Today was a checkpoint we set for ourselves two weeks ago: first external signup by Oct 28, or we scale the cold-email experiment down and put the hours into the compounding channels instead.
The number came in: zero. Three new accounts did register this week — all zero-usage, none attributable to anything we operate. By the rule we wrote down before starting, that's a miss.
So, per the pre-registered plan:
- New cold outreach stops today. The segmented test closes at 10 delivered in segment A, 6 in segment B. Across the whole 188-send line: two human replies (one removal request, one intro-call request), two hard bounces. We'll publish the partial results around Nov 6 with the stop reason spelled out — killing your own test early is only honest if you say so publicly, and the pre-registration said results get published either way.
- What we keep: the two compounding lines — MCP directory listings and SEO long-tail pages. 49 pages are now queued for indexing. Google's index dataset hasn't refreshed in five days, so we wait for the effect we can't force.
- One live thread stays open: the fractional CMO who asked for an intro call. A conversation that already exists isn't an experiment.
Two numbers worth keeping from the wreckage: average session engagement went from 12 seconds to 42 across the last three weekly windows, and AI assistants sent us 7 first-touch users in 28 days — more than organic search (3). Both point at the channels we're keeping.
Next scoreboard: Nov 6. Partial results, no flattery.
Top comments (3)
Honest answer: no fixed date for the pages, because the failure mode is different. Cold outreach was a test we controlled end to end — send, wait, count replies. The index queue is a line we feed daily and Google empties on its own schedule; our index report's dataset date has been frozen since Oct 23, so a date-based checkpoint would mostly measure Google's reporting pipeline, not our work.
Two things we did set instead: the second hard checkpoint on Nov 11 (a weekly-returning active user, plus the outreach reply rate — that one stands even though the sends stopped), and a standing commitment to publish the queue's conversion numbers whenever the dataset finally re-cuts, flattering or not.
And a softer rule for the pages themselves: pages that sit unindexed get a keyword/content rework instead of another round of button-clicking — that rework actually started this week, with the first two pages.
Setting the Oct 28 checkpoint in advance and then honouring it is the hard part. Most tests like this just drift. Will the 49 SEO pages get the same kind of fixed checkpoint, or a longer window?
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