Scenario One — House Insurance Case Study
Grounded: 120×10×3 infrastructure, 5 actual + 50 warm-up per mailbox/day, 30 sending days. Soft: 1.5% per-email reply rate, 2.3 emails/contact, $25/lead — benchmark figures; confirm against the client's own dashboard. Watch: Simple and Complex are two views of the same rate — flipping the toggle is revenue-neutral (8,100 leads either way). What moves the count is the per-email rate × emails-per-contact; agree those before quoting.
Scenario Two — M&A Small Business Acquisition Case Study
Grounded: ~400 root domains, 100 inboxes each, no subdomains, ~5 actual/inbox/day, single-touch to mostly personal Gmail; 1.28% positive reply rate (317 ÷ 24,830 sent, measured); domains burn in ~1–3 wks (lifespan set to 2). Soft: warm-up 5/inbox (really measured by duration, 7–30 days), $25/lead (revenue is really an M&A transaction fee, not per-lead). Watch: short domain life is now priced into cost (fleet rebought ~26×/yr to stay live); it does not dock sending volume — the model assumes burned domains get replaced fast enough to keep the fleet sending.
Reply Rate — Which % To Use (Scenario Two dashboard)
One dashboard, three percentages, three different denominators. The calculator turns sends → leads, so it needs positives per email sent — the 1.28% line, not the 34.6% headline.
Key Questions To Ask
- Reply rate — which denominator? Is the quoted positive-reply % per email sent or per reply? (See the table above — use the per-send 1.28%, never the 34.6% headline.)
- Emails per contact — single-touch, or a multi-step sequence? It converts the per-email rate into the per-contact rate (the two reply-rate boxes); it does not change the lead count — the per-email rate alone drives leads.
- Warm-up volume — what's the real warm-up send count per mailbox/day, beyond “we warm for 7–30 days”?
- Domain longevity — how long does a domain really stay live? You now set this as Average Domain Lifespan; it drives the domain replacement cost (it doesn't reduce sending volume — the model assumes burned domains are replaced).
- Bounce rate — what share of sends bounce (≈3% on the dashboard)? It trims deliverable volume off the top.
- Revenue model — fixed $/lead, or transaction fee × close rate × deal value? M&A has no per-lead price, so the revenue line is illustrative only.
- Inboxes per domain & provider — does deliverability hold at 100 inboxes/domain on Microsoft 365 sending to personal Gmail?
Infrastructure — wide, not deep
~400 root .com domains, 100 inboxes each (≈40,000 inboxes), no subdomains. Microsoft 365 / Exchange shared inboxes, domains on Spaceship, sequenced through SendKit → moving to PlusVibe. Each inbox sends only ~5 actual/day (weighing a drop to 3). The whole operation is bigger still — ~1,000 domains at ~500,000 sends/day; the 400-domain build is their dedicated M&A push.
Audience — ~90% personal email
90–94% personal / Gmail addresses (Main Street owners for M&A + franchise offers) — a B2C-style send on B2B intent. Reply rate 1–2%, of which 45–70% come back positive. Warm-up runs 7–30 days before a domain goes live.
The bottleneck — domain longevity
Domains inbox hard for the first week, then get killed in ~1–3 weeks (up to ~5 weeks if heavily pre-aged). Bounce sits around 2.5%. The whole game is keeping inboxing on personals alive longer — reputation, not raw volume, is the ceiling.
Output — replies go straight to the phone
~400–450 positive replies/day off ~50,000 sends (the measured campaign ran 1.28% of sends = 317/24,830, which Scenario Two uses; earlier blended estimates put it ~0.9–1.3%). Replies push straight into the CRM and get dialed by ~50 SDRs — no email follow-up. Revenue is a fee on each M&A transaction, so there's no fixed “$/lead” — model it from your own close rate × deal value.