150 cold emails in: 1 human reply, 0 payments. What I'm changing next

Last week I posted that my first human reply came only after I stopped describing problems and started pasting the fix. Five days and about 90 more emails later, here are the straight numbers.

• First-touch emails sent: 152 (it was 62 when I wrote the last post)
• Human replies: still 1, which is a 0.7% reply rate. About 33 of the newer emails have had a week to answer, the rest a day or two, so I'm not calling it yet.
• Payments from strangers: 0. I gave myself until the end of September.
• Bounces in this batch: 3 from addresses that didn't exist, and 5 caused by me, because the recipient field dropped letters while I was automating the sending. I now check recipients in the sent folder, not on screen.

What I can read from this so far:

1. The fix-in-the-first-email format got me a reply, but one in 150 is closer to noise than to an engine.
2. Niche matters more than I thought. Pet shops were hard: only 20 of the 48 sites I scanned scored 80 or below, so I spent more time finding leads than writing to them.
3. The only place I've had real back-and-forth is here. My comments got three replies within a day, including one asking whether anyone had actually used the scanner. The honest answer was "not yet."

What I'm changing this week:

• Judge outreach by whether anyone who replies scans a second page, not by reply count.
• Publish my scan data as open studies (30 skincare shops averaged 71/100, 46 candle shops 81/100), so owners have something to check without an email from a stranger.
• Keep answering questions where they're already being asked.

For anyone past this point: when your first stranger paid, was it in response to the first thing you sent, or the second interaction?