Partner spotlight: IntentSignal

Most outbound agencies are a stack of tools with a service wrapped around them. IntentSignal threw out the stack. It writes its own code, takes on one client at a time, and works only with executives at companies above $100M in ARR.

IntentSignal is an OutboundSync agency partner, and a deliberate outlier in how it’s built.

Who’s behind it: Kyle Rasmussen and Andrew Elsakr

IntentSignal was co-founded by Kyle Rasmussen and Andrew Elsakr, who came to the agency from opposite ends of the cold-email problem.

Kyle was a top sales rep at Glassdoor before leading sales at Talview and Chat Metrics, where he built a name for getting into the C-suite at enterprise accounts — booking meetings with cold emails to executives as senior as Starbucks’ Howard Schultz. Andrew came from the build side: after leading teams at AI language-learning startups, he co-founded Lyne.ai, which used AI to personalize cold emails at scale from prospect and account data and was acquired in 2023.

That pairing — a closer who knows what earns a reply from a busy executive, and an engineer who automates the work behind it — is why IntentSignal builds its own software instead of renting it.

Why IntentSignal writes code instead of buying tools

The standard outbound agency rents its capability: a sending tool, an enrichment tool, a sequencer, and a service layer on top. IntentSignal takes the opposite position. Its view is that tools constrain what is possible and make every agency’s outreach resemble everyone else’s, so it builds its own. The team wrote more than 350,000 lines of code in 2023 while testing and scaling client campaigns, and it neither hires out nor delegates the work — one client at a time, engineered in-house.

That focus is the product. Rather than spread thin across a roster, IntentSignal designs a single client’s outbound system from scratch and treats every day as a test, on the principle that it is only as good as today’s results.

The track record

The case studies are where the build-it-yourself approach turns into numbers.

For Gainsight, IntentSignal tested 70 experimental campaigns over 11 weeks, found five winners, and scaled them to book 90 meetings into a small, crowded target market. For Route, it created 117 opportunities in a single month — more than the company’s team of 17 SDRs — and generated $42M in ARR pipeline over three quarters. For Upside, it booked meetings with leaders representing 6.5% of all US restaurant locations, plus grocery decision-makers at chains doing more than $200B in combined annual revenue.

What IntentSignal actually builds

Behind each engagement is custom infrastructure, not a tool subscription. IntentSignal builds redundant sending infrastructure to keep email landing in primary inboxes, then runs continuous experiments on messaging and targeting — testing new ideas daily, scaling the campaigns that win, and retiring the ones that don’t. Because the whole system is its own code, the team can change anything about how a campaign runs instead of waiting on a vendor’s roadmap.

The fit with OutboundSync

IntentSignal’s clients keep their pipeline in a CRM such as HubSpot or Salesforce. OutboundSync lands the outbound email activity IntentSignal generates — sends, replies, and booked meetings — on the right records there, so cold-email work shows up against the same contacts and deals the client’s revenue team already tracks. For a program judged on booked meetings and pipeline, that keeps attribution whole instead of stranding the outreach in a separate system.

If you run a $100M+ ARR company and want outbound built from scratch rather than assembled from the same tools everyone else uses, IntentSignal is worth a conversation.