Frederik Jakobsen turned cold email into Danish Lead Co
Frederik Jakobsen is founder and CEO of Danish Lead Co, which books qualified B2B sales meetings through cold email and LinkedIn outreach. The conversation traces the business’s start, how a clear division of roles shaped it, and why Jakobsen puts customer research ahead of automation.
Learn how buyers describe their problem before automating outreach. Jakobsen’s account shows the value of relevant targeting, human-sounding messages and clear ownership of business roles over email hacks.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I started Danish Lead Co in 2021, in the middle of COVID. I was an intern at Mercedes in Stuttgart, the offices were closed, I didn’t know anyone in the city, and after three months of watching Netflix I started a Facebook ads agency like everyone else. I knocked on more than 100 restaurant doors in bad German. To find clients I started sending cold emails, and the emails worked better than the ads I was selling, so I switched to selling outbound. Martin Rasmussen, who was running his own agency at the time, joined me as co-founder.
Since then we’ve booked more than 10,000 sales meetings for over 110 B2B companies, tied to more than $30 million in revenue. What makes us different is that we built our own platform: every campaign draws on patterns from more than 10 million email sends, and AI does the research and drafting while people make the decisions. Today it’s three companies: Danish Lead Co for outbound, SourceRank AI for getting B2B companies recommended by AI search, and DealSource Systems for proprietary deal flow for PE firms and M&A advisors.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
My first real traction came from cold email, the same thing we sell today. I was emailing businesses to sell them ads, and the replies were coming from the emails, not the ads.
Today most of our new business comes from two channels we ran for ourselves before we ever sold them: outbound, meaning cold email and LinkedIn, and AI search. When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Gemini who the best outbound agency for M&A advisors is, we work to be one of the names it gives. Those buyers arrive half sold, because the AI recommended us the way a trusted friend would. Every service we sell, we sold to ourselves first.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision was partnering with Martin and splitting the roles cleanly. I had struggled with sales for over a year, and Martin was simply better at it. So I own operations and delivery, Martin owns sales with the final say, and we don’t second-guess each other’s lane. That clarity is a big part of why we grew quickly once we joined forces.
The mistake: AI engines were quoting our DealSource Systems pages about 100 times in answers that never mentioned us. Our pages explained the topic well, but the paragraphs the AI borrowed never said who we are, so the recommendation went to whoever was named on a list. It’s like giving the best answer at a conference without a name tag. Now every page opens with one sentence that says who we are and what we do. The best answer in the room is worthless if nobody knows your name.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Two big things. First, cold email got harder. Everyone now uses the same AI to write the same email to the same people pulled from the same databases, so inboxes are flooded and filters are stricter. A crowded street doesn’t kill restaurants, it kills average restaurants. We adapted by building tighter lists, writing like a person instead of a template, and measuring every campaign.
Second, buyers now ask AI who to hire. In our October 2026 study of 1,249 AI answers across 22 B2B categories, 98.6% named specific companies, about seven per answer. If you’re not one of those seven, that buyer never hears your name. That’s why we started SourceRank AI: we measure what the AI engines recommend every two days and do the work to get our clients onto that shortlist.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: talk to 50 people in your market before you automate anything. Email them humbly, say you’re trying to learn from people who know the field, even offer to donate $100 to a charity of their choice for 15 minutes. Learn how they describe their problem in their own words. Then remember that cold email stands on three legs: land in the inbox, reach the right person, and say something relevant to them. Miss one and the other two don’t matter.
Ignore the hacks. Fake personalization like complimenting someone’s latest podcast episode, clever subject-line tricks, tools that promise replies on autopilot. People spot them instantly now. If ChatGPT wrote your cold email, it wrote everyone else’s too.
Thank you to Frederik Jakobsen and the team at Danish Lead Co for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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