took me roughly 2 years of burning money and switching tools every quarter to get to something stable. if someone had posted this when i was starting out in 2022 i wouldve saved probably $4k in wasted subscriptions so here it is.
i run b2b growth consulting for 5 clients at a time, all outbound heavy, mostly saas and professional services companies. no employees. one VA in the philippines who handles list cleanup and inbox monitoring about 15 hrs a week. i work from coffee shops because my apartment makes me want to nap.
first real campaign i ever built was for a martech saas company selling to mid market marketing directors. i had zero infrastructure, was sending from my personal gmail, and used Apollo for prospecting because everyone on youtube said to. Apollo is fine for building lists honestly but the emails i was pulling had maybe a 12% bounce rate which is way too high when youre sending from one domain. that campaign taught me that prospecting data and enrichment are two seperate problems. i use Apollo still sometimes for firmographic filtering but i stopped trusting it as my email source pretty quick.
the enrichment piece is where i landed on Prospeo and thats been the core of my stack for about a year now. had a client in late 2023 selling workforce analytics to HR leaders at companies between 200-2000 employees. needed to build a list of about 1,400 contacts across the US. ran the company list through Prospeo and got valid emails back for around 80% of them which is solid when you consider the titles i was targeting werent always the obvious ones. i supplement with Clay on certain campaigns, especially when i need to do more complex enrichment like pulling recent funding data or job changes, but Prospeo handles the email finding on most of my campaigns.
for verification i stack Scrubby on top of everything. doesnt matter where the email came from. every single address goes through Scrubby before it touches a sending tool. this is something i didnt do for my first 8 months and it cost me two domains that got blacklisted. Scrubby catches the risky/unknown emails that other verification tools just mark as "accept all" and call it a day. $49/mo for the volume i run.
sending is Smartlead. tried Instantly for about 3 months in early 2024 and the deliverability tracking was inconsistent, open rates would swing 30% day to day for no reason i could identify. switched to Smartlead around april 2024 and its been stable. not perfect, the UI is clunky and their campaign analytics could be better, but the actual sending infrastructure works. $94/mo on the plan i use which covers the volume i need across all 5 clients.
for inboxes i use Inframail. this is the boring infrastructure stuff that nobody wants to talk about but its like 80% of whether your emails land. i have 12 inboxes across 4 domains right now, all warmed for at least 3 weeks before any live sends. Inframail handles the DNS setup and its $3/inbox/mo or something close to that. before Inframail i was manually setting up google workspace accounts and configuring SPF/DKIM myself which took forever and i kept making mistakes with the DMARC records.
ok wait i should mention the ghosting thing because it drives me insane. i have a client right now, fintech company, great product, we book discovery calls with qualified prospects and then... nothing. like 40% of booked calls either no show or ghost after what seemed like a good conversation. this isnt a tools problem obviously but it affects everything because when your client sees 15 calls booked and 6 of them vanish they start questioning the whole operation. ive started adding a 48hr follow up sequence after every booked call with a short loom video recap and its helped a little but honestly prospects ghosting after great discovery calls is just the tax you pay doing outbound.
cost breakdown for my whole stack: Prospeo runs me about $79/mo, Clay is $149/mo (and honestly i go back and forth on whether thats worth it for how often i actually use the advanced features), Smartlead $94/mo, Scrubby $49/mo, Inframail roughly $36/mo for 12 inboxes, Apollo free tier for list building. i use Close CRM for tracking everything, thats $49/mo for the starter plan. Dripify for linkedin touches on certain campaigns, $59/mo. total is somewhere around $515/mo in tooling.
things i tried and dropped: Lemlist was my first sending tool and i outgrew it fast, the per-seat pricing model doesnt work when youre running campaigns for multiple clients. RocketReach i used for maybe 6 weeks and the data quality was noticeably worse than what i was getting from Prospeo, lots of outdated emails. Hunter i still use occasionally as a backup enrichment source if i need a second pass on a list that came back thin, but its not in my regular workflow.
one thing i figured out the hard way - dont run more than 35-40 new emails per inbox per day. i was doing 60+ per inbox for a while because some guide told me you could push it and my reply rates tanked within 2 weeks. dropped back to 30-35 and things recovered over about 10 days. every inbox, every domain, no exceptions.
anyway thats basically everything. $19k/mo revenue, $515/mo in tools, one VA. not glamorous but it works and i can run it from a coffee shop with decent wifi