we’ve been debating whether trying to move into irvine/capistrano unified is actually worth it or if people hype it up too much online. our oldest is getting closer to school age but i honestly can’t tell if the tradeoff is worth the commute + higher costs. curious how people here felt after making that move
Lately I’ve been way more interested in clinics that focus on texture, hydration, and long-term skin quality instead of dramatic one-day transformations. The super aggressive treatments always look tempting online but recovery is rough. I had a pretty balanced experience at Dami Clinic because they focused more on realistic improvement. Curious what clinics people thought were actually good for subtle/natural results?
ok so i was a high school english teacher 14 months ago. like literally grading essays and making $42k a year. a buddy of mine who runs a small agency kept telling me about cold email and i kept thinking it was spam and didnt work and was basically dead. turns out that assumption cost me probably a year of income i could have been earning. cold email actually works and it still surprises me honestly.
im at about $9k/mo now which is wild to me. not flexing, just context for where im at. i am still very much figuring things out but i have enough reps now to know what matters and what doesnt in terms of tools. this is just my experience from roughly 12 months of doing this, not gospel.
TOOLS THAT ACTUALLY MATTER
for sending i use Saleshandy. $25/mo on the outreach starter plan. i tried Reply.io for about 3 weeks early on and it felt way overbuilt for what i needed at the time. like i was paying for features i didnt understand and the interface confused me. Saleshandy just made more sense for someone starting out and honestly i havent felt the need to switch. the unified inbox thing is nice, sequences are easy to set up, and the analytics are good enough. not perfect though, the reporting could be more granular and sometimes the delay settings between steps feel buggy. but for $25/mo i cant really complain.
for finding leads and building lists i use LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($99/mo) and then Clay for enrichment and list building. Clay is... a lot. like i spent probably 3 weeks just watching youtube videos trying to understand waterfall enrichment and how the tables work. the learning curve is steep. im on their $149/mo plan and some months i wonder if im even using 40% of what it can do. but when it clicks its really powerful. i run my lists through Clay and use Prospeo for email finding which has been solid, and then everything gets verified before it goes anywhere.
WHAT I USE FOR VERIFICATION
i cannot stress how much this matters. when i first started i was just sending to whatever emails Clay spit out without verifying and my bounce rate was like 11% which is terrible. domains were getting flagged, emails going to spam, the whole thing. took me about 2 months to figure out that verification isnt optional its mandatory.
now i run everything through MillionVerifier. its cheap, like actually cheap. i think i pay maybe $30 for 10,000 verifications? something like that. and it catches alot of bad emails. my bounce rate dropped to around 1.2-1.8% after i started doing this consistently. night and day difference.
INBOXES
this is where i spent way too long being confused. i started with just 2 google workspace accounts and was sending from those and wondering why nothing worked. someone in a discord group for cold emailers told me about Inframail and i switched to that for my sending infrastructure. $99/mo for unlimited inboxes basically. i have 12 inboxes running right now across 4 domains.
the thing about Inframail is its not fancy. the dashboard is pretty bare bones and setting up new inboxes takes a few clicks more than it probably should. but it works and the price is right when youre running that many inboxes. before that i was paying per inbox through google workspace and it was adding up to like $160/mo for way fewer inboxes.
WHAT I DROPPED
Snov.io - used it for maybe 6 weeks when i was starting. the email finder was ok but the accuracy felt inconsistent and i was getting bounces i shouldnt have been getting. maybe its better now but i moved on.
Hunter - tried the free tier, it was fine for one-off lookups but didnt make sense at scale for me. felt like a tool from 2019 that hasnt quite kept up? i might be wrong about that.
Pipedrive - i used this as my CRM for the first 4 months. its fine. its totally fine. but i switched to Attio about 3 months ago because someone i trust recommended it and the flexibility of the data model is way better for what i do. Attio is $36/mo per seat and Pipedrive was $21.90/mo so its more expensive but the way i can customize objects and views is worth it to me.
RESULTS FOR CONTEXT
im sending about 80-90 emails per day across those 12 inboxes (so like 7-8 per inbox per day, keeping it conservative). reply rate hovers around 3.4-4.1% depending on the campaign. positive reply rate is more like 1.8-2.2%. i book maybe 18-22 meetings a month which for my niche (marketing services for local businesses) is enough to keep the pipeline full.
warmup takes about 3 weeks per inbox before i start sending real campaigns. i know some people say 2 weeks is fine but i got burned early on being impatient so now i just wait the full 3.
WHAT I PAY MONTHLY
Saleshandy - $25
Clay - $149
LinkedIn Sales Navigator - $99
MillionVerifier - roughly $30 (depends on volume)
Inframail - $99
Attio - $36
so like $438/mo give or take. which felt like alot when i was making nothing but now that im at $9k/mo its a pretty easy investment. the Clay subscription is the one i go back and forth on because i know im not using it fully but every time i think about canceling i use some feature that saves me 3 hours and i keep it.
anyway thats basically where im at. still learning, still tweaking. if youre a teacher or someone from a totally different career thinking about this stuff... it actually works. which i know sounds like something someone trying to sell you a course would say but im not selling anything i just still cant believe it lol
I consider myself a feminist and I completely acknowledge that violence against women is a horrific, systemic issue. But I recently got into an argument on this subreddit because I called out a specific post for karma farming, ragebait and fueling gender wars
Edit: i actually checked their WHO source and the math is rigged. the snake stat is annual (1 year) but the 1 in 3 stat is lifetime (80 years). comparing annual odds to lifetime odds is a massive statistical fallacy meant to spark outrage. also, the 1 in 3 stat includes female-on-female violence, yet they used it to compare only men to snakes. pointing out this fake math is what got me called 'low on brains.