Personalised outreach you actually send yourself

Outreach is the execution arm of your segment map: paste or import a prospect and John drafts a first-touch email and a LinkedIn message grounded in the value proposition for the segment they belong to. It drafts only. There is no automated sending, no SMTP warm-up manager and no LinkedIn bot — the most it will do is open a pre-filled compose window in your own email client, and you press send. That is a deliberate design decision, not a missing feature.

“I have to reach 50 of the right people this week. ChatGPT writes generic crap, and Apollo wants $99 a month and doesn't know what my product does.”

What you get

Artifacts, not adjectives.

A first-touch email and a LinkedIn message per contact, written from the value proposition of that contact's segment.
Follow-up drafts that reference what actually happened rather than bumping the thread.
Optional email lookup for a contact — charged only when an address is found, never for a miss.
Contacts that flow straight into the CRM, so nothing is hand-entered twice.

What it isn't

The half that decides whether this is right for you.

Not an automated sender. No sequences running unattended, no send-on-your-behalf. You review and send each one.
Not a deliverability suite. Domain warming, SPF, DKIM and DMARC are yours to set up — and the channel playbook for cold email tells you how, because getting it wrong is the expensive mistake.
Not a scraper. It does not harvest contacts from directories or maps; you bring the list.

What it costs

1 credit per contact for the email and LinkedIn draft together. Email lookup is 1 credit per address actually found — misses are free.

One shared credit pool across every job. You are only charged for work you approve — a failed generation costs nothing.

What has to happen first

Needs a segment map, and a paid plan. The segment map is what makes the copy specific rather than generic, which is the entire reason to use this instead of a prompt.

John prepares. You approve.

Everything here arrives as a draft in your inbox with its credit cost shown before you decide. Nothing is sent, published or spent without your explicit yes, and there is no setting that changes that — it is the architecture rather than a preference. The reasoning is written up here.

Cold outreach: common questions

Will John send cold emails for me?

No, and this is deliberate. He drafts; you send. The furthest it goes is opening a pre-filled compose window in your own email client. Automated sending in someone else's name is the failure mode that produces wrong names and stale prices in live messages to real people, and no draft-quality improvement makes it safe.

Is cold email even legal?

It depends entirely on where your recipients are — broadly permitted for B2B in the US under CAN-SPAM if you identify yourself and honour opt-outs, and materially more restricted under GDPR in the EU and UK. That is not legal advice; check the rules for the jurisdictions you are sending to before you start.

Why is Outreach on paid plans only?

Because it is the chapter most capable of doing reputational damage at volume, and because it is only useful once your segments exist. Free and Starter get the strategy chapters that come before it; the plans page has the full breakdown.

John's other jobs

Last updated 2026-08-03