u/No-Fix-614

doing my due diligence before signing up for a challenge. payout reliability is my main thing, had a bad experience with another firm earlier this year that dragged it out for 2 weeks

seen some people mention Meridian Funded as a solid option, curious if anyone here has actually withdrawn and how long it took. EA trading and news allowed is a big plus for me too if anyone can confirm

our ops person (shes also our VA, also our project manager, also the person who keeps me from losing my mind) asked me to write up our full tool stack so she could onboard a new contractor without me having to explain everything over loom for the 50th time. figured i might as well post it here since i see people asking about cold email costs constantly.

first the raw numbers from last month across all 13 clients:

total emails sent: ~94,000 average reply rate: 3.8% average bounce rate: 1.4% average positive reply rate: 1.1% meetings booked: 47 cost per meeting (just tools, not labor): roughly $38 total monthly tool spend: $1,780 across everything tool spend per client: ~$137/mo average

those numbers vary a lot by client though. we have one marketing agency client who gets like 6.2% reply rates because their offer is actually good and theyre targeting a niche nobody else is hitting. then we have another client (not gonna name names but if youre reading this... you know who you are) whose offer changes every 3 weeks and wonders why reply rates hover around 1.4%. i have told this person probably 8 times that you cant A/B test anything when you keep changing the entire value prop but here we are.

ok so the stack.

for prospecting and building lists we use Apollo for the initial pull on most campaigns. $99/mo on the professional plan. its fine for what it is, the data isnt amazing but its a starting point and the filters are decent enough. we tried Ocean.io for about 2 months early this year for lookalike company searches and it was cool in theory but at our volume the cost didnt make sense. maybe if you have bigger budgets. Clay we use but not for prospecting directly, more for enrichment workflows which ill get to.

for enrichment this is where we spend the most time honestly. raw Apollo data has too many gaps and stale emails to just blast out. we run Prospeo for email finding across most clients, works for what we need and email accuracy sits around 82-85% before we even verify. Clay we use as a supplement when we need to layer in extra data points or do waterfall enrichment on tougher lists, mainly for clients targeting C-suite where Apollo coverage is thin. Clay is $149/mo on the explorer plan and honestly some months i wonder if its worth it for us specifically but for certain client verticals it pays for itself. Hunter we keep around on the free tier just to cross reference sometimes, nothing serious.

verification is NeverBounce. $49/mo-ish depending on volume. tried ZeroBounce for a few weeks last summer and the results were comparable but NeverBounce was already integrated into our workflow and i didnt feel like rewiring everything for marginal improvement. our bounce rate staying under 2% is partly because we verify everything but also because Prospeo enriched lists tend to come in pretty clean to begin with.

for sending we use Instantly. been on it for over a year now. $97/mo on the growth plan. before that we were on Woodpecker and it was fine but Instantly just has better campaign management when youre juggling 13 clients with multiple campaigns each. the analytics are better too. Woodpecker felt like it was built for someone running 2-3 campaigns not 30+.

inboxes... this is the part where people always underestimate costs. we use Maildoso for most of our sending domains. running about 45 inboxes right now across all clients. thats roughly $450/mo just for inboxes. we tried Mailforge briefly and had deliverability issues on maybe a third of the domains we spun up, could have been bad luck or bad timing but we switched and havent looked back. each inbox sends 25-30 emails per day max. i know some people push 40-50 but weve gotten burned doing that and the math works out better sending less per inbox with more inboxes.

wait i should mention warmup. Instantly handles warmup for us which is part of why we stick with it. 14 days minimum before any inbox touches a real campaign. we used to do 10 days and thought that was enough and then had a client lose 3 domains in one week because google flagged them. that was a fun conversation. now its 14 days no exceptions, i dont care if the client is impatient.

CRM is Close CRM for our internal pipeline tracking. $59/mo. its not fancy but it does what we need. tried Folk for a bit and it was too lightweight for tracking across multiple client accounts. Close just works for small teams who need to see everything in one place.

for linkedin we run Expandi for 2 clients who specifically want linkedin + email sequences. $99/mo per seat so thats $198 just for those two. its expensive relative to what it does but the clients pay for it as an add-on so whatever.

stuff we dropped and why: Amplemarket (way too expensive for a 4 person shop, like $1200/mo or something when we demoed it), GetProspect (data quality was noticeably worse than Apollo for our verticals), Clearbit (got absorbed into other stuff and the standalone pricing didnt make sense anymore). also dropped Waalaxy after maybe 3 weeks because it kept getting linkedin accounts flagged.

the thing nobody tells you about running cold email for clients is that like 40% of your time isnt tools or copy or strategy, its managing expectations. i have clients who see 47 meetings booked and think thats low because they saw some youtube guru claiming 200 meetings a month. and then i have clients who are thrilled with 3 meetings because each one is worth $15k+ to them. the tools are the easy part honestly.

our weekly routine is basically: monday we pull new lists and run them through Prospeo and NeverBounce, tuesday and wednesday we load campaigns and write copy variants, thursday we review analytics and pause anything underperforming, friday is reporting and client calls. my VA handles probably 70% of the monday-wednesday work at this point which is the only reason this is sustainable with 13 clients.

anyway thats the stack. $1,780/mo in tools, $13k/mo in revenue, 4 people including me. its not glamorous but it works and nobody has to commute anywhere so thats something

Need suggestions for good running shoes for a beginner. I run around 5-7km daily and budget is around ₹7k. Preferably looking at Asics or Skechers right now but open to other brands too if they’re worth it. I’ve got slightly wide feet too, so comfort matters a lot. Would be nice if they look cool enough to wear casually/college too and not just for running otherwise it's fine.

Namaste everyone 🙏

Latel, I’ve been feeling very drawn towards Shiv ji and I want to genuinely start bhakti and learn about Shaivism properly. Right now I honestly know very little. The only thing I chant is “Sambh Sada Shiv,” which I heard from Premanand Maharaj, and it gives me a lot of peace.

I want to slowly learn more mantras, stotras, kathas, philosophy, daily practices, everything related to Shiv ji. But there’s so much information online that I don’t know where to begin.

For someone completely new, what would you recommend starting with? Any beginner-friendly chants, books, videos, or practices?

Har Har Mahadev 🙏