- 11,997
You're right, this is confusing. Are you saying that you're a ListShack customer?
Listshack Pro website issues
- Thread starter kgressler
- Start date
You're right, this is confusing. Are you saying that you're a ListShack customer?
LOL....you're the one that said we were, so you tell me! Even if we were though, it wouldn't come from FinalExpense101.com.....so that's not right.
- 11,997
Again, this is all very confusing
Big picture, anyone that is a customer of any listshack URL, listshack.com, listshackpro.com, listshack.support, has been a customer of Affordable Marketing Lists, LLC. That's a Virginia LLC. The address in Oakton says closed because when the three year lease was up, I moved out of the office and we started trying the "virtual office" thing to save some money. Affordable Marketing Lists, LLC has been doing business as AffordableMarketingLists.com, ListShack.com, and ListShackPro.com.
Wyatt, was appointed as the CFO, but he has partners at another technology company that I believe he worked with to make ListShack.support. Rather than him fixing the minor issues with ListShack.com or ListShackPro.com, he redirected the traffic to ListShack.support because this helped him avoid having to learn our code base and systems as we've been at that point using them for six years. Wyatt was informed by no later than 2/20/2020, that his services were no longer needed, partially because there appears to be a lot of money missing. During the time here on the forum people were accusing me of taking money and running, he was the one in charge of the money and, frankly, everything else. He told the original developer for ListShack that he didn't think my health would recover and to not even talk to me anymore... then he started taking $14k/month from the business without talking to me.
I met Wyatt at church years ago when I was married. I've gone to his birthday parties, helped him pick up a couch because for a while I was foolish enough to own a truck, those sorts of things. So when I started feeling like I wasn't well and I needed someone to help watch the business so I could attend to my health issues, Wyatt seemed like a good choice. He initially said he was just doing it to be a friend and he knew how hard I worked to build my business.
So why during that time Wyatt ignored the complaints on the insurance forum, I couldn't tell you. I was trying to be disconnected. Some of the attacks on here get very personal. Take this guy, whatyouwantfinally, years ago he came to the insurance form about some internet lead generation revelation or something, and then when he finds out ListShack is having issues, it appears he tried to game out building his own platform and getting into this exact same space. Oh, really fun fact, John Spangler, who I believe has some ownership interest in SalesDataPro.com, actually for years bought data from me through ListShackPro.com, isn't that funny?
So, since the guy that was supposed to be taking care of my business while I was taking care of my health appears to have had ulterior motives, it's making this thing really messy.
I do appreciate you caring enough about what's going on to go back and forth about it. I think on threads like this it helps vendors have open and transparent discussions about what's going on.
I'll hit you up on google hangouts regarding the specifics related to you and/or finalexpense101 re: listshack.
- 26,177
Step 1:
Own your own shit.
Own your own shit.
whatyouwantfinally
Guru
- 527
I came on the forum in 2009 (I believe, anyway) because I had interesting information about an event/company that was relevant in the insurance leads world at the time. I stuck around because I became an insurance agent. And yes, I decided to start a lists company when I saw how bad you dropped the ball. You did the same thing originally; the idea of unlimited lists for $50/month wasn't your idea. You saw that another company had offered it and took it away, leaving a demand. That's business, don't complain about it now.
And nothing you're saying here makes sense. You're very concerned about your company's reputation, but for months while all this went on (all before this Wyatt guy came into the picture), you were partying it up on the beach in Venice, driving around in a 6-figure car, not addressing any of it. You didn't have time to answer 200 emails a day? Considering they would all be about the same thing (the service doesn't work and/or I want to cancel), you could literally send 1 or 2 emails with everyone CC'd on them. Even if you typed out a 60-second response to each one, that's what, under 4 hours a day? If you paid someone to help you could have it done well before lunch. That's just a lie.
It's not like you weren't online. You were posting to Twitter about your adventures constantly every day, sometimes actually posting customer complaints from your email and mocking them. On your company's Facebook page a few months ago you were blaming everything on your original programmer, saying he locked you out and HE was trying to steal all the customers (all those posts are conveniently gone).
Stripe has processes in place to recover your account if you can't do the two-step authentication. It takes like one day.
And, of course, the time you choose to finally come back here and address it happens to coincide with your having a new site you need people to sign up for.
- 11,997
Objectively, you don't know the actual history on my business.
Do you have any suggestions on how to send an email to about 5,000 customers? Gmail won't allow it and MailChimp literally refuses to work with list brokers (surprisingly). I'm in the process of trying to set up a mail server for ListShackPro, but if you have any other helpful suggestions about how I could send an email to 5,000 people, I'm all ears.
I'm just quoting this for the attorneys.
- 11,997
There were a lot of problems. I'll be honest, I've been following up with Sue Reed with the Missouri AG office. They haven't been responding to me. I was confused as to what their position was on someone, I believe to be you, making personal attacks against me on facebook?
To speak specifically to your issue, if someone has your money, it's Wyatt. I have contacted the Fairfax County Police and they are currently assigning a detective to it. I've been consulting with attorneys. I've also been talking to Stripe (the merchant processor) and had a big win with them last week. I still have a few thousand transactions I'm trying to get settled out and there just isn't a good way to get around it. I have two people I'm interviewing for a customer support position and that, combined with possibly a ringless voicemail drop/emails/etc, should help me figure out what is going on in terms of who has had refunds, who still needs them, and who needs to cancel.
During any period of time of outages, the funds automatically withdrawn, remained in the Stripe account. Wyatt Grantham was hired as the CFO to help deal with some banking issues we were having that would have gotten the original developer paid and we would have been able to fix the two major known bugs. Wyatt had raised over $3 million dollars for his startup around the time I was starting ListShack, I've known him for years, and I met him at church, so I thought he would be a trustworthy and competent choice. I also thought he could have been able to get the health insurance paid; Not that my health really should be anyone's business, but I take a drug for bipolar disorder called Lamictal. With my little girl having four brain surgeries before she turned two, being told by her doctor we weren't sure if she'd live to three, a financially devastating divorce, and then the loss of the 300 milligrams a day of lamictal, it was very difficult for me to focus on work. We also were having banking issues which prevented two staff members from getting paid and so in order to move forward we needed to make some changes.
The customer service model on ListShack was pretty much always an 800 number that goes to an answering service, I get those messages emailed to me, and then that would get forwarded to the customer service rep (formerly Jared). This let me keep an eye on what feedback we were getting (I usually read every message that came in) and Jared was usually able to call people back within 15 minutes. So when Jared was no longer working, customers didn't really have an indication about what was going on, so more and more messages to the answering service. Rough numbers, I have had a lot of customers. Any plan that involved me calling each person back would have meant multiplied by the number of times I was having to call people back divided by 168 hours in a week meant I just needed better solutions for customer service that scaled better. When the SSL warning was on the site it was a pretty big tell that maintenance wasn't being done. With what limited access I had I was able to stop the billing for ListShack.com and then Wyatt was given access to the Stripe account for ListShackPro.com. By the time he got access to it, he chose to launch a clone of the site and, as I understand it, spoke with customers directly and I was told that around that time, more or less all the customer concerns were resolved. I think that was around October/November.
It is currently my understanding that if anyone has not received a refund, then the money is still available for any time when people paid for a service they weren't getting. Wyatt created a clone of the site and redirected people to it, effectively bypassing my business form getting paid. As it sits right now I am working with Stripe to get help getting people refunds (have about 25 right now in my mailbox). I have so far had some degree of success with Stripe on some other issues and so I'm optimistic about how this will turn out, but it's just taking time.
In an attempt to try to make everything easier on folks that just wanted a great place to access cheap data, all of the ListShack.com and ListShackPro.com traffic is being redirected to DownloadSalesLeads.com until we relaunch ListShack.com. So as of the time of my writing this, I believe some customers have signed up through the cloned version of ListShack Wyatt made and have been getting what they paid for. I don't see any reason to refund those people which is why there have been some mixed messages about refunds/not refunds/etc.
For what it's worth, having people complaining to the attorney general, making repeated calls, sending threatening emails, etc, none of that has helped me get through this any quicker. It's also worth noting that it wasn't until yesterday I was able to pay myself anything since around the middle of last year and most of that is probably going to have to go back into the business.
So as much fun as it would be to fill up the trunk of a car with cash and ride off into the sunset, that's just not what's been going on. I have a tech going to the server site this week and we should be able to restore access to our primary servers and from there work on the relaunch of ListShack.com. In the meantime, a lot of customers just needed access to affordable lists, so we took DownloadSalesLeads.com and put that up so call centers that rely on affordable data and other vendors could get back to work. I'm very lucky that the two technical workers I built ListShack with have been very understanding of my situation and circumstances and frankly, we spent about 7 years working on this, it makes us happy to see ListShack up and running. For at least two of us, this was our blood, sweat, and tears.
To go back to your earlier comment about who is responsible for the $35, as long as you got your everything else back, if you'd consider being compensated for that as good customer service (understanding I can't go back in time and change anything that's already happened), I'd be happy to write you a check for the $35, just email me your address. Near as I can tell you were with me for at least two years so if the only difference between us being at odds is $35, just PM me here with your address and I'll get the check out. I'm sure it was a pain for you to contact the AG and I'm sure you had other things you'd rather be doing than being upset about feeling ripped off.
Robert Burkett
New Member
- 1
I have read the above posts about ListShack. Years ago I bought leads from ListShack and was satisfied. I want to buy more today. So, where do I go? Is ListShack or any of its affiliates open for business?
- 5,506
If you can't figure out how to send 5,000 emails, then you shouldn't be in any sort of decision making capacity.
- 4,202
Yeah, I just sent out 3,000 to this 13 year old superhero with a deformed left hand.
