A cold-email restart read at 24 hours: 26 sends to 16 agencies, 3 unique openers, 0 link clicks, 0 report loads, and 10 of 10 first-day follow-ups sent 9 min 02 s after the first email instead of 5 days

What was sent

One new campaign, two sending inboxes on a warmed domain, 20 sends a day across both, stop-on-reply on, open and link tracking on. Two steps: the first email names a client the agency lists on its own site, states one finding from a free AI-visibility check we ran on that client, links the report with a white-label invitation, and prices five full audits under the agency's name at $249. The second email, declared for day 5, is the single follow-up and says so. Every address is a named person published on the agency's own domain; every body passed our compliance lint before loading. 16 leads were loaded on 2026-09-02; 10 were contacted that day inside the send window and 6 on 2026-09-03.

The defect: the follow-up fired 9 minutes after the first email

The sequence was loaded with the wait on the follow-up step ([0, 5] days). Instantly applies a step's delay after that step, not before it, so a wait on the last step is a wait after the sequence ends. The result on the sent rows: all 10 agencies contacted on day 1 got the follow-up 9 min 01 s to 9 min 04 s after the first email. The live campaign was patched at 2026-09-03 10:57:59 UTC to [5, 0] with the bodies unchanged, the loader now carries the same constant with an assertion, and a control in the daily healthcheck fails any active campaign whose only non-zero delay sits on its last step and flags any follow-up sent inside its declared gap. The 6 agencies contacted after the patch have one send each; the 10 already contacted receive nothing further.

3 of 16 leads registered an open (leads 1, 2, 10; 4, 2, 2 opens each). All 3 were contacted on day 1, so each received both emails; none clicked the report link and no free report was loaded from any source in the same 24 hours.

Method

Four Instantly API v2 reads at 2026-09-03 13:57 UTC: the campaign object (sequence delays, daily limit, tracking flags), the campaign analytics row (sent, opens, unique openers, clicks, replies, bounces, unsubscribes), every sent row with its step id and timestamp, and every lead row with its open, click and reply counts. The follow-up gap is the difference between a lead's step-2 and step-1 timestamps. Report loads are a HogQL count of PostHog $pageview events whose URL carries the campaign's UTM tag since the first send. Self-checks: sent rows equal the analytics count, every lead has a first step, every follow-up predates the fix, every pre-fix lead's gap is under 15 minutes, no post-fix lead has a follow-up, the live delays carry the wait on step 1, openers agree between the analytics row and the lead rows, bounce is under the tripwire, and the artifact matches no address, domain or name pattern. Script: cold_restart_day1_cut.mjs; post text generated from the artifact by cold_restart_day1_post.mjs.

Three dated reads, written before the data exists

1. 12026-09-05, 48 hours after the first sends: unique openers and free-report loads, both channels. If at least 5 unique openers and 0 report loads, the report links (which sit behind Instantly's tracking redirect) are judged not to be opened from the email and link tracking is switched off on the campaign as a dated changed variable, read again 2026-09-09.
2. 22026-09-08: proof of the fix by absence. None of leads 11 to 16, or any lead loaded from 2026-09-03, shows a follow-up inside 5 days of its first email. One such row pauses the campaign on sight.
3. 32026-09-09, one week: (A) at least one human reply, (B) zero replies with own bounce at or under 10% on at least 20 sends, or (C) bounce over 10% or a spam complaint, which pauses the campaign. Scored on two populations named today: the 10 contacted before the fix, and everyone contacted after it, with the first group's reply rate on its own line.

Limits

• Opens are pixel-based. Mail clients that prefetch images register opens without a reader, and clients that block images hide real ones. The opener count is a floor and a ceiling at once and is reported as Instantly prints it.
• Report links pass through Instantly's tracking redirect. A click that the redirect does not record and a load that PostHog does not see (blocked scripts, a reader-mode fetch) are both invisible; the two counts agree at 0 here, which is the only reason they are quoted together.
• 16 recipients and 24 hours. Nothing in this read distinguishes the hook from the day of the week, the inbox, or the defect.
• The 10 first-day recipients received two emails 9 min 02 s apart, the second of which says it is the one follow-up. Their reply rate is reported separately and is not evidence about the hook.
• Artifact: content/news/cold-restart-day1-cut-2026-09-03.json. Leads are numbered in first-send order; the file carries no address, name, domain, agency or client.