outreach-pilot

Pilot: a first campaign on 100 contacts

What this does

Walks you through one complete outbound campaign, from "who do we sell to" to "here is what the numbers say", on a deliberately small list of 100 contacts. It runs the other skills in order and stops at every step so you can look at what was produced before anything costs money or reaches a person. At the end it gives you one decision: scale, change the message, or change the target.

When to use it

Use it when you have never run a campaign with this repository, when you are opening a market you have not sold to, when you are testing a new offer, or when the sending domain is new. Use it also when someone else set up a campaign and you want to see the whole chain once, slowly.

Do not use it when you already know the market and the copy works: run outreach with full instead, which does the same steps without stopping at each one. Do not use it to fix a campaign that is already running: that is outreach-audit.

Inputs

Input	Required	If missing
A sentence about who you sell to and what you sell	yes	ask for it, do not guess
The country or countries you will email	yes	ask, the rules differ by market
EMELIA_API_KEY in the environment	for enrichment and sending	offer dry run: every file is still produced, nothing is sent, nothing is charged
A source of contacts (Basile key, a Sales Navigator search URL, or a CSV)	yes	ask which one, a CSV always works
A sending domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and warmup running	before launch only	say it at step 1, not at step 8, so the user can start warmup today
An Emelia campaign whose steps are already built in the app	before launch only	explain the split at step 1 (see step 8), it surprises everyone once

BASILE_API_KEY is optional and only used if the list comes from Basile. The MCP server is optional too: the pilot uses the REST API by default and reaches for MCP only where REST has no equivalent (campaign statistics, warmup status, sending accounts, list management). Check whether it is configured, never assume.

Write nothing outside outreach/ in the current directory.

How to do it

What it costs you, before you start

Time, if the sending domain is already warmed:

Phase	Your attention	Elapsed
Steps 1 to 3 (target, rules, list)	10 to 15 min	same day
Steps 4 to 6 (verify, copy, sequence)	15 to 25 min	same day
Step 7 (deliverability gate)	5 min	same day
Step 8 (launch)	2 min	same day
Step 9 (read the results)	three check-ins of 5 min	14 days

If the domain is not warmed, add two to three weeks before step 8. Warmup cannot be compressed, and starting it is free, which is why step 7 is announced at step 1.

Credits, on 100 contacts:

What	How many jobs	Skipped when
Find email	one per contact with no email, at most 100	the row already carries an address
Verify email	one per address, so about 100	never, verification is not optional here
Find phone	zero	the pilot is email only

Each job consumes Emelia credits, and the price per job depends on your plan: read it in the Emelia app before you answer yes. This skill states the count and waits for an explicit yes before spending anything.

Submit the whole batch, then poll the whole batch. The finder is asynchronous: the POST returns a jobId at once and the GET answers when the server is done. Waiting out one row before starting the next turns a 250 row run into two hours; sent as a wave the same 250 come back in a minute or two, because the jobs run in parallel server side. scripts/find-emails.py does this, and --enough 120 lets it stop as soon as the campaign has the contacts it needs, leaving the slower rows to finish on their own with their jobId written into the file. The /tools/ routes are exempt from the per plan rate limit, so there is nothing to pace: hold back only on the campaign and list routes (100 requests per minute on Start, 300 on Grow, 1,000 on Scale, 30 with no subscription). Do not retry in a loop when you see a rate limit.

Why 100 and not 1,000

1. It answers the only question a first campaign has. Not "which subject line wins", but "is anything here alive". Three replies out of 100 means the chain works end to end. Zero replies means something is broken, and you find out for the price of 100 contacts.
2. It is not enough to compare two things, and that is fine. With 100 sends, an observed 5% reply rate carries a 95% interval of roughly 2% to 11%. Telling a 3% message apart from a 6% message at normal confidence takes around 750 contacts per variant (standard two proportion sample size, so a rule of thumb, not a promise). The pilot therefore runs one message, not an A/B test. A/B testing comes later, with volume.
3. It protects the domain. A domain that has never sent cold email and suddenly pushes 1,000 messages gets throttled, foldered or blocked, and reputation takes weeks to rebuild. 100 messages across ten working days is ten a day, which a warmed mailbox carries without a bump.
4. Mistakes stay cheap. A merge variable that renders empty, a link that 404s, a first line that reads as a template: on 100 contacts you burn 100 contacts. You do not get to email the same person again with the better version and expect a different answer.
5. The bounce rate stays survivable. Three bounces out of 100 is a visible 3% and a reason to stop. Thirty bounces out of 1,000 is the same rate with ten times the damage already done.

The nine steps

Run them in order. After each one, show the user what was produced and wait. Record the decision in outreach/pilot.md before moving on.

Step 1. Say who you are targeting. Run outreach-icp. Produces outreach/icp.json: titles, industries, headcount, geography, exclusions. Check before continuing: read it back. Could you name one real company that fits? Are the exclusions written down (existing customers, competitors, students, agencies)? If the titles list runs past six entries, that is a wish, not a spec: cut it.

Step 2. Sharpen what you sell. Produces outreach/offer.md, and the block the writing prompt will consume. Check before continuing: what you sell is specific enough that a competitor could not put their logo on the same sentence. If it still reads like a category description, the messages will read like everyone else's and the pilot will not tell you much.

Step 3. Source about 500, cut to about 250, enrich those. Run outreach-leads with a target of 150, then outreach-filter. Produces outreach/leads.csv, source column kept. Source 150 and not 100: filtering removes duplicates, current customers, blacklisted domains and rows too thin to personalize. Sourcing exactly 100 leaves you with 70. Check before continuing: open the file and read ten rows at random. For each one, could you write the first line of an email to that person without inventing anything? If the answer is no for three of the ten, the list is the problem. Go back to step 1.

Step 4. Find the missing addresses, and verify only the ones you brought yourself. Run outreach-enrich. Produces outreach/enrichment.json: found, not found, verification result, cost. Filter first (step 3), enrich second. Never the other way round: credits spent on rows you are about to delete are gone. Check before continuing: the run reports found and not found separately, as percentages. Keep the rows the finder returned as valid, plus the ones you brought that the verifier confirmed. Drop catch-all and unknown rows from the pilot rather than "trying them anyway", because on 100 contacts you cannot afford their bounce risk. If you end up below 80 usable rows, source more before launching: a pilot on 60 contacts answers nothing.

Step 5. Write the sequence. Run outreach-write. Produces outreach/sequence.md: subject, first email, two follow ups. One angle, one ask, no A/B at this size. Check before continuing: read the first email as if it landed in your own inbox on a Tuesday morning. Is every claim in it true? Do all the variables fill correctly on your first three rows? Is the ask small enough to answer in one line? If the email needs a paragraph to explain what you do, the offer is not ready and no sequence will fix it.

Step 6. Design the flow. Run outreach-sequence. Produces the campaign spec in outreach/campaign.json. For a pilot: three email steps over about twelve working days, stop on reply, no condition branches, no A/B versions. Check before continuing: the flow stops when someone replies, the delays are in working days, and there is no fourth step. A fourth step buys a few replies and costs more unsubscribes than it is worth at this size.

Step 7. The deliverability gate. Run outreach-deliverability. This step is allowed to stop the pilot, and it should. It must confirm: SPF, DKIM and DMARC published on the sending domain; warmup running with a healthy score; the sending domain is not the domain your invoices come from; a daily cap of ten to twenty per mailbox; a custom tracking domain if link tracking is on. Anything missing means no launch today. Check before continuing: you can state each of those five out loud. This is the step people skip, and it is the most common reason a first campaign returns nothing.

Step 8. Launch. Run outreach-campaign. It waits for an explicit yes. Before you give it: send yourself a test of all three steps and read them on a phone. Be honest with the user about the split of work, and say it now if you have not already. POST /advanced/campaigns creates a campaign with a name and nothing else: the three steps, the delays, the schedule and the sending identities are built once in the Emelia app, on that campaign, and the user starts it there. From then on it is programmable: contacts added to the list attached to the campaign enter the running campaign on their own, so the last action of the pilot is pushing your 100 verified contacts into that list. Check before continuing: outreach/campaign.json holds the campaign id, the list id and a contact count that matches the number you verified at step 4. If those counts differ, do not launch, find the missing rows first.

Step 9. Read what happened. Run outreach-audit three times, at day 3, day 7 and day 14. Produces outreach/report.md.

The three read points

Day 3, once the first email has reached everyone. One question only: is it being delivered?

• Bounces above 3% of sent: pause the campaign now and go back to step 4. Nothing else matters until that is fixed.
• Two or more unsubscribes already: the list or the first line is wrong, pause.
• Zero sent: the campaign never actually started. Check the campaign status (a campaign left in DRAFT sends nothing) and the sending mailboxes (a disconnected provider sends nothing either).
• Anything else: keep going and change nothing. It is far too early to judge the copy.

Day 7, after the second step. Record the numbers, read every reply in full, answer the ones that deserve an answer. The only changes allowed today are answering replies and pausing on a deliverability signal. Follow ups carry a large share of the replies, so judging the copy now will make you throw away a message that was about to work.

Day 14, sequence complete. Decide, using the table below.

The decision at day 14

Per 100 contacts actually contacted, not per 100 sourced:

What you see	What it means	What you do
4 or more replies, at least one asking for a call, a price or a demo	list and offer both work	Scale. Same sequence, same ICP, 500 to 1,000 contacts, ramp the daily volume, keep verifying every address
4 or more replies, none positive, mostly "not for us" or "wrong person"	the message reaches people, they are the wrong people	Change the target. Back to step 1, tighten titles and company size, keep the copy
1 to 3 replies, mixed, bounces under 2%	targeting is plausible, the message is weak	Change the message. Keep icp.json and the source, rewrite the first email around a different problem, run a second pilot on 100 fresh contacts
0 replies, bounces under 2%, mail clearly going out	nobody cares, or the ask is too big	Change the message and the ask before touching the list
0 replies with bounces above 3%, or almost nothing sent	delivery, not copy	Stop and go back to step 7. Rewriting now teaches you nothing
Replies are mostly "how did you get my data", or unsubscribes above 2%	source or tone problem	Back to step 2, then step 1

Two rules that matter more than the table. Never scale a pilot that produced zero replies by sending more of the same. And never change two things at once: change the target or the message, then run another 100. That is the whole point of running 100.

Output

outreach/pilot.md, the run log. Every other file is written by the skill that owns it (icp.json, leads.csv, enrichment.json, sequence.md, campaign.json, report.md). Real example, mid run:

# Pilot run, started 2026-09-08

Target market: France. Offer: API monitoring for SaaS teams.

| # | Step | Status | Result | Decided |
|---|------|--------|--------|---------|
| 1 | ICP | done | CTO / VP Eng, French SaaS, 20 to 200 people, excl. agencies | 2026-09-08 |
| 3 | List | done | 152 sourced (Basile), 104 after filtering | 2026-09-08 |
| 4 | Enrich | done | 104 rows: 71 emails found (68%), 66 verified valid, 5 dropped | 2026-09-08 |
| 5 | Copy | done | angle: "your status page lies", one ask: 15 min | 2026-09-08 |
| 6 | Sequence | done | 3 emails, day 0 / day 4 / day 11, stop on reply | 2026-09-08 |
| 7 | Deliverability | BLOCKED | DMARC missing on mail.acme-outbound.com | 2026-09-08 |
| 8 | Launch | pending | waiting on step 7 | |
| 9 | Read | pending | day 3 / day 7 / day 14 | |

## Spend
- Find email: 104 jobs, approved by user 2026-09-08 14:02
- Verify email: 71 jobs, approved by user 2026-09-08 14:19
- Find phone: not used

## Open items
- Publish the DMARC record (p=none to start), then re-run step 7.
- 66 verified contacts is below the 100 target. Decision: launch on 66 and treat
  4 replies as the scale threshold, rather than delay two weeks to source more.

Note in the log what you did not do. "71 emails found out of 104" is the useful line. "List enriched" is not.

Checks before finishing

• Every step has a line in outreach/pilot.md with a status and a date.
• No credit was spent without a recorded yes from the user, with the count stated first.
• The contacts attached to the campaign are only addresses that verified valid.
• The deliverability gate passed on its own terms, and you can name SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warmup and the daily cap.
• The user typed a yes for the launch itself, separately from the yes for spending.
• Every number reported to the user is a real count, with its denominator named.
• The day 14 report ends with exactly one recommendation, not a list of options.

Failure modes

"Skip the pilot, load 2,000 contacts." Say what the pilot buys: a cheap answer and an intact domain. If the user still wants volume, do not refuse the work, but require the ramp plan from outreach-deliverability and a fully verified list, and say plainly that the first campaign on a cold domain is the one that decides the next six months of deliverability.

No Emelia key. Say it at step 1. Steps 1 to 6 run fine in dry run and produce every file. Steps 4, 8 and 9 cannot run. Discovering this at step 8 wastes the user's hour.

Not enough leads at step 3. The ICP is too narrow, or the source does not cover that market. Widen the geography before widening the titles: a broader title list degrades the message faster than a broader map.

Fewer than 60 emails found out of 100. That is a signal about the list, not a tool failure: the companies are too small, too new or too obscure for any finder. Report the percentage and offer to change the source. Never fill the gap with guessed patterns like firstname.lastname@domain, they bounce and they cost you the domain.

Warmup is off and the user wants to launch anyway. Refuse, and offer something better: start warmup now, keep the campaign in draft, and schedule the launch for the date warmup completes. Everything else in the pilot is already done by then.

The copy is edited after step 7 and before step 8. Re-run the checks. One added line can introduce a link, a spam trigger word or a variable that does not exist in the list, and the gate you passed no longer applies to what you are about to send.

Zero activity at day 3. Look at the campaign status before anything else. A campaign that was created but never started stays in DRAFT and sends nothing, and a disconnected sending mailbox produces the same silence.

Limits

This skill cannot tell you which of two subject lines is better: 100 contacts cannot resolve a difference smaller than roughly a factor of two. It cannot validate an offer nobody has bought yet: if three different messages to three fresh lists of 100 all return nothing, the problem is upstream of outreach and more sending will not find it. It does not place calls and it does not run LinkedIn steps unless that integration is already connected. It cannot build the campaign steps through the API: it produces the spec and the copy, and verifies that what was configured in the app matches. And the 100 contacts it uses are spent: re-emailing the same people with a better message is a worse test than emailing 100 new ones.