$ man minimum-contacts

No Campaign Under 10,000 Contacts

The principle that cold email campaigns need a minimum list size of 10,000 contacts to produce statistically meaningful results and generate enough pipeline to justify the infrastructure investment.

A 1,000-contact campaign with a 1% reply rate gives you 10 replies. After qualification, maybe 3-4 are worth pursuing. After no-shows and objections, maybe 1-2 become opportunities. That's not a pipeline — it's a rounding error. Scale is what makes cold email work. 10,000 contacts at 1% reply = 100 replies. 10-20 qualified opportunities. That's a pipeline. The infrastructure cost (domains, mailboxes, warmup) is the same whether you send to 1,000 or 10,000. Amortize it over more contacts.

I set a minimum of 10,000 contacts for any partner campaign. If the TAM (total addressable market) is smaller than 10,000, cold email at scale might not be the right channel — we look at ABM or direct outreach instead. The contact minimum also forces better list building. You can't scrape 10,000 relevant contacts from a bad ICP definition. The list size requirement pushes teams to define ICP tightly and build comprehensive lists.