I used to send the emails
the nanny now removes.

The sender side.

I spent years in B2B - building products, running marketing, sending cold emails by the thousand. I bought Apollo seats. I tested Lusha. I used Clay to enrich lists. I wrote subject lines that looked personal and weren't. I A/B tested follow-ups. I learned, like everyone in this game learns, that the ratios are brutal: send 1,000 emails, get 30 replies, get 3 calls, close 1.

And here's the part that took me longer to internalize: those 1,000 sends produced 1,000 unwanted moments in someone else's day. Most never opened. Some got annoyed. A few replied with the kind of message that ruins your afternoon - “please stop, I never asked for this, how did you get my email.”

I'd send a polite apology. Add them to a suppression list. And the next week I'd run another list from a different database and they'd be back in it - because the database doesn't care about my suppression list, only their data.

The receiver side.

Then I started getting cold pitched myself. Around the time my own startup got listed in a few directories, my work email started showing up in Apollo, ZoomInfo, Lusha. Suddenly I was on the other end of the same scripts I'd been writing.

And it was worse than I'd realized. Not because any single message was outrageous - most were fine, just template-shaped pitches from people doing their job. It was the volume. The way one pitch follows another. The way LinkedIn fills with the same templates as email. The way every “quick question?” needs three seconds of your attention to decide it's nothing.

You can't focus inside a building where someone knocks on the door every six minutes - even if the knocking is polite.

I tried Gmail filters. I tried marking-as-spam. I opted out of one database, then watched my address re-appear in another a month later. I tried “do not contact” lists, browser extensions, even (briefly) a separate burner address for work. None of it scaled with the volume.

What I learned working in cold outreach.

Two things I want people on both sides to know:

• Most cold emails never get a reply. Industry benchmarks put response rates somewhere between 1% and 6% for cold pitches to senior decision-makers. The other 94-99% is pure noise on both ends - wasted send-effort on one side, wasted attention on the other.
• Removed lists work better than bigger lists. Senders who actually clean their lists - removing people who don't want to be contacted - see higher reply rates from the people who remain. The “more leads = more revenue” math is wrong above a certain volume. Quality has been more profitable than scale for years; the industry just hasn't caught up.

Why Inbox Nanny.

I built this for the people who used to be me - on the receiving end, tired of the noise, but also for the senders who genuinely don't want to keep pitching people who never wanted to hear from them.

It's not a war on outbound. Cold email isn't going away, and frankly it shouldn't - it's still one of the only ways small companies can reach people without paying a platform to be seen. What needs to go away is the asymmetry: the way one person's “let's try a new tactic” becomes 50,000 people's “another tab to close.”

The nanny is the simplest thing I could build that fixes this for one side. She removes you from the databases that sold your email. She filters what slips through. She takes you off the lists, so the senders use their finite outreach budget on people who actually want to talk.

Everyone wins. Quieter inboxes. Cleaner outbound. Fewer pitches into the void.

If that sounds like the inbox you want, connect Gmail and let the nanny take it from here.