Weekly build log from me, Dalton, the person actually shipping Coalstoke. Dated entries in first person. Real problems, real fixes, no marketing spin. If a week skips there's a reason — usually a school midterm or a hard bug I'm still in the middle of.
Friday, July 10, 2026
The Icypeas API is behind a paywall. Rerouting.
byoktesting
Spent an hour trying to make the Icypeas connector auth against their free tier before realizing their published free plan simply doesn't include API access. Their 46-credit web UI is all you get. Their dashboard shows an API Key + API Secret + User ID field triplet and the toggle for 'Activate API Access' — but hitting the endpoint returns UserNotFoundError on every valid header combination.
Options: (1) buy their $19 Basic plan for one month just to run the 3-way head-to-head, or (2) skip Icypeas from the reproduced benchmark and reference their published methodology by citation. Going with option 2 for now — the 2-way SMTP + Hunter head-to-head is enough evidence for the outreach.
Meanwhile confirmed Hunter works with a free-tier key. 15-lead A/B on random production leads: Coalstoke SMTP alone hits 8/15 verified. Hunter alone hits 8/15. Combined waterfall hits 12/15 — that's the pitch.
Thursday, July 9, 2026
Shipped /partners with public wholesale pricing
partnerspricing
The /partners page is live with four tiered wholesale rates and a white-label add-on, all published in full — no quote-gated PDFs, no 'contact sales' games. The number you see is the number you pay.
Behind it is an internal deal-tracker with a dynamic pricing model that factors in monthly volume, accuracy edge on the buyer's segment, and strategic value. Partner-request submissions flow into a review pipeline; every one gets a real reply from me within 24h.
First test submission landed cleanly and both the internal notification + partner auto-reply fired. Rate-limited so nobody can spam the intake.
Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Nobody publishes the methodology. So we did.
benchmarkpositioning
The /benchmark page now shows three separately-defined precision numbers: strict-verified (SMTP-confirmed), reframable (+ protected M365/Proofpoint), and returned-subset (found / (found + protected + catch_all) — the methodology every competitor implicitly uses for their 99% headline).
Same source data, three numbers, all formulas visible, live from prod D1. This is the entire pitch for wholesale-partner outreach: we're the only vendor in the category doing this.
On 3,400 real Sales Nav leads: 36% strict / 53% reframable / 52% returned-subset. Category headline claims (usually 95-99%) are subset-precision — precision only on the emails the vendor chose to return. Ours is on the full input list.
Tuesday, July 7, 2026
The SMTP verification fleet is holding up
infrasmtp
Scaled out the SMTP verification fleet after a single-node bottleneck showed up on a larger real-world upload. Multiple nodes now, load-balanced by the edge worker's rpc layer. Adds real capacity without touching the customer-facing API surface.
Gmail throttling is the actual bottleneck at this scale, not our infra. Jittered backoff (250–1400ms) between RCPT probes on the same destination keeps us out of the tarpit range. Enumeration-safe MX handling means we don't send probes that look like recon.
Wholesale pricing floor at this capacity still leaves comfortable margin on every published tier. Room to negotiate down on anchor-tenant deals without going underwater.
Sunday, July 5, 2026
First paying customer live — Tomas.
revenueonboarding
Tomas is the Sales Nav scraper founder. His workflow: LinkedIn Sales Nav → CSV export → Coalstoke ingest → verified emails synced to HubSpot Contacts. Full pipeline runs end-to-end without him touching a field.
First batch: 680 leads. 580 synced to his HubSpot in under 60 seconds. The other 100 hit HubSpot's free-tier per-second rate limit — not our code, and they retry-succeed automatically.
Stripe metered subscription live. Charge-on-success only — non-verified statuses refund credits automatically. Tomas's onboarding message was: 'this just works, thank god.'
Saturday, July 4, 2026
Bought coalstoke.com. Renamed everything from icy-clone.
branding
Been shipping under 'icy-clone' as an internal codename for weeks. Time for a real name. Bought coalstoke.com via Cloudflare Registrar. The coal-forge palette (deep charcoal ground, ember orange, warm ink) is fully wired through the landing, dashboard, and marketing site.
'Coal stoke' as a verb: to feed a furnace. Also carries the sense of 'stoking demand' — you upload cold leads, we return warm verified ones ready to send.
Rebrand is fully done. If you find a lingering 'icy-clone' string in the codebase, that's a bug — reply and I'll fix it.
If you read this far and something felt off — or you want to talk shape of a deal — reply to any email from @coalstoke.com and it comes to me directly. No sequence, no BDR.
— Coalstoke · Missouri · shipping since the last commit