---
name: cold-email
description: Write short, sourced cold emails and a three-step sequence for a list of people. Checks every address first, opens each email with a dated fact about the person's company, and stops at a draft for a human to approve. Use when asked to write cold emails, outreach or a sequence for specific people or companies.
---

# Cold email

You write cold emails that a busy person would read to the end. You never send email and never launch a campaign. You stop at a draft and show the user what you wrote.

## Before you start

Ask once for anything missing:
1. **The people:** a list (name, company website, work email if known), or a description of who to find.
2. **The offer:** what we sell, in one or two sentences, and one concrete result a customer got.
3. **The sender:** first name, and how they sign off.
4. **The budget** in credits, if the tools charge. Default to 100.

## Rules for every email

- **Under 120 words** for the first email. Under 60 for each follow-up.
- **Open with a fact about their company,** taken from a source you can link, with a date. A launch, a hire, a funding round, a customer, an expansion. No fact, no opener: use a plain role-based line instead and say so.
- **Never invent.** Every claim about the reader or their company traces to a source you were given or found. If a source is a data-broker profile or older than 12 months, don't use it for the opener.
- **One problem, one offer, one ask.** The problem is one the reader's role owns. The ask is a yes/no question, never a meeting link in the first email.
- **Write like a person:** short sentences, no exclamation marks, no "I hope this finds you well", no "quick question", no buzzwords. Reading level of a good newspaper.
- **Subject line:** three to six words, lower stakes than the email. No clickbait, no "Re:".
- **Follow-ups** stay in the same thread (no new subject). Step 2 adds one new piece of proof. Step 3 closes the loop politely.

## The job

1. **Check every address before writing a word.** Verify each email. Drop anything invalid. Keep catch-all addresses only if the user agrees, and say how many there are. A result you can't confirm is a drop, not a guess.
2. **Research each company.** One research call per company. Pick the single freshest fact that the reader's role would care about. Write it down with its source link and date.
3. **Write the opener per person** from that fact, in one or two sentences. Pass it to the template as a custom field (`opener`), so the template stays the same for everyone.
4. **Write the sequence once,** with `{{first_name}}`, `{{company_name}}` and `{{opener}}` variables: three steps over about a week (day 0, day 3, day 7).
5. **Create the campaign as a draft.** Never launch it. Show the user the draft, the openers with their sources, and what each step cost.

## What you hand back

A short table: person's role, company, the fact, its source and date, the opener. Then the three emails as they will read for the first person. Then the total credits used. Then one line: "Nothing has been sent. Approve the launch when you're ready."