PJ Pahygiannis
New Contributor
Hey everyone! I haven't posted in a while, but that is because my business has exploded over the last 7 months.
But now it is crumbling
I am a 23 years old senior in college. I have built a large, well known personal brand among digital marketing agency owners on Facebook as the go to person for all things cold email. Long story short, four years ago I was fired from my first job because I could not sell using cold email (I was doing B2B sales). Ever since I have been obsessed with cold email and have come close to mastering it. In October 2017 I started branding myself as "PJ The Email Guy". I deleted almost my entire friends list and added 5,000 digital marketers. I started putting out content about cold email (mainly my observations and experiments) in agency owner groups and on my profile and very quickly made a name for myself.
For the first year all I did was scrape and sell lists of business owner email addresses to agency owners and would basically write the copy for them. I made good money for a college student (around $40k a year). But, last October a friend who I ran a cold email campaign for and got amazing results for encouraged me/pushed me to offer what I did for him as a complete done for you service, which was running cold email campaigns from start to finish to schedule calls with small business owners interested in his service. He does one on one Facebook Ads training. In 14 days I had 150 business owners wanting to be called about his service from cold email.
The first version of the service for $1,500 we ran the cold email campaign, got business owners interested, and put their info into a spreadsheet and passed it off to the client.
So, I did. I had built a following on Facebook by this point and the service very quickly caught on. By November I was doing $15,000 a month.
In October I hired my first time employee, a virtual assistant named Veronica. She became my project manager. Thanksgiving 2018 I hired my second employee named Rodolfo to handle the spreadsheets.
In December that same friend told me we should take it a step forward and have Virtual Assistants actually call the business owners that replied interested, qualify them for the client, and schedule them on the clients calendar for $1,000 more. So, we did.
This service soon attracted even more clients. In January we brought on 10 clients and grossed $25,000. In March we added a 5 deal guarantee where we would work until they closed 5 new clients from the calls we scheduled.
I was not prepared for what came next. We relied on Google/Gmail and sending softwares like Mailshake and Woodpecker. All of the sudden Google started throttling/restricting these sending softwares. It happened gradually, but started affecting us immediately. We needed to send 500 emails a day, everyday per client. At first Google started occasionally blocking emails. But, by April we couldn't send more than 100 a day. By June we could only send 30 to 40 emails a day. It went from a gradual tightening to a full blown choking. Google has essentially choked these software company's off their API.
I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off for a good month trying to find a solution. I tried to pay to have my own software built. I tried just about everything. Clients got sick of waiting for is to find a solution and started requesting refunds.
My next move was to hire 10 VAs to send emails one by one manually. They used their phones and Instagram. Most businesses have their email addresses on their profile. A VA would go to Instagram, type in #draincleaning, and email every plumber using that hashtag by copying and pasting the email copy we gave them. We would create a new domain/email for each client and give the VA the log in to add the email account to their phone. This got very expensive very fast. We were paying $140 per 3,000 emails sent. But Google started blocking us here as well. Domains/email accounts were getting sent to spam in as little as 24 hours.
Fast forward to today, we did $33,000 in May and $31,000 in June. We had to refund $60,000 back to 25 clients. There were weeks we brought on as many clients as we refunded
Thankfully, as of two weeks ago the sending issues are fixed. We ended up having to get off Google servers entirely and get our own SMTP server. We are now sending almost 20,000 emails a day flawlessly.
Unfortunately, I blew through every cent I had saved and invested just to cover all of the refunds, operations, and payroll. Things got so bad I had to take out a $20,000 line of credit through Kabbage at 16% interest to make payroll yesterday (it was $7,000) and refund clients. I have $5,000 left in the credit line and a three weeks until the first payment is due.
We have 15 clients remaining who signed up at the $2,500 price point and 30 clients who signed up for a promotion we ran where they paid $500 upfront for the first deal/client.
In June my payroll was $5,500 and in May it was $7,100. I let go two team members yesterday and cut my project managers pay by $300 to $1,700 a month. Her assistant was one of the ones I let go. Now my payroll is down to $2,900 a month
I have $100 left in my bank account.
But, now word has spread about everything we went through. The clients I refunded are talking trash about me to their friends in the industry. We had to refund two big influencers in the industry and they have told all of their friends. Our sales are down 70% to $7,500 a month (roughly three clients). We have not brought on a new client in almost three weeks.
I feel toxic. No one will touch me or my company with a ten foot pole. I'm losing friends on Facebook daily. My pipeline has dried up completely.
I was supposed to host a cold email master class in a Facebook group of 36,000 marketers, but when a client we refunded who owns a multi million dollar agency told his friend, the owner of the group, about his poor experience with us the owner cancelled and found another person.
My business is and was dependent on my personal brand/my reputation. I'm not sure how to recover it. I've posted publicly on my profile what we went through and how we have fixed it, but it hasn't helped.
I feel hopeless. I can't find a way out of this hole I am in and I don't know how to stop digging. I can't afford to refund $53,000 to the clients we have left and can't afford to keep paying my team to work on their campaigns.
But now it is crumbling
I am a 23 years old senior in college. I have built a large, well known personal brand among digital marketing agency owners on Facebook as the go to person for all things cold email. Long story short, four years ago I was fired from my first job because I could not sell using cold email (I was doing B2B sales). Ever since I have been obsessed with cold email and have come close to mastering it. In October 2017 I started branding myself as "PJ The Email Guy". I deleted almost my entire friends list and added 5,000 digital marketers. I started putting out content about cold email (mainly my observations and experiments) in agency owner groups and on my profile and very quickly made a name for myself.
For the first year all I did was scrape and sell lists of business owner email addresses to agency owners and would basically write the copy for them. I made good money for a college student (around $40k a year). But, last October a friend who I ran a cold email campaign for and got amazing results for encouraged me/pushed me to offer what I did for him as a complete done for you service, which was running cold email campaigns from start to finish to schedule calls with small business owners interested in his service. He does one on one Facebook Ads training. In 14 days I had 150 business owners wanting to be called about his service from cold email.
The first version of the service for $1,500 we ran the cold email campaign, got business owners interested, and put their info into a spreadsheet and passed it off to the client.
So, I did. I had built a following on Facebook by this point and the service very quickly caught on. By November I was doing $15,000 a month.
In October I hired my first time employee, a virtual assistant named Veronica. She became my project manager. Thanksgiving 2018 I hired my second employee named Rodolfo to handle the spreadsheets.
In December that same friend told me we should take it a step forward and have Virtual Assistants actually call the business owners that replied interested, qualify them for the client, and schedule them on the clients calendar for $1,000 more. So, we did.
This service soon attracted even more clients. In January we brought on 10 clients and grossed $25,000. In March we added a 5 deal guarantee where we would work until they closed 5 new clients from the calls we scheduled.
I was not prepared for what came next. We relied on Google/Gmail and sending softwares like Mailshake and Woodpecker. All of the sudden Google started throttling/restricting these sending softwares. It happened gradually, but started affecting us immediately. We needed to send 500 emails a day, everyday per client. At first Google started occasionally blocking emails. But, by April we couldn't send more than 100 a day. By June we could only send 30 to 40 emails a day. It went from a gradual tightening to a full blown choking. Google has essentially choked these software company's off their API.
I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off for a good month trying to find a solution. I tried to pay to have my own software built. I tried just about everything. Clients got sick of waiting for is to find a solution and started requesting refunds.
My next move was to hire 10 VAs to send emails one by one manually. They used their phones and Instagram. Most businesses have their email addresses on their profile. A VA would go to Instagram, type in #draincleaning, and email every plumber using that hashtag by copying and pasting the email copy we gave them. We would create a new domain/email for each client and give the VA the log in to add the email account to their phone. This got very expensive very fast. We were paying $140 per 3,000 emails sent. But Google started blocking us here as well. Domains/email accounts were getting sent to spam in as little as 24 hours.
Fast forward to today, we did $33,000 in May and $31,000 in June. We had to refund $60,000 back to 25 clients. There were weeks we brought on as many clients as we refunded
Thankfully, as of two weeks ago the sending issues are fixed. We ended up having to get off Google servers entirely and get our own SMTP server. We are now sending almost 20,000 emails a day flawlessly.
Unfortunately, I blew through every cent I had saved and invested just to cover all of the refunds, operations, and payroll. Things got so bad I had to take out a $20,000 line of credit through Kabbage at 16% interest to make payroll yesterday (it was $7,000) and refund clients. I have $5,000 left in the credit line and a three weeks until the first payment is due.
We have 15 clients remaining who signed up at the $2,500 price point and 30 clients who signed up for a promotion we ran where they paid $500 upfront for the first deal/client.
In June my payroll was $5,500 and in May it was $7,100. I let go two team members yesterday and cut my project managers pay by $300 to $1,700 a month. Her assistant was one of the ones I let go. Now my payroll is down to $2,900 a month
I have $100 left in my bank account.
But, now word has spread about everything we went through. The clients I refunded are talking trash about me to their friends in the industry. We had to refund two big influencers in the industry and they have told all of their friends. Our sales are down 70% to $7,500 a month (roughly three clients). We have not brought on a new client in almost three weeks.
I feel toxic. No one will touch me or my company with a ten foot pole. I'm losing friends on Facebook daily. My pipeline has dried up completely.
I was supposed to host a cold email master class in a Facebook group of 36,000 marketers, but when a client we refunded who owns a multi million dollar agency told his friend, the owner of the group, about his poor experience with us the owner cancelled and found another person.
My business is and was dependent on my personal brand/my reputation. I'm not sure how to recover it. I've posted publicly on my profile what we went through and how we have fixed it, but it hasn't helped.
I feel hopeless. I can't find a way out of this hole I am in and I don't know how to stop digging. I can't afford to refund $53,000 to the clients we have left and can't afford to keep paying my team to work on their campaigns.
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