Who is Malik Sahal | The GTM engineer behind 5.5M cold emails

If you got a cold email from me and searched my name, this is the page that answers it.

The short version

I'm Malik Sahal, a GTM engineer based in Islamabad, Pakistan. I build outbound engines — the whole system that takes a company from "we should do cold email" to booked meetings — and then I run them.

• What I do: ICP and list building, data enrichment, sending infrastructure and deliverability, copy and sequences, reply automation, and running the campaigns week to week.
• Who I do it for: B2B and SaaS companies, mostly US and European, working US, UK and EU hours from Pakistan.
• How long: since September 2023.
• Background: BS in Psychology, Virtual University of Pakistan, 2019–2023. No computer science.
• Scale so far: more than 5.5 million cold emails sent, 30+ outbound engines built, 10 roles across 7 countries.
• Tools: Clay, Instantly, Smartlead, Claude, Make, HubSpot.

What the work actually looks like

"GTM engineer" is a vague title, so here is the concrete version.

A company has a product and no reliable way to start conversations with the people who should buy it. I build the machine that starts those conversations: I work out who to target and why now, build and verify the list, set up domains and inboxes that actually land in the inbox, write the copy per segment, launch, and then read what comes back and decide what to change.

The last part is the job. Anyone can send email. Reading a campaign that's quietly failing — and knowing which of the four usual causes it is — is what takes years.

The numbers

These are from campaigns on my work page, where the unedited dashboard screenshots sit next to each one.

Across the campaigns shown there: 806 opportunities and $3.3M in pipeline.

The number I'd point at isn't the reply rate. It's the positive share — 107 of 202 replies on that first campaign actually wanted to talk. A reply rate counts "remove me from this list" the same as "yes." I wrote about why that distinction matters, because planning against the wrong one will have you forecasting double the pipeline you have.

Where I've worked

Ten engagements, seven countries, in order:

Every one of those was won cold. Zero referrals. I mention it because it's the only credential that matters in this work: I use the thing I sell to get the clients I sell it to. If my own outbound didn't work, none of those rows would exist.

How I got here

I don't have a computer science degree. I have a BS in Psychology from the Virtual University of Pakistan, which I studied for between 2019 and 2023 — and I think it turned out to be the more useful degree, because cold email is a reading-people problem far more than an engineering problem.

Note the dates. I graduated in May 2023 and took my first outbound role that September, which means the whole of the career below was built after — and partly during — a degree that had nothing to do with it.

The start was a borrowed $100 and a bangles shop that made about $25 a month. I bought a $75 laptop with what was left. My family didn't believe in any of it; they sold that first laptop and told me I was destroying my life.

My first client paid $20 a month. My first job fired me. I came close to being sent to Saudi Arabia for good before a company hired me at $300 a month — which, at the time, felt like the ceiling rather than the floor.

Then I lost my father and became the breadwinner, and the work stopped being about ambition and started being about arithmetic.

Everything technical I use — Clay, Instantly, Make, Claude — I taught myself at night, after the shop. There was no bootcamp and no mentor. That's not a virtue, it's just what was available.

The offers come because of results now, not because of that story. But people ask how someone in Islamabad ends up running outbound for companies in Iceland and Canada, and that's the honest answer: slowly, and by being cheaper than the alternative until I wasn't.

How I work

Four things I hold to, because they're the ones clients tell me are unusual:

1. I treat it like it's mine. Your pipeline is my pipeline. I flag problems before you ask about them.
2. You talk to the person doing the work. No account managers. The person on the call is the person in the sequencer.
3. Results over reports. Judge me on meetings booked, not on an activity dashboard.
4. You keep everything. Every table, domain, inbox and sequence lives in your accounts. If we stop working together, you still have the engine.

Three people I've worked with, in their words:

"What stood out most was his ownership mentality — he didn't wait to be told what to fix." — Jose Alejandro Ruiz Balanta, Co-Founder @ Lead'rs

"He works like part of the team, not like a vendor." — Mohamed Gamal, MBA, Founder @ Gambra Digital

What I'd rather you do than take my word for it

I publish the things most people in this field keep behind a call:

• My pricing — the actual numbers, not "it depends on scope."
• Unedited dashboard screenshots — every case study sits next to the screenshot it came from.
• Free templates and checklists — the deliverability pre-launch checklist and the outbound diagnostic order are the two I'd read first, and neither asks for your email.
• A free cold email checker — paste a draft, see what would get it filtered. It runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.

If you want to talk, the contact page has every way to reach me. If you'd rather judge the work first, start with the work page.

The plain answer

I'm a GTM engineer from Pakistan who builds outbound systems for B2B and SaaS companies, has sent over 5.5 million cold emails, and won all ten of his roles cold without a single referral.

If you work with me, you get the person who built it, and you keep what gets built.