u/Carry_Mean

Thanks.

If you're running cold email through SuperSend, check your inbox. I just got an email from Kurtis Tryber at SuperSend with some important news.

The short version: SuperESP, the dedicated cold email sending infrastructure SuperSend used, got mass-blacklisted by Spamhaus over the last 72 hours (as of yesterday). SuperSend tried to fix it and couldn't find a reliable path forward, so they're shutting SuperESP down entirely and closing any account that depended on it.

Key points from the notice:

• SuperSend as a company/platform is NOT shutting down. This is specifically about the SuperESP sending infrastructure.
• If your account used SuperESP, it's being closed. Your most recent invoice gets refunded in full.
• No more outbound mail will go through SuperESP after the date of notice.
• You have 30 days to log into app.supersend.io and export your contacts, campaigns, and history before the account and data are deleted.
• If you were still in warmup and hadn't sent production email yet, you still get the full refund even though you got zero value out of it.

If this affects you, you might not want to wait around. Log in now and export everything you need. I wouldn't assume "30 days" is a hard guarantee that nothing goes sideways sooner.

Posting this in case anyone else got this email and is now scrambling to figure out where to move their cold email sending. Curious what people are migrating to or if you have any additional context on this you can share.

A few years ago I sold a run of pro-rate science fiction stories. Analog, Nature, some others.

I was an aspiring author at the time. I wasn't expecting to get rich. I was hoping to build some kind of audience, something I could turn into a novel deal, or an agent, or just a reason to keep going.

Honestly, I'd have settled for a few people saying "nice work, buddy."

What struck me the whole time I was publishing was that nobody ever seemed to know a story of mine was out unless I told them myself. I'm a marketer by trade, and I deliberately stayed out of the business side of it, because if I'd wanted to be a content marketer, I could have made a lot more doing it for a fintech firm than scribbling short stories. I figured if a magazine is paying eight or twelve cents a word, the work has to be worth at least that much to them, and they'd do something with it.

The audience never materialized. What I concluded at the time was that my work just wasn't good. That I'd somehow fooled a series of editors into buying stories that a better writer should have been paid for, and that readers could tell even if the editors couldn't. That feeling had a lot to do with why I stopped writing fiction. (There were other reasons. AI has taken a profession that was already economically unviable and made it unviable-er.)

I've started wondering lately whether I had the diagnosis backward.

I keep a Google Alert set for Analog. It's a lousy instrument, and I know it, since it misses Reddit, Discord, Goodreads, podcasts, and most reviews. But I get one of those notifications maybe twice a year. Companies that went out of business decades ago throw off more signal than that.

So here's what I actually want to know from readers, since you're the people I was theoretically writing for.

Do you read the short fiction magazines? Analog, Asimov's, F&SF, Clarkesworld, any of them?

If you do, how do you find out that a particular story is worth reading? Is there a place that conversation happens that I was just never standing in?

And if you don't, is that a promotion problem or a demand problem? Would you read more short fiction if you knew about it, or is the format itself simply not what you want anymore?

I ask because from the writer's side these publications feel like ghost ships, put out on the waves of commerce sometime before the internet. These speculative Flying Dutchmen are still under way, nobody at the helm, refitted every so often by a crowdfunding drive. But that's the view from one deck, and all I ever saw was my own stories go out and vanish. I don't know what it looks like from where you're standing.

I'm not sure that ANYONE can make money with a pure content play at this point. If Condé Nast can't figure it out, I'm not expecting Analog to have a better plan.

Still, it seems like these publications aren't even making an effort or have any idea how to move forward. (Or, perhaps the new owners of the big three spec publications are just using the back catalog to train AI...?)

If you're running cold email through SuperSend, check your inbox. I just got an email from Kurtis Tryber at SuperSend with some important news.

The short version: SuperESP, the dedicated cold email sending infrastructure SuperSend used, got mass-blacklisted by Spamhaus over the last 72 hours (as of yesterday). SuperSend tried to fix it and couldn't find a reliable path forward, so they're shutting SuperESP down entirely and closing any account that depended on it.

Key points from the notice:

• SuperSend as a company/platform is NOT shutting down. This is specifically about the SuperESP sending infrastructure.
• If your account used SuperESP, it's being closed. Your most recent invoice gets refunded in full.
• No more outbound mail will go through SuperESP after the date of notice.
• You have 30 days to log into app.supersend.io and export your contacts, campaigns, and history before the account and data are deleted.
• If you were still in warmup and hadn't sent production email yet, you still get the full refund even though you got zero value out of it.

If this affects you, you might not want to wait around. Log in now and export everything you need. I wouldn't assume "30 days" is a hard guarantee that nothing goes sideways sooner.

Posting this in case anyone else got this email and is now scrambling to figure out where to move their cold email sending. Curious what people are migrating to or if you have any additional context on this you can share.

GHL is how I ended up in this subreddit, so I'm hoping some of you have crossed paths with these people.

I run a small B2B consultancy. I'm strong on positioning, messaging, and diagnosing why a company's pipeline is broken. I'm weak on paid acquisition, and I know it, which is why I took the call in the first place.

Limitless Agency out of Tampa pitched me last week. The offer as it was put to me:

* $16,000 one time, or two payments of $10,000

* 16 weeks

* Guarantee of $50,000 in contracted new revenue. If they miss it, they work free until they hit it

* That guarantee is conditional on me running about $100/day in ads, so roughly $12,000 of my own money on top of the fee

* Four workstreams: narrow to one niche and one offer, build a paid acquisition system (Meta funnels, landing pages, VSLs, pixels, retargeting), audit and systematize fulfillment, hire and train staff on my behalf

* Required stack is GHL plus premium Slack. Private Slack channel, account managers, one on ones, small group calls with the founder, SOP library

* Stated outcome at 6 months: around $100k/month, 45-55% margin, 20-30 hours a week, broker ready

I did a few hours of homework before answering. Five things I'd like a sanity check on:

1. Every public write-up of their method describes cold outbound to large or franchise clients. "Whale outreach." The sales call described close to the opposite: Meta ad funnels and a media buyer hire. Those are two different businesses to be taught. Does anyone know which one the program actually delivers?

2. Their proof case is a chiropractic agency. Local, high intent, short cycle, cheap impressions, high volume. My buyers are senior people at complex B2B companies with cycles measured in months and deal sizes in the tens of thousands. That's the opposite on every dimension. I asked to be put on the phone with a client in my shape and haven't gotten one yet.

3. There are published tiers on their own materials at $497 and $1,997/year. I was quoted $16-20k. I understand done-with-you costs more than a course. I'd still like to hear from someone who can tell me what the top number buys that the $1,997 doesn't.

4. One public review states flatly that they don't do refunds. My salesperson verbally offered $8k back if I wasn't convinced inside 7 days. That's not in writing yet.

5. They claim 225 to 300 agency owners served. I can barely find a review anywhere. No Trustpilot, almost nothing on here. For a program that size, that's the part that bothers me most, and it's why I'm asking.

Two asks.

If you've been through Limitless, or you know someone who has, I want to hear it, good or bad. Specifically: did the acquisition system produce anything outside local services?

And separately, for anyone who has bought a $15-25k agency program of any brand. What do you wish you had asked before you wired the money? What was the actual failure mode when it went wrong, theirs or yours?

Happy to be told I'm overthinking a fair offer from people who'd do the work.

I've spent most of my career running marketing and communications for complex B2B organizations.

I'm strong on positioning, messaging, narrative, content, and understanding how a business actually makes money. I can sit with a founder or a CEO and diagnose why their pipeline is broken at the strategy level. I'm also decent at using AI to create content and insights at scale that used to require a human with my skillset.

What I am **not** is a demand gen specialist. That's a missing piece of the puzzle that connects everything I do with dollar-based ROI, and it's necessary, I believe, to fill out my current offering.

I've owned demand gen as a function and worked next to people who ran it well, so I'm not at zero. But if you handed me a blank slate and a pipeline number to hit, there are pieces I'd be improvising.

Here's why I think there's a real opening. The companies I know best are complex B2B, mostly SaaS and professional services. Long cycles, technical products, multiple stakeholders, senior buyers, and price points in the high five figures for their own products. Those companies generally are willing to spend on acquisition but won't hand their pipeline to a lead-gen-only shop that can run cold email but can't hold a conversation about their business. I can hold that conversation and, for better or worse, that's my differentiator in this market.

My problem is that I've been on the buying side of agency relationships for a long time and I know exactly what it looks like when someone oversells and underdelivers. I'm not willing to be that person.

I've come close once already. I ran an engagement last year that did exactly what the client asked for and didn't deliver what they actually wanted. It didn't fail on execution. It failed because I took it. They had no clear idea who their best customer was or what offer brought people into their orbit, and they wouldn't give me the access to their own customers I needed to work it out. Ninety days from a standing start was never going to produce revenue under those conditions, and I knew it going in. I took the job anyway because I wanted the case study, and then I ate the scope trying to earn it instead of waving them off like I should have.

I'd rather take longer to get competent than burn credibility with the exact network I'd be selling into.

I'm not pushing anything hard until I'm confident I can produce ROI.

Three questions:

1. Building the skillset. How'd you learn to run this stuff for real? Your own money through channels? Learn as you go on clients? Working under an operator? Certifications or communities that weren't a waste? I'm open to paid courses, but a lot of them look like the real business is making you a customer of their tech, where you carry the risk, and they take a piece of the upside. Tell me which ones are actually worth it.
2. Partnership as the alternative. Maybe the answer isn't "learn all of it." Maybe it's find an operator who's strong exactly where I'm weak, where I bring the relationships, the diagnosis, and the message, and they bring the execution engine. If that's right: where do you actually find that person, and what's a sane structure? Rev share, subcontract, real partnership? What failure modes should I watch for? The one I keep coming back to is that if the operator underperforms, the client blames me, because it's my relationship and my name on it.
3. What important questions did I neglect to ask? What did you not know going in that ended up costing you time, money, credibility, business, etc.?

Also happy to be told I'm wrong about the opportunity or about how I'm approaching it.

I've spent most of my career running marketing and communications for complex B2B organizations.

I'm strong on positioning, messaging, narrative, content, and understanding how a business actually makes money. I can sit with a founder or a CEO and diagnose why their pipeline is broken at the strategy level. I'm also decent at using AI to create content and insights at scale that used to require a human with my skillset.

What I am **not** is a demand gen specialist. That's a missing piece of the puzzle that connects everything I do with dollar-based ROI, and it's necessary, I believe, to fill out my current offering.

I've owned demand gen as a function and worked next to people who ran it well, so I'm not at zero. But if you handed me a blank slate and a pipeline number to hit, there are pieces I'd be improvising.

Here's why I think there's a real opening. The companies I know best are complex B2B, mostly SaaS and professional services. Long cycles, technical products, multiple stakeholders, senior buyers, and price points in the high five figures for their own products. Those companies generally are willing to spend on acquisition but won't hand their pipeline to a lead-gen-only shop that can run cold email but can't hold a conversation about their business. I can hold that conversation and, for better or worse, that's my differentiator in this market.

My problem is that I've been on the buying side of agency relationships for a long time and I know exactly what it looks like when someone oversells and underdelivers. I'm not willing to be that person.

I've come close once already. I ran an engagement last year that did exactly what the client asked for and didn't deliver what they actually wanted. It didn't fail on execution. It failed because I took it. They had no clear idea who their best customer was or what offer brought people into their orbit, and they wouldn't give me the access to their own customers I needed to work it out. Ninety days from a standing start was never going to produce revenue under those conditions, and I knew it going in. I took the job anyway because I wanted the case study, and then I ate the scope trying to earn it instead of waving them off like I should have.

I'd rather take longer to get competent than burn credibility with the exact network I'd be selling into.

I'm not pushing anything hard until I'm confident I can produce ROI.

Three questions:

1. Building the skillset. How'd you learn to run this stuff for real? Your own money through channels? Learn as you go on clients? Working under an operator? Certifications or communities that weren't a waste? I'm open to paid courses, but a lot of them look like the real business is making you a customer of their tech, where you carry the risk, and they take a piece of the upside. Tell me which ones are actually worth it.
2. Partnership as the alternative. Maybe the answer isn't "learn all of it." Maybe it's find an operator who's strong exactly where I'm weak, where I bring the relationships, the diagnosis, and the message, and they bring the execution engine. If that's right: where do you actually find that person, and what's a sane structure? Rev share, subcontract, real partnership? What failure modes should I watch for? The one I keep coming back to is that if the operator underperforms, the client blames me, because it's my relationship and my name on it.
3. What important questions did I neglect to ask? What did you not know going in that ended up costing you time, money, credibility, business, etc.?

Also happy to be told I'm wrong about the opportunity or about how I'm approaching it.