From Two People
to Twenty-Five — and still going
The RankWizards Story

Before I knew what cold email was, before I had ever heard the words "domain rating" or "email warm-up" or "ICP", I was a teacher. That was my identity, my career plan, and the life I had imagined for myself. I was studying for my Bachelor of Business Studies degree, I had a stable path ahead of me, and I had no particular reason to think any of it would change.

Then, in early 2020, it all changed.

COVID-19 arrived in Bangladesh and shut everything down. Schools closed. Physical classrooms emptied. And in rural areas — where I was working — online teaching simply wasn't an option. The infrastructure didn't exist. The students didn't have reliable internet. The tools weren't there. Overnight, my career disappeared.

My income dropped to zero. Not gradually — literally overnight. I went from a working professional with a career trajectory to someone sitting at home with no job, no income, and a business studies degree that suddenly felt very theoretical in a world that had stopped functioning normally.

It's strange, looking back, to think that the worst period of my life set up the best chapter of my career. But that's what happened. COVID didn't just close my school — it forced me to find a different door entirely.

My BBS degree had digital marketing in the curriculum. I'd studied the theory. I knew what SEO stood for, what an email campaign was supposed to do, how lead generation worked in principle. But knowing something in theory and actually being able to do it are two entirely different things.

In those first months of lockdown, I started learning seriously. I didn't take a single course and declare myself a marketer — that's not how I approached it. I picked one skill, got good at it, then moved to the next. I treated learning like a research project, spending hours studying the actual mechanics of things rather than watching surface-level tutorials.

Cold email grabbed my attention early. It was technical in a way that appealed to me — there were real variables you could control, real metrics you could measure, and a direct, traceable line between your inputs and your outputs. If an email landed in spam, there was a specific reason. If an open rate dropped, you could investigate and find the cause. It wasn't guesswork. It was a system.

I went deep into deliverability. I learned what SPF records actually do, why DMARC matters, how email warm-up works at a technical level, what causes domains to get blacklisted and how to recover them. I learned ICP research not from a slide deck but by actually doing it — building lists, testing them, seeing what bounced and what didn't.

By the time I felt ready to look for professional opportunities, I had developed a genuine understanding of cold email — not just the surface mechanics but the deep technical layer underneath that most people skip entirely. That foundation is what shaped everything that came after.

I joined RankWizards as a complete fresher. I want to be honest about that — I wasn't coming in with years of agency experience or a portfolio full of successful campaigns. I was someone who had spent months studying the craft intensely and believed I was ready to apply what I'd learned in a real environment.

RankWizards was a content marketing agency — helping B2B companies, SaaS businesses and brands build organic growth through content and SEO. The agency model meant working with multiple clients across different industries simultaneously, which turned out to be an accelerated education in itself. Every client was a different problem. Every campaign required adapting the fundamentals to a new context.

In those early months, I absorbed everything. I took on work that stretched beyond my immediate comfort zone because I understood — from teaching, actually — that the best way to learn is to be responsible for outcomes. When you have a deadline and a client depending on you, you find a way to deliver. That pressure accelerated my growth more than any amount of self-directed study could have.

I was building skills across multiple disciplines simultaneously — cold email infrastructure, lead generation and list building, link building outreach, inbound email strategy. Each one reinforced the others. Understanding deliverability made me a better link building outreacher. Understanding ICP research made my cold email campaigns sharper. The skills compounded in ways I hadn't anticipated.

I was also learning the agency business — how to manage client relationships, how to balance multiple projects under competing deadlines, how to communicate results clearly, how to set realistic expectations and then exceed them. These aren't skills you can study from a book. You learn them by doing the work, making mistakes, and doing the work again with the lessons incorporated.

RankWizards was, in those first years, a place that gave me room to grow. The work was real, the stakes were real, and the feedback loop was immediate. If a campaign didn't perform, you knew about it quickly and had to figure out why. If a link building outreach wasn't getting replies, you had to diagnose the problem and solve it. There was no hiding behind process — only results.

There's a chapter of the RankWizards story that doesn't appear in the agency's marketing materials. A period that was never written about publicly, never discussed in case studies, never mentioned in blog posts. But it is the most important chapter — both for understanding what the company became, and for understanding who I am as a professional.

The team shrank. Gradually at first, then faster. Client work slowed. Revenue dried up. The people who had built the agency alongside the founder started leaving, not because of any dramatic falling out but because there wasn't enough work to sustain everyone. One by one, the team got smaller.

Then it was just two people. Saleh Ahmed, the founder and CEO, and me.

I want you to understand what that moment actually felt like. We were sitting with a company that had once been a functioning agency — with processes, with clients, with momentum — and watching that infrastructure slowly collapse around us. There was no guarantee that it would recover. There was no obvious path forward. There was just a choice: leave, or stay and try to rebuild.

The decision to stay in that moment is, looking back, the single most consequential professional choice I have ever made. Everything that came after — every skill I developed, every result I achieved, every client I helped, every team member I worked alongside — traces back to that decision.

But staying was only the first part. The harder part was figuring out what to actually do next.

Rebuilding a business with two people and no clients is an exercise in absolute fundamentals. You don't have the luxury of testing marginal improvements — you need to build the core engine from scratch and make it work fast enough to keep the lights on.

Everything I had learned about cold email in those early months of self-study, and everything I had applied in client work since joining RankWizards, came into focus in this period with a clarity and urgency I hadn't experienced before. This wasn't a client's business on the line. This was ours.

I rebuilt the entire outreach infrastructure from the ground up. New domains. New mailboxes. Proper DNS configuration — SPF, DKIM, DMARC — set up correctly from the start rather than patched together. A real warm-up process. A clean, verified lead list built around a precisely defined ideal customer profile rather than a vague target audience.

The ICP work was particularly important. Content marketing agencies have a crowded market — there are hundreds of them competing for the same clients. The way to stand out in cold outreach isn't to send better copy (though copy matters). It's to be more precise about who you're reaching. To understand the specific type of business that most needs what you offer, the specific pain points they experience, the specific language they use to describe those pain points, and the specific moment in their business journey when they're most likely to respond to an outreach message.

I researched deeply before sending a single email. Hours of research for each ICP segment. Understanding the difference between a seed-stage SaaS company and a Series B SaaS company in terms of their content needs. Understanding why a B2B services firm might be a better client for a content agency than a consumer e-commerce brand. Understanding which job titles to target and which to avoid. Building lead lists that reflected that precision rather than simply pulling every company that matched a broad industry filter.

The first positive reply to a cold email during that rebuild period is a memory I still have clearly. It wasn't a large client. It wasn't a dramatic win. It was just a reply — a real person saying they were interested in learning more. But after weeks of silence, that reply meant the system was working. The targeting was right. The copy was resonating. The infrastructure was delivering emails to inboxes rather than spam folders.

One reply became five. Five became conversations. Conversations became proposals. Proposals became clients. Month by month, the pipeline filled. The agency started generating enough revenue to think about hiring again. Then to actually hire. The rebuild was working.

None of this happened quickly. There were months where progress felt painfully slow, where a single week of poor reply rates was enough to make you question whether the strategy was right. The willingness to stay patient, keep testing, and trust the process through those difficult stretches was as important as any technical skill.

Growth didn't happen as a single event. It happened as a series of compounding decisions, each one building on the last. The first client brought back confidence. The second brought revenue. The third made it possible to hire someone. The first hire made it possible to take on more clients. More clients meant more revenue for more hires. The compounding loop was running.

What I find most interesting about this period, looking back, is how much of the growth was dependent on marketing infrastructure rather than just good work. RankWizards was always good at the work — the content quality was high, the SEO results were real, the clients who stayed were happy. But good work alone doesn't grow an agency. Clients have to find you, and then you have to convert them.

Cold email was the primary acquisition channel throughout the growth phase. Every new client that came through the door — in those early months of the rebuild and for a long time after — came through outbound outreach. Not referrals, not content marketing, not paid ads. Cold email. The channel I had spent years learning, building and refining was the engine that drove the entire growth story.

As the team grew, my role evolved. In the early days, I was doing everything — building lead lists, configuring infrastructure, writing sequences, managing replies, running campaigns. As we brought on more people, I began transitioning from pure execution to strategy and oversight. Training new team members on outreach fundamentals. Building processes that could be replicated without my direct involvement. Systematising the work so that the results didn't depend on any one person.

That transition — from individual contributor to someone responsible for a team's output — was its own education. Understanding how to communicate a strategy clearly enough that someone else can execute it faithfully. Understanding where to give people autonomy and where to maintain tight quality control. Understanding that the goal isn't to be indispensable but to build systems that work without you.

Through this period I was also managing client work directly — running cold email campaigns, link building outreach and inbound email strategy for RankWizards clients alongside the agency's own growth work. The client results compounded my skills further. Every campaign was a new data point. Every client industry was a new context to adapt the fundamentals to. The breadth of exposure across SaaS companies, consultancies, fintech businesses and marketing agencies gave me a depth of pattern recognition that pure focus on a single niche would never have provided.

That acknowledgment from Saleh means more to me than any metric. Not because it's flattering — but because it captures what I actually tried to do. The hardest marketing problems aren't the ones with obvious solutions. They're the ones where the path forward isn't clear, where the standard playbook doesn't apply, where you have to figure it out in real time. Those are the problems I learned to solve at RankWizards.

Five years is a long time to develop skills in a focused domain. Over the course of the RankWizards journey — from fresher to Head of Marketing, from near-shutdown to 25+ person team — I built expertise across the full email and outreach stack. Not surface-level expertise, but the kind that comes from doing the same things hundreds of times across dozens of clients in different industries with different constraints and different goals.

Here is an honest accounting of what I built, and how I built it.

These skills didn't develop in isolation. They developed in the context of real client problems, real deadlines, real consequences. That context — the pressure of results that actually mattered — is what sharpened the skills beyond what any formal training environment could have produced.

I am a better cold email strategist because I had to rebuild an agency with it. I am a better link builder because I had to produce results for clients who were paying real money and expecting real rankings. I am a better inbound email specialist because I built systems from zero that had to convert users on behalf of products I believed in. The RankWizards journey wasn't just where I developed skills — it was where I learned what those skills were actually for.

Most case studies have a tidy ending. Results achieved, lessons learned, the client is happy. This one doesn't have that ending — because this story isn't over.

I am still at RankWizards. Still as Head of Marketing. Still working alongside Saleh Ahmed, the founder who chose to rebuild with me when everyone else had gone. The company that was almost dead is now a thriving 25+ person content marketing agency, and the work of growing it continues every day.

But something else has happened alongside the RankWizards journey — a realisation that the skills I developed in service of the agency's growth are skills that other businesses need too. The cold email infrastructure expertise that rebuilt RankWizards is the same expertise that helped OutboundBin set up 6,000 accounts in 30 days. The ICP research methodology I refined at the agency is the same methodology that drives 35% click rates for TubeOnAI. The inbound email systems I built for clients are the same systems that produced 99.60% open rates and 96.7% trial-to-paid conversion for the bookkeeping SaaS.

That realisation is why riadhasan.com exists. Not to leave RankWizards — I'm not going anywhere. But to make the expertise available to businesses beyond the agency's direct client base. To take everything the RankWizards journey built and put it to work for founders, SaaS companies, and B2B businesses who need the same results.