The honest question

When we sell SimpL using SimpL, the numbers look great. When some customers try the same setup, they stall at 2%.

We kept asking an uncomfortable question: is the product actually good, or do we just know our own story too well? We know every objection, every pain point, every moment someone is ready to hear from us. Customers bring brand guidelines, approved messaging, and ICPs shaped by years of internal politics. We wondered if our results reflected the platform — or our familiarity with what we sell.

That question spawned Sell Anything, a Labs experiment running since March 31, 2026. The premise was simple. Remove us from the equation entirely.

The experiment

We picked two agency-service products in verticals where we have zero experience. No brand. No website. No social presence. No warm leads. No referrals.

The setup was standard SimpL — nothing custom, nothing hidden. We defined the ICP, connected open-web signals, and let the system run. SimpL finds who to contact, why now, and what to say. It reads public signals, drafts outreach grounded in what the prospect is actually doing, and learns from who replied and why. Every configuration we used is available to every SimpL customer today.

Agency services were deliberate. There is no product demo, no free trial, no self-serve path. You are selling trust to people who get pitched every day. If the system could start real conversations here, the category was not the problem.

The results so far (~90% response rates)

Response rates across both products are approaching 90%.

Zero brand recognition. No manual intervention. No special tricks on our side.

This is not a promise or an industry benchmark. It is a data point from controlled conditions with a small sample, and the experiment is still running. We are publishing it because it is real, and because Labs exists for transparency — not polished case studies.

Most teams will not hit 90%. Brand constraints and compliance matter. But the gap between 2% and what we are seeing is not about the product being sold or the market being addressed. Something else is going on.

What we think is happening (the baggage hypothesis)

When brand constraints, approved messaging, and institutional ego are removed, the system focuses entirely on what the prospect cares about. Messages get sharper, more direct, more human.

Companies do not write bad messages because they are bad at writing. They write bad messages because they cannot stop talking about themselves.

Three observations from the experiment so far:

1. Removing brand constraints made outreach sharper, not worse. Without a voice committee or legacy sequence to protect, SimpL wrote about the prospect's situation — not our positioning deck.

2. Messages for products we have no emotional attachment to are more direct. We are not defending a tagline or a feature launch. The draft starts with what changed for them, not what we want to say.

3. Signal quality matters more than message quality. The best-converting outreach was not better written. It was sent at the right moment, about the right thing, to the right person. Timing beat polish.

The mechanism is the same one SimpL runs for customers every day: open-web signals plus outcome learning. Who replied, what was said, why. Not list-and-blast. The difference in Sell Anything is what we removed — not what we added.

What this means for sales teams

The bottleneck in cold outreach is rarely the product or the market. It is institutional baggage.

Brand voice committees that slow every draft. Sequences someone built two years ago and nobody wants to kill. ICPs shaped by internal politics instead of conversion data. The inability to write a message that starts with the prospect instead of the company.

This does not mean brand is bad. Brand should serve the signal, not override it. When a funding round or a hiring spike creates a reason to reach out today, the message should lead with that — not with your value proposition paragraph.

The daily feed SimpL produces is built around this: who, why now, and a draft that sounds like homework was done. Not a template with merge fields. Not "we help companies like yours." A specific reason, tied to a specific person, at a specific moment.

What's next (and a CTA)

The experiment is expanding. We are moving into a second vertical now, with a plan to run four to five product categories by end of Q2 — each with its own ICP and signal configuration. Results from every vertical will be published as they come in. Failures included.

Want to see what SimpL finds in your market? Get SimpL and watch the first feed build itself. Or read the full Sell Anything experiment — early results, no filter.