I built and ran an outbound campaign from scratch here’s what happened

I wanted to test whether I could run an outbound campaign end-to-end myself, so I built and ran one from scratch.

Here’s what I actually did:

Infrastructure

– Bought 2 domains

– Set up 5 mailboxes

– Configured DNS authentication

– Connected everything to Instantly

– Warmed the mailboxes for 3 weeks

– Mailbox health score: 100%

Lead sourcing & cleaning

– Extracted the initial lead list from Apollo

– Used Claude to clean, deduplicate and structure the data

– Final list: 145 unique leads

Campaign

– Uploaded the list into Instantly

– Built and launched the outbound campaign

– Managed the campaign end-to-end and monitored the results

Results

– 6.21% reply rate

– 3.1% positive reply rate

– 1 lead closed

The main thing I wanted to prove to myself was that I could take an outbound campaign from domain setup – deliverability – lead sourcing – data cleaning – campaign launch – replies – closed deal, rather than just knowing how individual tools work.

It was a small sample size, so I’m not treating these numbers as some universal benchmark. But it gave me a complete hands-on understanding of what actually happens when you run the process yourself.