted a thread saying "reply with your niche and I'll tell you how to scrape their email addresses." He got about 500 comments, and every single reply he wrote was another boost.
(500 comments at 800 followers. Most accounts with 80,000 followers can't pull that.)
Demos for $79 Customers
One more thing Fazio does that almost no SaaS founder will copy: ListKit's cheapest plan is $79 a month, and they'll still put a live salesperson on a demo call for it.
They started with one salesperson. Added a second the next month. Hired three more in the two weeks before the interview.
The outbound motion for ListKit is the product eating its own dog food. His team films a Loom of themselves building a lead list inside ListKit for the specific prospect, sends the video plus the finished CSV for free, captures a phone number on the request, and follows up by call and email sequence.
The prospect gets real value before paying a cent, and the demo is the product demoing itself.
Brett asks the classic question: if you could only keep one traffic source for ListKit, what survives? Fazio doesn't hesitate. Outbound. Cold email, for a cold email company. It reminded me of the widget founder who knocked on doors in door to door SaaS sales: the founders who win are weirdly comfortable doing the unscalable version of their own pitch.
What I'm Stealing From This Interview
→ Sell the skill, then sell the tool. If your content teaches a workflow, the software for that workflow is your obvious second product. Fazio waited until 58,000 people were following his instructions before building it.
→ Shorter products get finished, and finishers buy again. A 30-minute course outsold the 70-hour ones because completion is the real conversion metric.
→ Create your market instead of renting it. Every dollar spent teaching cold email manufactured a future ListKit user. Ask yourself what cheap product would create your ideal customer.
→ Fix the "are you a scammer?" test today. Type your sending domain into a browser and look at it like a stranger would. Ten minutes of work, measurable reply-rate difference.
→ Volume forgives almost everything else. His "impossible to lose" framing is just doing enough input that failure becomes unreasonable.
The update since 2023 backs the model: Fazio has publicly shared that ListKit and Client Ascension crossed $1M a month combined. The funnel he describes in this video kept compounding for two more years.
FAQ
What is a cold email funnel?
A cold email funnel is a sales system where cold outreach feeds a ladder of offers instead of a single pitch. In Fazio's version, low-ticket products and free content create cold emailers, those people buy his course, course buyers subscribe to his ListKit software, and the best customers move up into coaching and done-for-you services.
How much money does Daniel Fazio make?
In the December 2023 interview, Fazio says about $500,000 a month across all offers, with 47 people on the team. By 2026, he has publicly written that Client Ascension and ListKit passed $1M a month combined and that the founding team has generated over $30M total.
What is ListKit?
ListKit is Fazio's B2B lead database SaaS. You describe who you want to reach and get verified prospect lists with emails, instead of building manual filter searches. It grew from $40K to $125K a month in its first months, hitting $100K within 90 days, largely because his course audience already needed it.
Does cold email still work for SaaS in 2026?
Yes, if the offer is strong and the sender passes the trust check. Fazio's rule: prospects will look up your domain, your site, and your LinkedIn before replying, and they only buy when they believe you can make them more money than you cost. Weak offers fail regardless of volume or tooling.
Steal Playbooks Like This Every Week
I interview bootstrapped SaaS founders doing $100K to $10M a year and pull their funnels apart the same way, step by step, with the real numbers.
