A founder who sells has the best possible message and the worst possible calendar. Nobody knows the product or the customer better, and nobody has less time to write forty messages a day. The fix is not to write faster. It is to decide which parts need you and hand the rest to something that runs while you build.
What only you can do
Three things, and they fit in an hour:
- Say who. The target sentence: who, where, why now. Ten minutes when a campaign starts, then nothing until it needs changing. The post on writing a searchable target is about getting this right.
- Approve or turn away. Look at the leads agaria found and the reason it gives for each. Approve the ones that make sense, turn away the ones that do not. Five to fifteen minutes.
- Answer replies. The people who wrote back. This is the part of outreach that is actually selling, and the part that should have your whole attention. Whatever is left of the hour goes here.
What runs without you
Finding people, researching them, ordering them by signal, drafting the messages, sending them at a walking pace within your quotas, following up on schedule, detecting replies, proposing meeting times. All of that happens between your hours, from your own LinkedIn account, through the extension on your laptop.
Keep your browser open and the extension connected. Approvals, daily action limits and connection acceptance can also hold queued steps.
The switch
Every campaign has a setting for automatic approval. Off means every lead and every draft waits for you. On means agaria approves the leads that fit, sends the drafts, and follows up on its own, and you only see the replies.
Start with it off. Review everything for the first week, and turn away anything that feels wrong: a title that is not really the buyer, a signal that is too old, a draft that sounds like a bot. Agaria learns from the profiles that reply or book meetings, compared with those that do not respond, to guide the next lead search in the same campaign. When a week goes by where you approved everything without editing, flip the switch. Your hour goes from reviewing to selling.
The hour, in order
- Minutes 0 to 10: replies. Anyone waiting on you gets an answer first, while their attention is warm. Drafts are ready; send or edit.
- Minutes 10 to 25: approvals. Yesterday's new leads. Approve, turn away, move on. Do not rewrite drafts here; if a draft is wrong in a way that will repeat, fix the campaign's offer or target instead.
- Minutes 25 to 45: the meetings. Prepare for today's calls with the lead's research and the thread open. This is where the hour pays for itself.
- Minutes 45 to 60: the numbers. Once a week, not daily. Reached, replied, meetings, stopped, and the first broken link in that chain. Change one thing.
What it looks like after a month
After a month, review the leads reached, the reply rate and the meetings booked. Results depend on your audience and offer; use the numbers to decide where the next hour will help most. That is the founder's job in outbound: not the sending, the conversation.