How to get your first 10 customers
The launch-and-wait playbook fails because discovery is dead. A concrete week-by-week plan for winning your first 10 customers with direct outreach — with the math that keeps you sane.
Read the guide →The AI SDR for founders
Every AI SDR is built for sales teams — seats, CRMs, ops. Founders need something different: one person, zero setup, full control. What founder-mode outbound looks like.
Read the guide →“Do things that don't scale” is outreach advice
Paul Graham's most-quoted essay is really about manual customer recruitment. Why founders agree with it and still don't do it — and how to keep its spirit at real volume.
Read the guide →How to write cold emails that get replies
The anatomy of a cold email that gets answered: subject lines that read like internal mail, first lines about them, one honest sentence about you, and a question-sized ask.
Read the guide →How to find someone's business email
Five reliable ways to find a work email address — from free pattern-guessing to enrichment tools — plus the verification step that protects your domain.
Read the guide →One tool that finds the leads AND writes the emails
The standard outbound stack is four subscriptions and a Zapier bill: data, sequencer, warmup, inbox. What changes when one agent does the whole loop.
Read the guide →Never send cold email from your main domain
Why outreach from your primary domain (or even a subdomain) risks your product email, the cousin-domain setup serious senders use, and the mailbox math for real volume.
Read the guide →persist vs Instantly: AI agent or sending infrastructure?
Instantly is machinery you operate — mailboxes, warm-ups, campaigns. persist is an agent that runs outreach itself. Which fits depends on whether you want to be the operator.
Read the guide →persist vs Apollo.io: database or agent?
Apollo sells ingredients: a huge database plus tooling you drive. persist cooks: brief the agent in a sentence, review the campaign, take the replies.
Read the guide →7 Apollo alternatives for founders (2026)
The honest alternatives map by use case — AI agents, sending infrastructure, enrichment, email finders — with a one-minute chooser at the end.
Read the guide →The 6 best AI SDR tools in 2026
The real AI SDR category, mapped honestly: persist, 11x, Artisan, AiSDR, Reply.io, Regie — by autonomy, price shape, and who each is actually for.
Read the guide →What is an AI SDR? A founder’s guide
What an AI SDR actually does, the honest human-vs-AI comparison, when a founder needs one, and the five questions that separate real agents from spam cannons.
Read the guide →Cold email subject lines that get opened (27 examples)
The three rules that earn opens without lying, 27 real subject lines grouped by play, and the words that send you straight to spam.
Read the guide →How many cold emails can you send per day?
Provider caps vs practical limits, the warm-up ramp for new domains, throttling warning signs, and the multi-mailbox math for scaling safely.
Read the guide →Cold email deliverability: the 12-point pre-send checklist
SPF, DKIM, DMARC, separate sending domains, verification, warm-up, pacing — everything to check before your outreach ever leaves the outbox.
Read the guide →7 B2B cold email templates that don’t sound like templates
Copy-paste structures with the reasoning behind each — problem-poke, trigger event, proof-first, founder-to-founder, and the breakup that out-replies them all.
Read the guide →AI SDR vs hiring an SDR: the real cost math
A human SDR runs $110–140k fully loaded with months of ramp. When software wins, when humans win, and the hybrid that outperforms both.
Read the guide →How to find B2B leads without buying a list
Why purchased lists quietly ruin your outreach, how to write an ICP that filters itself, and the buying signals that actually predict replies.
Read the guide →Cold email follow-ups: how many to send and what to say
Most replies come from the follow-ups, not the first email. Here's how many touches to send, how to space them, and what each one should actually say.