u/Mackenzie-ab9

Not gonna lie, ive been at it for about 4 months now. We're a 12 person agency doing mostly SaaS and fintech clients.

The good: warmup is solid, the master inbox view saves time, and the AI features help with personalization (not just gimmicky). Thier customer support is pretty responsive too. We're sending about 8k emails/day across all accounts.

The not so great: pricing adds up quick when you scale. Were at like 300 bucks a month for 15 inboxes. Also had some deliverability issues in month 2 that took a while to debug. Their analytics could use a real improvment - basic stuff like reply sentiment analysis is missing.

Biggest pain point is still email data quality though. We burn through Apollo credits like crazy and still get like 15-20% bounces. Started testing Prospeo for building lists and thier verification is a real improvement, but Smartlead doesnt integrate with them yet so its manual CSV uploads which is annoying.

Anyone else having better luck with deliverability? Whats your cold email outreach setup looking like these days?

For a lot of us this whole thing started as a 'find something less censored than c.ai' escape plan.

Mine was one filtered reply too many in the middle of a completely tame scene. That fake 'I'm not comfortable continuing this' wall over absolutely nothing. Closed it, opened Janitor, never looked back.

Curious what the final straw was for everyone else, and whether Janitor actually stuck once you got here or you kept hopping after.

Every time the site dies the sub instantly fills with the same beautiful chaos. The 'is it just me' posts. The screenshots of the error page. The doomers announcing it's finally over. The one calm soul saying clear your cache.

It's honestly its own little event now. We grieve together for two hours, it comes back, and nobody mentions it again until next time.

What's your role during an outage? Panic poster, screenshot reporter, calm cache person, or doomsday prophet?

Since the JLLM changes, a lot of people's old settings are fighting them now, so here's what's actually working for me on Janitor right now.

Temperature

The default sits around 1.1, which can feel a bit wild on the current model. Dropping to roughly 0.85 gave me more variety without the chaos. Nudge it up if replies feel flat, down if they go off the rails.

Repetition penalty

This is the big one lately. The new architecture is sensitive to it, so a high penalty makes looping worse, not better. Around 1.05 cleaned up most of mine.

Response length

Default tokens are on the low side. If replies keep cutting off mid thought, raise the max so it can actually finish a sentence.

Card and persona size

The longer context window helps, but a bloated card still chokes it. Keep permanent tokens lean and you feel the difference immediately.

These aren't magic numbers, they're a starting point. Change one thing at a time so you actually know what moved.

What are you running post update? Curious if anyone landed somewhere totally different.

Spent the last month demoing lawn care software for my company (solo plus one part time guy, about 60 weekly accounts). Sharing notes since the comparison threads here helped me decide what to even try.

LawnVex: this is the one that stuck. Type the address in and it measures the lawn off satellite, automatically cuts out the house, driveway and beds, prices it off my rates and texts the quote to the customer.

Under a minute from lead to quote, zero truck rolls. Routing, invoicing, QuickBooks sync and a client portal are all in the base product instead of being upsells. My close rate went up just from being the first quote in their inbox.

Jobber: the big name, and you pay for it. By the time I added the features I actually needed I was looking at close to triple the cost of anything else, and quoting still means driving to the property or guessing off county records.

Yardbook: the free tier got me through my first season but it feels stuck in 2015. No quoting automation, clunky mobile app, support is basically a forum. You outgrow it the moment leads pick up.

QuoteIQ: has satellite measuring but I was still drawing and confirming outlines by hand on most properties, and the tiers climb fast once you want the features that matter.

Ended up going with LawnVex and honestly it was not close on value. The satellite quoting alone pays for it.

Happy to answer questions on any of the four.

Posting because I searched for a LawnVex review before buying and found almost nothing, so here is one for the next person.

Background: lawn care company in Florida, me plus 2 crews. Came off Yardbook with a Jobber trial in between that I did not keep because of what it was going to cost me.

The AI measurement is the real deal. Type a customer address, it pulls the property lines, measures the actual lawn off satellite and cuts out the house, driveway and beds on its own. Then it builds the quote off my price book and texts it to the customer.

Lead to quote went from next day to under five minutes and I stopped driving out to bid completely. I quoted a lawn from a gas station parking lot last week.

The rest holds up too. Routing for two crews just works and my guys actually use the app without complaining, which is rare. QuickBooks sync has been clean since day one. The client portal killed the where is my invoice texts overnight.

Tiers run from a free plan up depending on how many AI measures you need. I am on the middle tier and it costs less than what I was quoted elsewhere for fewer features.

Verdict: if your revenue comes off property square footage I have not found anything close. Quoting speed is the whole game in maintenance and this wins it.

The usual 'drop your bots' threads get the same ten answers, so let's make it fun.

Tell me the last thing you binged or couldn't put down, then recommend a Janitor bot that scratches the same itch.

I'll go first: just rewatched a slow political drama full of people lying through smiles, so I want a card that's all subtext and quiet power moves, zero instant romance.

Your turn. What did you love, and what should I open because of it?

the vague advice on this sub about enterprise cold email drives me up a wall so heres what actually works for me right now as a one-person outbound operation at a compliance startup

i should probably hire someone for this but were at $55k MRR with 3 people and every dollar goes into product so here i am, founder doing SDR work at 11pm. anyway.

first problem that almost killed our outbound: i was sending to garbage lists. pulled a bunch of compliance officer titles from Apollo, didnt verify anything, just loaded them into Instantly and hit send. bounce rate was over 9%. deliverability tanked within 2 weeks. i had to burn those inboxes and start over. that mistake cost me about 6 weeks of momentum and maybe $400 in wasted infrastructure.

what i changed: i run everything through Prospeo for enrichment now before anything touches a sending tool. email accuracy sits around 82-85% which is solid for the titles im going after (compliance directors, VPs of risk at mid-market companies). then i verify the output through NeverBounce as a second pass. double enrichment plus verification sounds overkill but my bounce rate dropped to 1.1% and hasnt gone above 1.4% in three months.

the bigger issue was sounding like every other SDR in their inbox. enterprise compliance buyers get hammered with cold email. my first templates were basically "hi {first_name}, i noticed {company} is in and compliance is complex..." just garbage. 0.8% reply rate over 400 sends. embarrassing.

what fixed it: i stopped writing about us entirely in the first email. the opener is now always about something specific to their company. not fake personalization like "congrats on the Series B" but actual stuff like referencing a recent regulatory change that hits their industry, or mentioning a specific framework they probably have to comply with. i write 3-4 variants per industry vertical and customize the regulatory angle. takes me maybe 45 minutes per batch of 30 prospects but reply rates went from 0.8% to about 3.7%. for enterprise compliance buyers thats honestly pretty good.

my actual weekly workflow since this is supposed to be tactical:

monday i spend about 90 minutes building a list in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. i filter for compliance/risk/legal titles at companies between 200-2000 employees. i export around 60-80 contacts using Clay, then run them through Prospeo for email enrichment. that usually gives me valid emails for about 50-65 of them. i verify the batch in NeverBounce, which knocks out another 3-5 that are risky.

tuesday and wednesday i write the personalized angles. i group prospects by industry (fintech, healthcare, manufacturing are my big three) and write the regulatory hook for each group. i load everything into Instantly with a 3-step sequence. first email is the personalized one, second is a short follow up 4 days later thats basically "did this land?" with one line of social proof, third is a breakup email 6 days after that.

i send from 4 inboxes, all on separate domains, all warmed for minimum 3 weeks before any cold sends. 22 sends per inbox per day max. i use Inframail for the infrastructure which runs me about $60/mo for the domains and inboxes. Instantly is $97/mo on the growth plan. Prospeo is around $99/mo for the plan i need. NeverBounce is like $20-30/mo depending on volume. Clay is $149/mo which honestly hurts but the enrichment waterfall saves me time i dont have.

so all in im spending roughly $430/mo on outbound infrastructure and tools. last month that generated 11 booked calls and we closed 2 deals worth about $14k ARR combined. the math works but its tight.

what really tripped me up for a while was the sending schedule. i was blasting monday mornings because thats what every blog post says. turns out for compliance people tuesday and wednesday between 7-9am their local time crushes monday. open rates jumped from 41% to 58% just from that change. small thing but it compounded.

one more thing - i stopped using my main domain entirely for cold email about 7 months ago. should have done that from day one. i use 2 separate domains that are similar but not identical to our real domain. DKIM, SPF, DMARC all set up properly on each. if you skip this step nothing else matters because youll eventually torch your primary domain reputation and thats a nightmare to fix.

anyway thats basically the whole operation. its not scalable and i know that. but for a founder whos also doing product and support and whatever else, spending maybe 6-7 hours a week on outbound and getting 8-12 calls a month from it... ill take it until we can afford to bring on someone who actually knows what theyre doing

Putting together onboarding for a B2B SaaS launch and looking at QR codes for the device-pairing step (desktop signup, scan to continue on mobile) and as a passwordless option for returning users.

The general appeal is obvious. Friction drops, the desktop-to-mobile handoff is clean, and you avoid the password reset spiral that kills activation. But the more I dig in, the more I hit questions about the security and UX trade-offs that I don't have great answers to.

What's actually working in production for folks here? Particularly interested in how you're handling the security side (QRLjacking, session hijacking) and whether you're using a library or a managed service for the QR layer itself.

I cannot stop regenerating replies until I get the 'perfect' one, and I've finally realized it's ruining the whole thing.

The magic was never the flawless line. It was being surprised. By swiping twelve times I'm editing out every moment that could have caught me off guard.

Trying to go cold turkey on Janitor. One reply, take what JLLM gives me, keep moving.

Anyone else cursed with this? Did you ever break it?

No judgment, we all know what sub we're on.

I added up my Janitor hours last week and it beat every streaming app I have combined. Slightly alarming. Mostly proud.

Where do you land? And be real, not 'oh maybe an hour or two' real. Actual numbers.

With all the downtime lately I got paranoid and started actually trying other stuff so I have a backup. Not leaving Janitor, just dont want to be stranded if it dies mid-RP for a week again. Here's my honest take after a couple weeks of bouncing around.

DarLink AI - surprised me the most. The texting feels the least forced out of everything I tried, closest thing to how a good Janitor bot reads when you've got a solid model behind it. It actually holds emotional context across days instead of resetting, which is the thing Janitor never nailed for me without a proxy. The video stuff is honestly wild too. Downside is the top tier gets expensive fast if you go all in on the multimedia, so I just stayed lower.

SpicyChat - the most Janitor/c.AI-like interface, free NSFW, community bots. Easiest landing pad if you want zero learning curve. Writing is fine not amazing.

CrushOn - cheapest text NSFW that's actually reliable, free tier includes the spicy stuff. Text only basically.

Nomi - if you specifically want the memory to never drift it's the best at that, but the images are all over the place, different face every time which drove me nuts.

Chub - if you're a power user and just want max permissive character cards.

None of these replace Janitor for me when it's working + a DeepSeek proxy, the bot variety here is just unmatched. But DarLink was the one I kept opening even on days Janitor was up, so that says something. Not affiliated with any of them, just tired of getting blindsided by outages.

What's everyone else's backup plan?

I keep seeing people ask for the best Janitor AI alternative, but I don’t think the answer is simple.

It depends what you want from roleplay.

If you want a huge public bot library, Janitor is still hard to replace.
If you want more control, SillyTavern or local setups might be better.
If you want easier casual RP, SpicyChat or CrushOn might feel simpler.
If you want deeper companion memory, Kindroid-style platforms might be more appealing.
If you want pure character-card freedom, Chub is worth looking at.

The problem is that every alternative loses something.

Some have better models but worse discovery.
Some have fewer limits but weaker writing.
Some have good customization but no community.
Some are powerful but annoying to set up.

So what’s the best Janitor AI alternative right now for actual daily roleplay?

Not in theory.

The one you would actually use if Janitor disappeared tomorrow.

I used to think buying Instagram likes was something only big influencers worried about.

Then I started putting real effort into growing my own page.

What surprised me wasn't how hard it is to create content. It was how hard it is to get people to engage with it.

Sometimes I'll spend a lot of time on a post, write a good caption, pick the right photo, and still end up with barely any likes. Meanwhile, another post gets early engagement and suddenly everyone seems interested in it.

That is what got me curious about buying Instagram likes.

Not because I think likes automatically make content better, but because people seem to react differently when they see a post that already has engagement.

A post with likes looks active. A post with no engagement often gets ignored, even if the content is good.

Maybe that is just social media psychology, but it feels real.

I still think quality content is what matters most long term, but I can definitely see why some creators buy Instagram likes to help their posts get noticed in the beginning.

Has anyone here actually tried it?

Did it help attract more genuine engagement later on, or was it mostly just a temporary boost?

For people who have traveled extensively in Europe, where did you go when you wanted something different?

Not looking for Paris, Rome, London, Santorini, etc. and would love to hear which locations really surpassed your expectations. Open to more remote locations or travel by smaller luxury cruise, just want to really feel that wonder on our next trip.

our team has been running aircall for about 4 months now with a team of 8 SDRs. the integration with salesforce is pretty smooth and the analytics dashboards are helpful for tracking call metrics.

the actual call quality varies though. sometimes crystal clear, other times we get weird echoes or drops. happens maybe 10-15% of the time which isn't terrible but gets annoying during important calls. their support is decent - usually respond within a few hours.

pricing feels a bit steep at like 30-50 bucks per user depending on features. we're hitting about 150-200 calls per rep daily so the unlimited minutes matter. local presence dialing works well for most US markets.

anyone else having the quality issues? we've tested our internet extensively so pretty sure it's on their end. also been comparing aircall against other outbound calling solutions like dialpad and ringcentral. even looked at Prospeo recently since we need better direct dial numbers for our lists - their mobile number coverage seems way better than what we're getting from Apollo right now.

Hey! Thanks for stopping by. For context I am fairly new to coding and tryna make his way in this. I stumbled across his channel recently while looking for swe job hunting advice. He seems to take that systematic approach to the whole process that I found interesting. Has anyone else watched him? Does his advice actually hold up or is it mostly surface level stuff? Asking because I'm looking for someone to follow closely as a mentor.

kept seeing people argue about whether adding linkedin touches to cold email actually does anything or if its just more work for the same result. drove me nuts because nobody had real numbers, just vibes. so i ran a proper side by side for 6 months.

i sell dev tools. $21k MRR, 7 people, i do all the outbound myself because we cant afford a dedicated SDR yet. every dollar i spend on outreach is a dollar i could spend on another engineer so i track everything obsessively.

the numbers:

EMAIL ONLY (jan through june) total sends: 11,400 reply rate: 3.1% positive reply rate: 1.4% meetings booked: 28 cost per meeting: ~$47 bounce rate: 1.8%

MULTICHANNEL email + linkedin (jan through june) total sends: 8,200 emails + ~3,100 linkedin touches reply rate (combined): 5.7% positive reply rate: 2.9% meetings booked: 41 cost per meeting: ~$89 bounce rate: 1.6%

same ICP for both. engineering managers and VPs eng at companies 50-500 employees. same messaging angles, same offer. i split my prospect list randomly so there wasnt any cherry picking.

the multichannel arm won on meetings. 41 vs 28. not even close on reply rate either. but the cost per meeting almost doubled and thats where it gets complicated for someone at my stage.

my stack for email only was Kaspr to build lists, Prospeo for the email finding step, Bouncer to verify, then everything into Smartlead. total monthly cost around $310.

for multichannel i added Dripify at $79/mo for the linkedin sequences plus had to be way more careful about my linkedin account (burned one in february, had to wait 3 weeks to get a new one warmed up). so the multichannel arm cost me about $390/mo plus way more of my time. like 4-5 extra hours a week managing the linkedin side, writing connection request copy, monitoring acceptance rates.

those 4-5 hours a week are the real cost. thats half an engineering day i could be spending on product. at my scale thats brutal.

the 13 extra meetings from multichannel converted to 4 closed deals over the 6 months. average deal size for us is around $380/mo so thats $1,520 MRR. worth it? mathematically yes but barely. and it took months to see that return.

ok let me back up on something. for the first two months i was running the multichannel arm wrong. i was sending linkedin connection requests and emails on the same day to the same person and the reply rate was actually worse than email only, like 2.8%. once i staggered them - linkedin touch first, wait 3-4 days, then email - thats when the numbers jumped. took me until early march to figure that out so the real multichannel data is more like 4 months not 6.

the linkedin touches also had a weird effect i didnt expect. people who connected with me on linkedin and then got my email were way more likely to reply with something thoughtful vs the email only crowd where most positive replies were just "sure send me a link." the multichannel meetings converted to pipeline at a higher rate. 34% vs 22%. small sample size though so who knows.

one thing i'll say is Smartlead handled the email side well for the price ($39/mo on the plan i'm on). nothing fancy but deliverability stayed consistent across both arms. i was running 4 inboxes through Mailforge, $3/inbox/mo, warmed them for 3 weeks before sending anything.

if i had to do it again with my current budget and time constraints... i'd probably stick with email only and just increase volume slightly. the multichannel results are better but the time cost is a killer when you're a founder doing everything. if i hire an SDR later this year the calculus changes completely.

for anyone at a similar stage - bootstrapped, no dedicated sales person - email only at higher volume with really clean data is probably the better play. i'd rather spend $89 on another month of Dripify towards an engineering tool honestly.

the one thing multichannel does that email cant is warm up completely cold prospects who have no idea who you are. if your brand has zero recognition in your space (mine doesnt, were tiny) the linkedin touch before email acts like a micro awareness play. whether thats worth 4-5 hours a week of founder time... depends on how desperate you are for pipeline i guess

I’ve noticed Instagram posts often get judged in the first few seconds. If a post already has likes, people seem more willing to stop, look, and interact with it.

I’m working on a page where the content is decent, but some posts take too long to pick up engagement. That makes the post look quiet at the start, even when the content itself is worth viewing.

So I’m thinking about buying Instagram likes for selected posts, mainly to support early engagement and improve the first impression. I’m not trying to use it on everything, just on posts that already fit the page and deserve more attention.

I’m looking for a site that can deliver Instagram likes gradually, with real looking users, stable likes, natural pacing, and engagement that matches normal activity.

Has anyone bought Instagram likes recently from a reliable provider? What is the best site you have tried, and would you recommend it?