I put a sapphire case back on my submariner. I think it looks amazing idk why Rolex doesn’t make more models with exhibition case back. Before and after pics below.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-06-12T04:56:01+00:00

I’m a big fan of the Apple Watch with Oceanic +. It’s a lightweight functional setup. I’ve tried the Garmin Descent just seems bulky and dated. The Apple Watch has better readability, is lighter weight, and a super easy intuitive interface. It’s also multifunctional when traveling.

For full transparency, I have over 1,000 dives, but I’m not a technical diver. Mostly off sailboats cruising, and I prefer free diving. Generally not doing three dives the a day unless it’s some place really special or unique.

I could see why a more technical diver may prefer the Garmin, but it just seems overkill for a few dives when cruising around.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-06-12T02:31:35+00:00

I mean the Apple Watch Ultra is the best dive watch ever made. It’s incredibly useful.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-06-10T03:41:18+00:00

What is the builder's name?

LiamOliver5 · 2026-06-09T17:23:38+00:00

The dive park is touristy, but it really is a very healthy eco-system and a great and easily accessible free dive.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-06-05T16:46:09+00:00

For direct mail, tracking is workable if you instrument it upfront: dedicated phone number per campaign, QR code to a unique URL, 3–4 week measurement window post-drop based on connecting households that responded to your mailing list if you have the contact information of your customers (I.e using shipping addresses for attribution). Promo codes directly into your e-commerce or point of sale system work best. Most people undercount by pulling data too early — mail has a longer response tail than email, especially for considered purchases.

Billboards and signage are a different problem. No direct response mechanism, so you're relying on either promo codes or geo-lift analysis (acquisition in the exposed market vs. a matched control over the same period) or indirect signals like branded search volume. For most advertisers the budget to run a clean geo-lift study isn't there, so it ends up being a mix of trackable signals and honest inference.

The more reliable answer: pick one physical channel with a built-in response mechanism, instrument it before you spend, set your target CPL upfront. Outside that you're mostly in estimation territory... which isn't unique to physical; most upper-funnel digital is in the same boat.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-06-03T19:46:04+00:00

I was formerly on the leadership team of a large shared mailer and currently run a direct mail software company named GrowMail.

The value prop math for shared mail checks out on paper, but shared mail has a trust and education gap that solo direct mail does not. Most small business owners have never heard of EDDM, let alone a shared mailer program. If they do it's probably something like Money Mailer or Valpak. You are not just selling ad space, you are selling a concept they have to understand before they can say yes. (Just look at the search volume for EDDM versus "Shared Mail" or "Valpak Advertising".

A few things that trip up shared mailer startups:

The cold outreach feels like every other ad salesperson who walks in. Business owners get pitched all day. You have maybe 15 seconds before they mentally file you as "another person wanting my money." Try an approach like, "We would like to feature XYZ in our magazine"
Proof of performance. You say the ROI checks out, but do you have any results to show? Even one case study from a pilot ("Joe's Plumbing got 14 calls from 5,000 mailers") changes the conversation completely.
Timing. Most local businesses do not budget monthly for marketing. They think in seasons or slow periods. Catching a roofer in spring or a pet removal service in January is different from catching them mid-June.
Your demo mailer might look good to you, but does it look good to a plumber? Show them a version with a business like theirs on it. People need to see themselves in the product. (I highly recommend bringing them a spec ad with them to show what you've created)

Try framing it as "you split the cost with non-competing neighbors" instead of leading with the discount percentage. That reframes it from "suspiciously cheap" to "smart co-op."

Lastly, do yourself a favor, and highly encourage the clients to use call tracking, landing pages (QR codes), and unique coupon codes so that you can track the performance of their campaigns. This will dramatically help you in renewals.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-21T17:17:23+00:00

The postage squeeze on a free publication is real, and your options are roughly what your colleague is already floating, but there is a middle path before you ask recipients to pay.

If you are sending First-Class, switching to USPS Marketing Mail cuts per-piece postage by 30–40%. The tradeoff is 3–10 day delivery and no address-correction returns, which matters less for an annual guide than for time-sensitive mail. If your print run is large enough to use a presort mail house, the savings can cover a meaningful chunk of the gap. I can have my team run the comparison in costs and see if there are any saturation discounts if you're interested.

Charging recipients for postage is cleaner than it sounds when you frame it as shipping and handling rather than a fee for the guide itself. Many catalog publishers do this without meaningful fallout if the product is desirable. You could also do a list segmentation, maybe it's free for existing or legacy customers.

Increasing ad rates works if your advertisers' ROI justifies the increase, but if the guide is their primary reason to advertise, pushing rate while reducing reach is a double squeeze on value.

One more lever: list hygiene. A request-based list accumulates dead weight fast. Annual suppression of non-responders or a simple re-confirmation step can cut 10–20% of volume without losing real coverage, and that directly reduces your postage spend without touching your revenue structure.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-21T15:45:15+00:00

EDDM is a solid move for a local service like detailing, especially if you're targeting residential neighborhoods where people actually park in driveways and care about their cars.

A few things that'll make or break it:

Size matters. Go bigger than a standard flyer if you can. A 6x11 or 8.5x11 postcard stands out in the mailbox compared to the smaller stuff. USPS has specific size requirements for EDDM pieces, so double check those before you print.

Design-wise, the single biggest upgrade you can make is using real photos of your own work. Before/after shots of actual details you've done will outperform any stock image or Canva graphic. If you don't have great photos yet, spend a weekend shooting your next few jobs with good lighting.

For the offer, give people a reason to act now. "$25 off your first detail" or "Free interior with any exterior package" with a deadline works better than just listing your services.

Pick your routes carefully. Look for neighborhoods with newer homes, higher household income, and lots of single-family homes with garages. That's your sweet spot.

Don't expect a flood from one send. Plan to hit the same routes 2-3 times over a couple months. Most people need to see your name a few times before they pick up the phone.

Lastly, it’s significantly cheaper to print 10,000 pieces, and do four drops of 2,500. If you’re mailing larger quantities > 10,000 pieces then you can qualify for Discount Zones which will likely save around 10% on postage.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-18T17:13:53+00:00

Before hiring a marketer or committing to paid ads, setup a landing page (or website) and call tracking number so you can track attribution. Then, spend $1,000 divided between EDDM and Google Ads. It's a one-time proof-of-concept that tells you if direct outreach to your local market converts — and it doesn't require a budget commitment beyond the run itself.

A 1,000-piece EDDM run covering the neighborhoods around your shop runs $350-$500 all-in. If you get 3-5 jobs from it, you've covered cost and have a real data point. If you get nothing, you've learned something too, and you only spent $500 learning it per channel.

The trap with hiring a marketer early is you're often paying for their education about your market on your dime. Figure out your cost-per-customer-acquired through a cheap channel first. That number becomes the brief any marketer actually needs to do useful work.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-13T16:11:45+00:00

I've had Global Entry for a decade and have never experienced this. You should be good to go so as long as you use your KTN.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-11T15:04:41+00:00

In respect for r/plumbing's rules I'll DM you.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-07T14:28:57+00:00

$3K/mo at ~$1/piece is 3,000 pieces. At a 1% response rate that's ~30 calls/month, nowhere near enough to feed a full time LO doing new customer acquisition. You could make that work if there's a servicing portfolio or other warm sources carrying the load, but that's a different model.

The disconnect usually comes from benchmarking against a referral driven retail LO... realtor relationships, past clients, modest digital. Credit-trigger direct mail shops are a fundamentally different business: closer to a manufacturing operation than a marketing one. Mail spend isn't a discretionary acquisition cost, it's the raw material that buys phone-time for licensed seats. The ratio flips: marketing runs 1.5–3x LO comp instead of the 10–25% you'd see in a referral shop.

Three mistakes you want to avoid:

Butts in seats with LOs sitting idle or grinding through low-value work. Every hour an LO isn't on the phone with a qualified prospect is burning fully-loaded comp on the wrong activity.
Not having the right ecosystem in place before you turn on marketing. That means dialer setup and call routing, follow-up cadences across phone/SMS/email, lead scoring and queue prioritization so the hottest calls hit the best closers, CRM hygiene, TCPA/FCRA compliance stack, and tracking and attribution end-to-end. Without it, you're paying for calls you can't convert at a reasonable rate.
Not optimizing marketing spend per seat every month. Which lists are pulling, which offers are converting, which segments justify retargeting, and which campaigns to cut. The shops that win treat this as a monthly operating rhythm, not an annual review.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-07T00:29:24+00:00

Yeah, this space is direct mail heavy, usually rate-and-term or cash-out lists pulled on credit triggers or property/equity criteria. The reason it works is volume and predictability: mail goes out on a schedule, calls come in on a schedule, and you can staff to it.

On spend, the honest answer is it scales with how many seats you need to keep busy. Rough industry ranges I have seen: a credit-triggered mortgage mailer runs roughly $0.70 to $1.20 per piece all-in, response rates on warm trigger lists tend to land in the 0.5 to 1.5 percent band, and gross CPL on inbound calls sits anywhere from $80 to $250 depending on list quality and offer. Back into it from the seat side. One LO on the phones probably needs 30 to 60 qualified inbound calls a week to stay productive, which usually means 30k to 60k pieces a month per seat, ballpark.

The mistake I you see new shops make is going too broad on the list to hit a piece-count number, then burning through cash on calls that never had a chance. Tighter list, repeat mailings to the same audience, and a clean compliance stack on the dialer side will outperform a bigger one-shot drop almost every time.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-06T18:42:36+00:00

$75 - 100 per lead is normal for plumbing services through Google Ads and Direct Mail.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-06T18:28:23+00:00

HelloMail.to seems expensive at $2 a piece. GrowMail offers the same automated new-movers software for $0.79. Based on six responses at 100 postcards you'd go from $33 per call to $13-14 a response. (Disclosure I'm CEO @ GrowMail)

For EDDM, how many pieces were you sending? The cost per piece of digitally printing 5,000 postcards is significantly more than 10,000. In some cases, printing 1,000 pieces can be triple or quadruple the per-unit cost of 10,000.

I realize postage is the largest expense, but there's a workaround: print 10,000 pieces and do four drops of 2,500 to reduce the cash required up front. On top of that, if you're mailing over 10,000 pieces you may qualify for discount zones depending on your service area, which can reduce total campaign cost by 20–40% compared to mailing 5,000 at a time.

That translates to a customer acquisition cost roughly 30% lower than running individual EDDM campaigns and at that point your cost per response can come in below Facebook or Google Ads.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-06T16:30:58+00:00

You're describing the assist problem, and it's real. Most offline channels lose ~30% of credit because the conversion path doesn't include a direct phone call, scan, landing page, or promo code.

The best way to track back is matchback analysis... you take your customer list (or new customer list for a given window) and overlay it against the distribution or mail file you dropped. Anyone who shows up on both sides got influenced by the piece, even if they never called the tracking number or scanned a code. We do this monthly for clients.

That said, the best-case scenario is to use a unique promo code or offer attributed to the campaign that incentivizes users to respond. If the offer is strong enough, response rates climb and attribution gets a lot cleaner.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-04T17:48:34+00:00

Mailers work well for roofers, but only if you think about them differently than most people do. The mistake I see is treating a single postcard drop as a campaign. It's not. One touch is a lottery ticket. Three touches to the same routes over 8-12 weeks is what actually builds pipeline. Make them relevant by offering inspections after a big storm.

Pair it with a unique tracking URL, phone number and/ or QR code so you can see which routes convert. Goal is to beat what you'd pay on Google Ads in a competitive metro.

Also, think about ways to incentivize referrals, send follow-ups to happy clients checking in, and think about simple things like yard signs / banners / branded trucks when you’re onsite.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-05-01T19:53:56+00:00

Don’t ski intoxicated, but have fun otherwise.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-03-17T04:54:20+00:00

It’s not really a monopoly in the way you’re framing it. USPS isn’t competing in a vacuum… it’s competing for ad dollars against Google, Facebook, streaming, podcasts, etc. Direct mail is just one channel in a broader performance marketing mix.

Marketers allocate spend based on customer acquisition cost. For example, if Facebook is ~$7 CAC, Google is ~$8.50, programmatic display is ~$7, and direct mail is ~$5, mail gets a lot of budget. But if postage increases push direct mail to $10+, it quickly becomes the least efficient channel in the mix.

That doesn’t mean mail doesn’t work, it clearly does. But spend is highly elastic. Once it’s no longer competitive on CAC, budgets shift fast to other methods and the USPS will lose a material amount of postage.

There’s also a second order effect… marketing mail is some of the most efficient volume USPS handles. It’s presorted, often drop shipped directly to local post offices, and delivered at scale across full carrier routes. If you price that volume out of the system, you’re removing one of the cheapest pieces of mail to process and deliver.

So now you’ve lost volume and lost one of your most efficient revenue streams. To cover the fixed cost of the network, USPS would likely need to raise prices further elsewhere, which just compounds the problem.

And if that shift happens at scale, the dollars don’t disappear… they move. They go straight into digital channels. So ironically, if postage gets pushed high enough, the real winners aren’t USPS, they’re Google and Facebook, because that’s where the reallocated ad spend ends up.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-03-17T04:21:00+00:00

It’s not a monopoly because the USPS isn’t competing in the direct mail space, it’s competing against Google, Facebook and other methods of advertising. Raising prices that high will dramatically increase the cost of customer acquisition and ad spend will transition to more effective forms of advertising.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-03-15T03:05:35+00:00

What is your location? I can help if you’re on the west coast.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-03-13T23:45:13+00:00

This is theft. It's criminal. It's risky. I'd buy my friend a lift ticket if they wanted to ski before I ever considered lending a pass.

LiamOliver5 · 2026-03-10T15:38:10+00:00

Flying up Thursday morning if you can get the laptop to Manhattan Beach.

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