Most Series A crypto companies should start with an outbound agency that sends from domains they own, then hire SDRs once one message books meetings on repeat. An in-house SDR costs a median $80,000 in on-target earnings and takes an average of 3.0 months to ramp (Bridge Group, February 2025). Hire in-house once you know what to hand the SDR.

How do the two options compare?

Outbound agency In-house SDR team
Time to first meeting New domains and mailboxes need warmup first. Our own Outbound books meetings from month two. Recruiting time, then an average 3.0-month ramp (Bridge Group, 2025).
Cost structure A monthly retainer, a fee per meeting, or both. Ours is $5K a month plus a fee per meeting held. Median $55K base plus $25K variable per SDR (Bridge Group, 2025), plus benefits, data, sending tools and manager time.
Who owns the assets Set by the contract. Domains, mailboxes, lists and sequences can end up in the agency's name. You own everything you set up in your company's name.
Risk Copy that sounds unlike you, the wrong buyer list, and infrastructure you cannot take with you. Only 60% of SDRs reached quota in the 2025 Bridge Group data. A weak hire shows up after the ramp.
Management load A weekly report and a review of replies. A manager, a quota, weekly coaching and a tool stack.

One question decides most cases: do you already know which buyers answer? If you do not, a new SDR spends the 3.0-month ramp finding out, at full salary.

What does an in-house SDR cost in year one?

An SDR costs about $114,000 a year in salary, commission and benefits at the median, before tools and data.

The Bridge Group surveyed 351 B2B companies for its 2025 SDR report. It found a median on-target earnings figure of $80K, split 68:32 into $55K base and $25K variable, unchanged since 2022. Average ramp was 3.0 months and average tenure was 1.9 years. Benefits made up 30.0% of private-industry compensation cost in June 2026. Applied to $80K, that gives about $114,300 a year (our arithmetic on Bridge Group and BLS figures, October 2026).

Three costs sit on top of that number. The SDR needs a contact database, a verifier and a sending platform. Someone senior has to write the first sequences and review replies. And with average tenure under two years, you should budget for a second hire.

The Bridge Group sample is B2B companies in general. Crypto-native SDRs who can explain validator economics or MEV in a first call may cost more.

What work hides behind a booked meeting?

For a crypto infrastructure company, most SDR hours go into the list. The buyer universe is small: exchanges, validators, custodians, funds and protocol teams. Every bad contact burns a scarce account.

Our own numbers show how fast that work goes stale.

  • We re-verified 520 B2B contacts that a verifier had marked deliverable about 10 weeks earlier. 349 were still valid (67%), 53 were catch-all (10%) and 118 were invalid (23%) (our data, October 2026; second verifier run on the same contacts).
  • On the first 600 emails of one campaign, bounce rates ran from 0% on a list verified the week before sending to 3.7% to 5.2% on lists verified about 10 weeks earlier. A crypto and web3 list from the same July batch bounced at 0.9% (our data, October 2026; small samples of 43 to 219 sends per segment).

Decay rates by list type are in how fast verified B2B email lists decay.

Timing signals take even more filtering. Our catalyst monitor logged 6,069 buying signals between 26 July and 7 October 2026, from X posts, TVL moves, job posts, hiring surges, DeFi listings and fundraise headlines. 5,857 of them (96.5%) were too imprecise to email about (our data, October 2026; we rejected noise, the wrong company in the headline, TVL drops and non-sales roles). A single SDR at a Series A company does this filtering by hand. An agency with its own signal pipeline does it once for many clients. See which buying signals predict a B2B purchase.

When does an agency make more sense?

Choose an agency when two or more of these are true.

  • You have not yet proven which buyer segment answers cold email.
  • You need meetings this quarter, for a raise, a launch or a partnership deadline.
  • Nobody on the team has managed SDRs before.
  • Your buyers are a narrow, specialised set, such as validators or custodians, where one research setup covers the whole list.
  • You want to test two or three segments before you commit headcount to one.

When should you build in-house?

Build the team when the message is proven and the pipeline needs daily attention that an outside team cannot give.

  • One message books meetings with the same buyer type, month after month.
  • Your average deal is large enough to carry a full salary and a manager.
  • Every first call needs deep product knowledge, such as validator client internals or auction design.
  • You have a sales leader with time to coach.

How do you protect yourself when you hire an agency?

Put these terms in the contract before the first send.

  1. Register sending domains and mailboxes in your company's name.
  2. Sync every contact, sequence and reply into your own CRM each week.
  3. Write the meeting definition down. Ours counts a meeting when it holds, with a Director-plus attendee at your target profile, for 15 minutes or more.
  4. Require re-verification of every list in the week before it is sent.
  5. Get a weekly report with sends, bounces, replies and meetings held.
  6. Agree a short notice period and a handover list for exit.

Can you run both?

Yes, in sequence. Let the agency build the sending setup and find the segment that answers. Then hire the first SDR to take over that segment, on the same domains, lists and sequences. Keep the agency on research, verification and signals, where the work repeats across clients.

That way the first hire starts with a proven message and warm infrastructure, and spends the ramp selling.

See how Outbound runs on domains you own, at $5K a month plus a fee per meeting held.