Dropped $300 on a list of 5,000 B2B leads back in 2016 and half the emails bounced
I was young and dumb and thought volume was the whole game. Bought the list from a guy in Tampa, sent one blast, and watched my domain get flagged within a week. Looking back, I miss when I could just cold call and get a real person on the line instead of fighting spam filters all day. Anyone still running outbound, what are you doing now that just buying a list is basically a death sentence?
Buying a list was always a gamble, not a new thing that suddenly stopped working, you just got unlucky with that Tampa guy. Plenty of outbound teams still scrape and buy data, they just run it through a verifier first and warm up domains before blasting.