The free outbound infrastructure audit.
Thirty minutes. We run Postmaster, MXToolbox, and a seed-list check against your sending stack live on the call — domains, deliverability, list quality, sequencing, reply handling. You leave with a prioritized 30-day action plan and the monitoring dashboard we run internally.
One slot per day. Phillip An, co-founder, runs every audit personally.
Eight surfaces. Thirty minutes.
The same checklist we run for paying clients in week one. Compressed into 30 minutes, applied to your numbers.
Deliverability state
Google Postmaster + Microsoft SNDS enrollment, current Gmail and Outlook reputation, spam-complaint rate against Gmail's 0.3% kill-switch (you want under 0.1%), and where seed-list emails actually land. If your open rate is under 40%, this is the problem — not your subject line.
Domain estate
How many inboxes per domain, whether your lookalike pattern is too obvious, registrar diversification, domain age, and whether your corporate root is firewalled off from cold sending. Rule of thumb: 5-10 lookalike .coms, 3 mailboxes each, 20 sends/inbox/day max.
Authentication posture
SPF under the 10-lookup limit, DKIM key length and rotation, DMARC policy and alignment, MTA-STS enforcement. We run your records through MXToolbox and mail-tester live on the call and walk you through every misconfig.
List quality and hygiene
Bounce rate against the 2% ceiling (above that and you're burning reputation), suppression-list discipline, scraped vs. verified ratio, and which contacts are spam traps waiting to land you on Spamhaus.
Sequencing health
Per-touch reply curve across your cadence, send-time distribution, whether your copy is fingerprinting as identical mass-send (the #1 reason warmed inboxes still get filtered), and the per-segment reply differential against the benchmark.
LinkedIn account health
Warmup state across paired accounts, restriction risk (connect velocity, profile-view ratios, automation fingerprint), and whether your account architecture survives a single ban. Accounts that get nuked are usually the ones doing 80 connects on day one.
Reply handling
Triage SLA against the 4-hour window where most replies still convert, reply-to-meeting conversion, and how your team handles the four objections every cold-email reply turns into. Where the lowest-hanging fruit in the whole funnel usually lives.
Pipeline conversion
Send → reply → meeting → opportunity → closed-won, your numbers against the empirical benchmark for your stage. We work backwards from your target: 0.4% send-to-customer means 500 emails for every 2 deals — most teams are sending a tenth of what they need.
Four deliverables, sent within 24 hours.
No deck. No recap email with bullet points and a follow-up nudge. The same artifacts a paying client gets in week one — applied to your situation.
- 01A prioritized 30-day action plan
Three to five specific changes, ranked by ROI against engineering hours. Written down and sent within 24 hours of the call.
- 02Your numbers against the empirical benchmark
Where you sit on the per-touch reply curve, the send→reply→meeting→won funnel, and the deliverability percentile. Numbers, not vibes.
- 03A working monitoring dashboard template
The same deliverability and pipeline dashboard we run for paying clients. Spreadsheet template — you wire it to your data.
- 04Direct answers to whatever else you ask
Domain registrar picks, sequencing-tool tradeoffs (Smartlead vs. Instantly vs. Apollo), which LinkedIn automation category fits your account count — anything in the surface area.
Four kinds of operators.
The audit fits a specific shape of company at a specific stage. If you don't see yourself here, book anyway — the framework adjusts, or we tell you it doesn't.
Founders running their own outbound
Post-PMF, pre-first-AE. Founder-led outbound out-converts hired SDRs until $1M ARR — the question is whether the next quarter's wall is more pipeline or better closing. The audit tells you which.
VP Sales who inherited an outbound motion
You're 60 days in, the team's hitting some number, and you have no read on whether the infrastructure under it is healthy or one bad week from a Spamhaus listing.
Batch teams sizing the infrastructure
Pre-launch or weeks 1-3. Founders should be sending ~250 personalized emails/week during the batch — this is the call that gets you to that volume without burning your primary domain.
AI-native founders new to B2B
Strong on product, zero reps on cold outbound. SPF/DKIM/DMARC/warmup is genuinely unfamiliar territory. We translate the whole surface area into the four decisions that actually matter.
Because the audit is the sales call.
Thirty minutes on your actual numbers tells both of us whether we'd be useful. If the answer is no, you keep the action plan and we both get our time back. If the answer is yes, the audit becomes the first deliverable of work that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise.
The alternative is a discovery call where we ask the same questions and nobody learns anything. We skipped that step.
Not a discovery call wearing an audit's name tag.
- No deck. There is no deck.
- No pitch. We don't bring up the product until you ask, and we'll tell you if it's not a fit.
- No generic "how's outbound going" small talk. The intake form keeps it specific.
- No second call between you and the action plan. You get the plan after the first call.
You get the same analysis a paying client gets in week one — applied to your situation, in thirty minutes, free.
Practical questions.
Do I need to share my CRM or sending platform access?
No. We work from a brief intake form and your numbers as you describe them on the call. If we end up working together, access happens then. The audit itself is a conversation.
What if I'm pre-launch?
Then this is the right time. Pre-launch audits run 20 minutes — we walk through the infrastructure to build before sending, the domain estate sizing, and the warmup runway against your launch date. The 30-day action plan becomes a launch checklist.
What if I'm at a different stage than the ones listed?
Book anyway. The framework adjusts — Series A and later, post-Series B with a 4-10 AE team, agency standing up multi-client stacks. We'll redirect to the right reference on the call.
Can you do this for a team of 3 AEs separately?
Yes, but typically one call with the founder or VP plus one or two ICs is more useful than three separate calls. The infrastructure questions don't change per rep; the operational ones do, and they're better answered in a room together.
Who runs the audit?
Phillip An, co-founder of Allston Labs. Every audit, personally. Not a BDR, not a discovery rep, not a sales engineer with a deck.
What's the catch?
There isn't one in the usual sense. We run one audit slot per day. If it turns into an engagement, the audit is the first deliverable of that engagement. If it doesn't, the action plan is yours and we move on.
Thirty minutes. One slot per day. No deck.
Phillip An, co-founder of Allston Labs, runs every audit personally. Pick a slot that fits. Fill the intake form when the confirmation lands. Show up with your numbers.