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cold email opens say 61% but i got 2 replies from 180 sends - is the open rate lying to me

That number is mostly machines. Since iOS 15 Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches the tracking pixel for mail delivered to Apple Mail users whether or not a human ever looks at it, and industry measurements now put roughly half of all recorded opens in that bucket. On a list skewed toward founders and ops people, who are heavily on Apple hardware, your share is probably higher than average.

So your real human open rate is likely somewhere in the high twenties to mid thirties, and there is no way to recover the exact figure from that data.

The ratios I actually watch on cold: replies per send, and positive replies per send. You are at 1.1% total, roughly 0.6% positive. That is low but it is not a catastrophe - it is the number of a list that is broadly right and a message that has not earned an answer yet. Fix the message, not the subject line.

214 · in/mrr-and-margins ·

How do you know a shoe is finished, mileage, or something you feel first?

I stretched a pair to about 1,100 km out of stubbornness and developed a calf problem that took two months to settle. I genuinely can't tell you it was the shoes, the physio thought my hill sessions had a lot to answer for, so I won't pretend it's a clean story. What I can say is that the last 300 km of that pair felt like running on a wooden board and I got no benefit whatsoever from the extra distance.

57 · in/running-shoes ·

Whole-house dehumidifier versus two portables: which did you regret less?

Sticky second floor in a forced-air house is often a distribution problem before it is a moisture problem. Ask whoever quoted you whether the return upstairs is undersized, because if the air is not moving up there, a whole-house dehumidifier is being asked to fix something a damper adjustment might handle. Worth an hour of a balancing tech's time before spending USD 2,600.

116 · in/indoor-air-quality ·

Did Einstein actually say the 'if you can't explain it simply' line, or is that a mug quote?

I put it on a slide in front of a room that happened to contain a historian of science, and she asked the same question your colleague did, in front of forty people. It was a very long two seconds. Now if I want the sentiment I attribute it honestly: 'there's a line people put in Einstein's mouth, and the closest documented version is Rutherford's', and that framing gets a better reaction than the poster ever did.

52 · in/explain-simply ·

Shirts gape at the bust button on every single button down, fixes that survive a wash?

A tailor can do this properly in two ways: add bust darts to the shirts you already own, or take in the shoulders and side seams on the size up you bought so it fits everywhere else. I had four shirts darted at once, it took about a week, and per shirt it cost me less than a single new shirt from the same brand. Worth being clear with the tailor that you want the gape closed, not just a slimmer waist, because those are different alterations and I got the wrong one the first time by being vague.

118 · in/wardrobe ·

Tomato leaves curling upward and leathery but no spots or yellowing anywhere

Leathery upward roll with normal colour and normal fruit set is physiological leaf roll and it is not a disease. The plant is limiting transpiration in heat, and indeterminates that are growing fast do it more. The tell is exactly what you described: no chlorosis, no lesions, no wilting at dawn. Compare with herbicide damage, which twists and cups the new growth into a fern shape, and with viral curl, which comes with mottling and stunted fruit. Neither is what you have.

178 · in/veg-patch ·

Black soot on the jar rim and a grey mark on the wall above my candles

Going to gently disagree with the wick-only answer. You are at 8 percent in 464, which is at the top of what that wax holds without weeping oil into the pool, and free oil at the wick is a very efficient soot machine. Before you rewick everything, run one jar at 6 percent with your current CD-10 and see whether the black goes away. If it does, you have a load problem wearing a wick problem's clothes, and sizing down would have just handed you tunnelling instead.

67 · in/candlemaking ·

Are air purifiers a waste of money if you already vacuum twice a week?

Slightly disagreeing with the top answer, only on emphasis. With cats the thing you are actually chasing is the allergen carried on skin flakes, and a decent chunk of that does stay airborne for hours in a carpeted room. My wife's eyes stopped being red in the evenings about ten days after we started running one in the room the cats sleep in, and that was the only change we made. It did nothing for the visible dust, exactly as described above.

210 · in/indoor-air-quality ·

Everything runs on a box in the cupboard, what should move to a cheap VPS and what should stay home

Politely disagreeing with the whole premise. It is a hobby project used by a handful of friends, and downtime is fine. Tell them it is a home server, put a sentence on the status page saying so, and spend the money and the weekends on something you actually enjoy instead. I ran the tunnel and the VPS and the failover for two years before admitting nobody had ever complained about the downtime except me.

96 · in/home-server ·

Moved countries with two suitcases and a new office dress code, what do you buy first?

Reserve a specific slice for alterations before you spend anything, because it changes what you can buy. I put aside about ten percent and it transformed the budget. A hem, a waist take-in and a sleeve shortening on a mid priced trouser gets you something that looks better than a garment costing three times as much off the rack.

The practical consequence is that you should shop for the shoulders and the hips, which are expensive to alter, and ignore length and waist, which are cheap. That single rule doubled the number of shops that were useful to me.

124 · in/wardrobe ·

keyword tool shows 10-100 searches a month for every phrase in my niche - dead market or bad tool

Keyword tools are search advertising instruments. They estimate what advertisers can buy, they bucket and round aggressively at the low end, and they under-report anything phrased as a long specific question. A niche B2B problem with two thousand buyers worldwide will look identical to a dead market in that interface.

What separates the two is intent per search, not volume. Forty phrases at 10-100 a month is potentially several hundred searches a month by people describing a specific operational problem in their own words. If you sell at $50 a month and convert a small fraction of that, it is a business. It is a terrible business for anyone selling ads against it, which is exactly why the tools do not represent it well.

The generic high volume term is a trap anyway. You would never rank for it and the traffic would not buy.

241 · in/before-you-code ·

Basement sits at 68% all summer and my 22-pint unit cannot keep up

Target below 60% and ideally 30 to 50%, which is the range published guidance points at for keeping mould and dust mites unhappy. Chasing 40% in an unfinished basement in a humid summer will just run the compressor into the ground for no benefit, so I set mine at 50 and leave it. Also put a cheap hygrometer at the far end of the room, not next to the machine, or you are reading the outlet air and congratulating yourself.

133 · in/indoor-air-quality ·

Desk pushed against the wall with monitors on it, how much is the desk itself wrecking my low mids

Measure before you buy anything, because this room will surprise you and everyone's guesses including mine are worse than one measurement. A calibrated measurement microphone and free measurement software will show you the actual dip, its frequency and how much moving the desk 30cm changes it, and the whole exercise costs an evening plus the price of the mic. I moved my desk in 10cm steps taking a sweep at each one and found a position that was substantially flatter than either extreme, which I would never have found by ear. Do that first and you will spend money on the right problem instead of the fashionable one.

104 · in/home-studio ·

small sale agreed - the domain, the payment account and the play listing all move differently, what goes in the handover

Subscribers are the hard part and you should sort them before anything else, because they decide the shape of the whole deal. Payment accounts are tied to the legal entity behind them. If the entity itself changes hands that's one story; if the buyer is a different entity entirely, then in the normal case they open their own account and you migrate.

Ask the processor directly, in writing, before you sign. There is a documented path for business sales and they'll tell you which one applies to you. Stored card data can often be migrated between accounts on request, but it's a process with compliance checks, not a button - budget weeks, not days.

41 · in/sunset-or-sell ·