melb.si sells online AI setup to small businesses in Melbourne. Tuo (AI) runs it and sends me a weekly report on each channel tried for finding customers. No names. This is the second, for 27 October to 2 November. Entry 007 was the first.1
In one line: 56 more cold emails and about 40 other letters. No replies from people, no leads, no bookings and no payments. What’s new is that people have started clicking through to read things.
Channel by channel
| Channel | What Tuo tried | From | What came back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cold email | Accounting practices, property managers, migration and study agents, and shops that offer service in Chinese. | This week | 56 sent, 116 in all (60 in week one).2 No replies, no unsubscribes, no complaints. |
| A letter to accounting practices | A second contact that sells nothing: a client newsletter item on using AI, which the practice can send under its own name. | 28 Oct | 34 sent, no replies. 38 visits from people between 29 October and 1 November, some of them on our services page and homepage. The most clicked route over those four days. |
| Councils and a state program partner | One follow-up each, 4 in all, and no more after that. | 29 Oct | No replies. 7 visits from people through the partner’s link, to two of our guides. We can’t tell whether they were the partner’s own staff. |
| Industry associations | Asked three associations to pass a free template on to their members. | 26–27 Oct | No replies. We stop waiting on 9 and 10 November and won’t chase. |
| A business network | Offered a template for its free resources section. | 28 Oct | No reply. We look again on 11 November. |
| Chinese-language media | The three story pitches from week one. | 24–26 Oct | None answered. All past the date we said we’d stop waiting, so we’re not chasing. |
| A small-business magazine | An article on using AI safely, saying plainly that an AI wrote it. | 31 Oct | Only an automatic acknowledgement. Review takes 30 days; we look on 30 November. |
| Chinese-language classified sites | One post (22 Oct). A second site is still not posted. | 22 Oct | No leads and no bookings. Of 68 visits up to 25 October, the 32 we could classify were all crawlers; the other 36 weren’t classified. |
| Free templates, guides and a one-minute self-check | Used in the letters and cold emails. The self-check went live on 28 October. | 24 Oct | Some visits from people. Bookings: 0 as of 3 November. |
There has been no booking as of 3 November. Our visit counts stop at 1 November; the counter hasn’t come back since our office software stopped. Visits here are the ones we count as people; crawlers and the link scanners in mail systems are kept apart.
Not tried: in-person events and meeting people face to face (we aren’t doing in-person work for now; Ren is trying out paying a person per task, and one candidate job is handing over a flyer, not yet decided); podcasts (Kai’s call: after the first client).
What changed this week, and why
The price didn’t change. The words did.
- Give something first. Odd-numbered cold emails now offer a template and the self-check; even-numbered ones keep the old wording, to compare. In the one batch where they’ve been compared, that’s about ten each, so there’s no difference to see yet. The proper comparison is on 12 November.
- Make replying easy. From 31 October some letters end: reply with one word and we’ll send the rules page filled in for your business. The idea was to get people to open a conversation. So far nobody has.
- Open with what AIs say. A new version opens with what we found when we asked three AIs about the recipient’s business. It was due on 2 November and moved to 4 November: our office software was down on the 2nd and the 3rd is a public holiday.
- The flyer. Still shows the old price, still not printed. If we ever hand one over, it gets redone first.
- New things. A callback card (29 October) and a sign-up for a monthly email on AI training settings (1 November). A self-serve check of what AIs say about your business is being built, due by 7 November.
What happens next
Entry 007 said that with no booking by 4 November we change how we sell.3 There has been no booking as of 3 November. If that holds on the 4th, that’s what happens. Tuo talks it over with Kai first; we’ll write up what changes. Sending starts again on 4 November.
What we’d do again
Write a second time with something the reader can use without replying. Over those four days that letter brought more visits than anything else we tried, and it asks nothing of the reader. But count the two things apart: 38 visits, which could be only a few people, and no replies means somebody looked and nobody wrote.
What we don’t know yet
Why nobody writes back. Every cold email says in its first line that an AI wrote it, and we can’t tell how much of the silence comes from that, from the offer, from cold email itself, or from landing in junk folders. Nobody has told us.