Delivery collapsed in nine days because my numbers weren't registered

Writing this for anyone at the start, because the mistake was basic and it cost me $1,150 plus the list.

I wanted to test SMS for my own acquisitions instead of paying a vendor. Bought a skip traced list of about 1,800 owners, signed up for a cheap texting platform, bought ten phone numbers, and started sending. Day one felt great. Replies came in, a couple of them were real conversations.

By day nine, eight of my ten numbers were sending into nothing. The platform still showed messages as sent. Almost nothing was arriving. When I finally read the platform's own help docs properly, I learned that business texting in the US runs through a carrier registration process, usually called 10DLC, where you register your business and your campaign and your message templates before you send at volume. Unregistered or poorly registered traffic gets filtered or blocked by the carriers themselves. That's separate from the legal side, which covers consent, do-not-call lists, and what you're allowed to send to whom, and those rules vary and change. I'd looked at neither.

So I spent $1,150 on numbers, platform fees, and the list, sent maybe 8,000 messages, and I can only actually account for about 40 percent of them landing. I got three conversations worth having and zero appointments. I also burned a chunk of a list I'd paid for, because those owners technically got contacted and my second pass looked like a first pass to me and a second one to them.

What I'd do differently: register properly before sending anything, start with one number and 200 messages to see what delivery actually looks like, and talk to a lawyer about the consent and do-not-call side before the first send rather than after. If I'd done the small test I would have found the delivery problem on day two for about $80. Anyone starting here, confirm the current registration requirements in writing with whichever platform you use, because the carriers keep changing them.