AI Systems & Workcraft for Entrepreneurs | LachlanCB
Field tests

What I tested

Experiments I actually ran, with the numbers that came back — including the ones that returned nothing at all. Anyone can publish the wins. The failures are where the transferable information is.

05
Tests
01
Outright failures
  1. № 01Failed2026

    Cold outreach at volume to local trades

    Can volume alone open a market that doesn't know it has the problem?

    Method
    ~5,000 cold emails plus ~100 SMS to local service businesses. Warmed domains, multi-step sequencing, segment-tuned copy — the same setup that produced 60–80% open rates on other campaigns.
    Result
    Zero replies. Not a low reply rate — zero. Deliverability was fine and opens happened, so the failure was downstream of the inbox.
    So what
    The problem wasn't the message, it was the premise: this audience had no felt pain about the thing I was selling. Switched trades to phone-first and reserved email for higher-ticket buyers who already know they have the problem.
    0replies
  2. № 02WorkedJuly 2026

    One room vs. an entire outbound campaign

    Does in-person beat scaled digital outreach for early-stage pipeline?

    Method
    Attended a single afternoon networking meetup and compared the outcome against the full cold-email experiment running in parallel.
    Result
    One room of working people produced more real conversations, replies and an actual employment lead than the entire cold-email experiment combined.
    So what
    Reweighted toward in-person and warm channels for anything early-stage. Cold volume is a scaling tactic, not a starting one — it multiplies a message that already works.
    1 afternoonbeat ~5,000 emails
  3. № 03MixedJuly 2026

    Selling a digital product with zero audience

    Will a product sell organically before any audience exists?

    Method
    Listed a synthesis product on a third-party marketplace with no promotion, no list, and no paid traffic. Left it to be found.
    Result
    One organic sale from a buyer who found it themselves, after months at zero. Small, but it came from marketplace discovery rather than anything I did.
    So what
    Enough signal to keep the channel and not enough to call it validated. The honest reading is 'first paid sale, n=1' — not product-market fit. Marketplace placement beat promotion at this stage.
    n=1organic sale, no marketing
  4. № 04MixedJuly 2026

    Rank-and-rent local site

    Can a local service site generate demand before a business exists behind it?

    Method
    Built and ranked a local trade site as a pure demand test, deliberately bypassing my own rule about validating first.
    Result
    The site ranks and the engine is reusable, but the lead path was left in demo mode — so early enquiries had nowhere to go. A build finished; a system didn't.
    So what
    Produced a reusable site engine for future locations. Also a reminder that 'shipped' and 'working end to end' are different states, and only one of them earns anything.
    livedemand test running
  5. № 05WorkedJuly 2026

    Migrating a 46-post blog off a hosted CMS

    Can you leave a CMS without losing search visibility?

    Method
    Exported 46 posts, 8 pages and 53 tags from Ghost to MDX in a Next.js app. Wrote automated checks for URL parity and content fidelity, then cut DNS over.
    Result
    Every live URL still resolves — 107 direct, 3 intentional redirects, zero broken. Content fidelity verified across all 46 posts. Two real traps: the CMS's own routing didn't match what I assumed, and the host served an expired certificate after cutover.
    So what
    Verify routing against live HTTP status codes rather than trusting documentation or memory. The plan was wrong in four places; only the checks caught it.
    110 / 110URLs preserved
The things I killed