How Kidous Mahteme Turned a Cold Email Problem Into InfraMail

After years in sales and firsthand frustration with outbound infrastructure, Mahteme helped build a platform now used by more than 2,000 B2B companies.

Before Kidous Mahteme became the co-founder and CEO of InfraMail, he spent years learning what makes people respond.

He worked in sales for roughly five years, gaining experience with offers, objections, and the difficult process of convincing someone to pay attention when they had not planned to buy anything.

At the same time, Mahteme was studying information systems and experimenting with different technology and marketing ventures. Sales gave him a practical understanding of customer behavior. His technical education helped him understand how software could remove the repetitive work happening behind those conversations.

Those two experiences eventually came together around a problem Mahteme was facing himself.

While running cold-email outreach for his own marketing work, he found that sending a campaign was only one part of the job. Before a message could reach a potential customer, someone had to purchase domains, create inboxes, configure authentication records, and connect everything to the software running the campaign.

Every time outreach expanded, much of that work had to be repeated.

For Mahteme, the opportunity was not to create another tool for writing or scheduling emails. It was to build the infrastructure underneath them.

Learning Sales Before Building Software

Mahteme’s years in sales continue to shape how he thinks about building a company.

His public writing rarely sounds like conventional software marketing. He writes about mistakes, unsuccessful experiments, and offers that did not work as expected. He also regularly argues that businesses spend too much time searching for shortcuts instead of improving the value they give customers.

In one account from his time in sales, Mahteme described giving prospective customers something useful before asking them to buy. The lesson was not simply about persuasion. It was about reducing the customer’s risk before expecting commitment.

That principle later became relevant to InfraMail.

Cold-email infrastructure has traditionally become more expensive as a company creates additional inboxes. InfraMail approached the problem differently, allowing businesses to create large numbers of inboxes under a flat-rate model.

The structure reflected a sales lesson Mahteme had already learned: a strong offer becomes easier to understand when the customer can see the value without first calculating a long list of additional costs.

Turning an Internal Problem Into a Product

The original idea for InfraMail emerged from Mahteme’s difficulty managing outreach for his own marketing operation.

Creating a small number of inboxes was manageable. Building enough infrastructure to contact prospects consistently was slower, more expensive, and more technically demanding.

Mahteme saw that the same problem affected agencies, recruiters, and B2B sales teams. The people running these campaigns were supposed to be researching prospects, improving offers, and responding to interested buyers. Instead, they were spending time configuring the systems required to send the emails.

Working with co-founder and technical lead Aman Ketebo, Mahteme helped translate that operating problem into software.

InfraMail was designed to let customers purchase domains, create inboxes, and configure authentication records without rebuilding the process manually every time they needed more capacity. Customers could then connect those inboxes to the campaign software they already used.

The division between the two founders was important. Mahteme brought sales experience, customer feedback, and firsthand knowledge of the problem. Ketebo brought the engineering background required to turn the idea into a functioning platform.

Within its first several months, the company generated multiple six figures in revenue. Its growth, however, was not uninterrupted.

The Period When InfraMail Almost Failed

Mahteme has been unusually direct about one of InfraMail’s most difficult periods.

“Our business was hanging on a string for two months, and we almost failed,” he wrote publicly while reflecting on the company’s early struggles.

Rather than presenting the company as if every decision had worked, Mahteme discussed the uncertainty with its audience. InfraMail made what he described as a major bet, explained what was happening, and continued rebuilding.

“Comebacks are made through transparency,” he wrote.

That approach became part of his identity as a founder.

Mahteme has discussed spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising that failed to generate the expected return. He has acknowledged when InfraMail’s offer needed improvement. He has also shared changes to the platform and its pricing directly, including the reasoning behind those decisions.

The result is a founder voice that is less polished than most corporate communication, but often more specific.

Rather than speaking only about growth, Mahteme explains what went wrong, what changed, and what the company learned from it.

Building in Public Around a Technical Product

InfraMail operates in a technical part of outbound sales, but Mahteme has consistently tried to explain it in practical terms.

His videos and written content cover topics such as sending capacity, domain health, offer development, and the relationship between infrastructure and campaign performance. The company’s education strategy is closely tied to the product because many potential customers do not initially realize how much infrastructure sits beneath a cold-email campaign.

“No one needs to know what an SPF, DKIM, or DMARC is to send cold emails at scale,” Mahteme has said. “They want conversations with the right buyers.”

That distinction captures much of his approach.

Customers do not purchase infrastructure because they are interested in managing technical records. They purchase it because they want their sales teams to reach more potential buyers without turning infrastructure management into another full-time responsibility.

InfraMail has since passed 2,000 B2B customers, ranging from lead-generation agencies and recruiters to larger outbound sales teams.

Mahteme has also said that the platform has processed tens of millions of cold emails, giving the company a large operating environment from which to observe how infrastructure behaves at scale.

From Setup Software to an Operating System

InfraMail’s development has followed the same pattern as Mahteme’s own progression as a founder.

The first problem was access: making it easier and less expensive to create enough domains and inboxes to run meaningful outbound campaigns.

The next problem was operations.

As customers began managing hundreds of inboxes, InfraMail expanded into monitoring, automatic reconnections, and tools designed to identify domain or IP issues while campaigns were still active. The company also added more operational support around the infrastructure it provides.

That evolution moves InfraMail beyond being a setup utility. It increasingly positions the platform as an ongoing operating layer beneath a company’s outbound campaigns.

For Mahteme, the direction still returns to the same problem he encountered before the company existed.

Businesses want to start conversations with potential customers. They do not want to spend their time rebuilding the machinery required to reach them.

InfraMail grew by taking responsibility for that machinery. Mahteme’s role has been to keep the company focused on the outcome that matters once all the technical work is removed: giving businesses more opportunities to sell.