Carrier filtering took replies from 8.4% to 2.1%, and six of nine seats left
Post mortem on a text-first seller lead qualifier. I built it, I sold it, and messaging deliverability killed it in about seven weeks.
What it was: investors upload a list, my system sends a first-touch text, an AI back-and-forth qualifies for motivation and timeline, and anything warm gets pushed to their CRM with a transcript. Nine seats at $249 a month, so $2,241 MRR, plus messaging passed through at cost. Build was $19,000 with a contract dev plus my own nights, and $4,100 of my own money on messaging while testing.
First six weeks were genuinely good. Reply rate on first touch averaged 8.4% across about 34,000 sends, and roughly one in nine repliers turned into something a seat holder wanted to call. That's the number I sold seats on, which was my mistake.
Week seven, replies fell off a cliff on one campaign and then across all of them. Two weeks of digging: my messages were being filtered at the carrier layer. Registration was done, but I'd done it lazily, one brand and one catch-all campaign covering nine customers with wildly different content. Add a public link shortener in every message and inconsistent opt-out language and I'd built something that looks exactly like the spam these filters exist to stop. Delivery receipts said delivered. Handsets never got them. Reply rate settled at 2.1% and never came back on that number pool.
Six of nine seats gone inside a month. I refunded two of them because I'd sold a response rate, in writing, like an idiot.
What I'd do differently. Treat delivery as the product and instrument it from day one, per carrier, per number, with a small seeded set of my own handsets on each network so I see filtering before customers do. Separate registration per customer instead of one catch-all. Own domain for links. And never sell a seat on a reply rate I can't control.
The other thing I underweighted: consent rules for outbound messaging vary by state and some are stricter than the federal baseline, and I wasn't checking which of my nine customers' lists were even permissible. That's an attorney question and I should have paid for the answer at the start.