Airfare Snacks: half the sending volume, 122 opportunities in seven weeks

The business

Airfare Snacks delivers healthy snacks to offices across the United States. Justin Steinfelder founded it and runs it. It has 250 office customers, and for two years every one of them has come from cold email. There is no paid channel underneath it and no sales team knocking on doors.

That makes the sending system the business. When it works, the company grows. When it stops, nothing else picks up the slack.

What broke

Justin scaled fast, and he scaled without rules. By late 2025 he was sending 10,000 emails a day, running far too many mailboxes on each domain, pushing 50 to 100 sends off each mailbox, and putting almost no verification in front of the list. He was not using spintax. Most of his contacts came straight out of Apollo with light filtering.

It held together for a while. Then in November it stopped, and by Thanksgiving the whole system was dead. Replies went to nothing.

He spent weeks talking to people who claimed they could fix it. In his words, he could not understand what most of them were saying. He picked the one he could follow.

The rebuild

Justin joined Insiders and was paired with a coach. The work was not exotic. It was the list of things that were wrong, fixed one at a time.

Infrastructure came first. Three mailboxes per domain instead of a stack of them. Ten to fifteen sends per mailbox per day instead of 50 to 100. Proper ramp-up on every new mailbox, and any mailbox that stops producing replies gets cut and replaced rather than left running.

Then the list. Every address now goes through two verification tools, catch-alls included, where before it went through none. Before anything reaches a campaign, the list is filtered against his own customers ranked by lifetime value, so contacts who were never going to buy are removed instead of emailed. Between a third and a half of any Apollo pull survives that filter.

Then the copy. Real variants and spintax replaced the single email he had been sending to everybody.

Then one addition that cost nothing. Anybody who finishes a sequence without replying goes back into a new one two and a half months later. That recycled campaign now replies at close to the rate of the fresh one.

The result

Justin's interested reply rate moved up 20 to 30% on average.

Across a recent seven-week window his account sent 8,721 emails, took 792 replies, 122 of them positive, and produced 122 opportunities worth $12,200 in pipeline.

He is doing that on roughly 5,000 emails a day, half the volume he was pushing when the system failed. The extra 5,000 had been going to spam, and nothing on his dashboard was telling him so.

What is still ahead

Justin is direct that the build is not finished. Roughly half his addressable list sits behind Microsoft, and he is still aging domains to reach it properly. He has a backlog of Microsoft leads waiting on that infrastructure, and a set of fixes from his most recent coaching call that have not landed yet.

The numbers above are what the system produces before that work is done.

In his words

"I came to you and it had completely fallen apart. The entire thing changed in a better way."

Justin Steinfelder, Founder, Airfare Snacks

More from Justin in his review.