In October 2026 Johnny Perloiro left Lead Gen Jay a one-star review on Trustpilot titled "Paid $9,400 for a custom lead generation buildout. Very Little Effort and No Results."
We probably should never have taken him on as a client. That's on me, and I take responsibility for it. But the review doesn't match what happened, and his own sending account shows it.
A different offer from the one he applied with
Johnny signed up with a personal Gmail address, and he bought with a different offer from the one he first applied with. When he first applied in August 2025, his offer was finding jobs for plumbers through Google's local service ads, and he wrote that it was open to change. By mid-September he had come back with a life insurance lead offer, and that's the one we built the system around.
On September 18, 2025, he signed our client agreement and paid $9,400 for a custom cold email buildout: strategy, sending infrastructure, lead lists, copy and campaigns, with a reply-rate guarantee in Section 3.
Nine campaigns and close to three times the guarantee
Over the following seven months the team:
- delivered the first drafts of his email sequences on September 29, 2025, eleven days after he signed
- placed six lead list orders, four in October 2025 and two in April 2026
- moved his campaigns to a new sending platform in December 2025 at no cost to him for its first three months
- ran nine campaigns on that platform, including two new ones launched in April 2026
From December 2025, when his campaigns moved to the new platform, through mid-September 2026:
- 56,747 emails sent
- 23,614 people contacted
- 269 replies, counted once per person and including auto-replies, a 1.14% reply rate
- The guarantee in the agreement: 0.4%
Johnny's position is that only replies written by a person should count. That's 72 people. The agreement's standard is a reply rate and doesn't separate the two. His campaigns cleared the 0.4% standard in their first month on the new platform: 1.26% in December 2025.
The leads he didn't answer in time
The first client responsibility listed in Section 4 of the agreement is to respond to interested leads. Section 3 makes it a condition of the guarantee: one of the conditions that void it reads "Client does not respond to interested leads within 24 hours."
Three leads wrote back wanting to talk: one asked for more information, one offered a call, and one answered his email "Yes." Johnny answered all three himself, from his campaign inbox:
| Lead wrote in | Johnny's first reply from that inbox |
|---|---|
| December 18, 2025 | 106 hours later |
| December 18, 2025 | 104 hours later |
| January 28, 2026 (the "Yes") | 130 days later |
Johnny says Jonathan, his account manager, promised to flag interested replies to him in the team chat, and that this didn't happen. We haven't been able to retrieve those chat messages, so we can't confirm it or rule it out. The replies were in his inbox either way.
He says the campaigns didn't produce a paying customer. We can't see his sales, so we take him at his word on that.
The PureFunnel offer seems to have been abandoned
The web page the life insurance offer ran on, purefunnel.com/life-insurance-leads, now returns a 404. The Wayback Machine has three copies of it, from October 5, 2025 to April 11, 2026, and none after that as of October 18, 2026. A second page for the same pay-per-lead offer, purefunnel.com/leads, also returns a 404. The plumber jobs site he first applied with didn't load on October 18 either.
The refund
On September 17, 2026, nine months after his campaigns cleared the guarantee, Johnny asked for the full $9,400 back. Section 1 of the agreement says full support runs up to three months after delivery or until the 0.4% standard is met, whichever comes first. The team kept ordering lists and building campaigns for him through April 2026 anyway. Section 3 says a refund is paid only if the company approves it, and under Section 2, domain and software fees are billed separately and aren't covered by the refund guarantee. I reviewed the request twice with the team and declined it.
What we got wrong
The first three months were slower than they should have been, and he told us so: he rated us 1 out of 5 on October 27 and again on December 15, 2025. Both were fair at the time.
The bigger mistake was mine. A buildout for an offer we first heard about days before he bought needs more than campaigns to work, and I should have said so before we took his money.
Where it stands
Johnny has asked for mediation under Section 9 of our agreement.
If you're weighing a buildout with us and want to know exactly what it guarantees and what it asks of you, ask me before you buy.
Jay Feldman
