An outreach engine in six days
Seven hundred warm contacts and no way to follow them up, turned into personalised mail from the founders' own inboxes.
- Services
- Build and handover
- Period
- Mar 2026
- Basis
- Pro bono. Built for a two-founder business and handed to its own developers.
Seven hundred people opened the emails. Nobody followed them up.
TrustLogic advises boards and chief executives on trust, and sells a software product to the same market. Its outreach ran from a spreadsheet: lists exported into a bulk mail tool, sent with almost no personalisation, and no follow-up once someone showed interest.
Stefan Grafe, the chief executive, described the problem in one line. We have about 700 people who regularly open our emails. We have at the moment no automated system to follow them up.
What follow-up there was, was manual. Roei Arminal, the tech and marketing manager, pulled the opens and clicks out by hand after each campaign and built a fresh list, and the lists kept piling up until, in his words, that's where the automation messes up
. Shane Woodhouse, the chair, and Stefan sent the rest one at a time from their own inboxes.
Three options, all three built
Rather than recommend one approach on paper, we built all three and let the founders watch each of them work. The first ran Claude Cowork against the contact spreadsheet with Outlook in the browser. The second had Cowork write ready-to-review draft files: fifty-five personalised drafts, from a tone and style guide that encoded the firm's voice. The third was a small web application.
All of it was a proof of concept, not a product to be sold back to them. The point was to show what AI-assisted development can do in a week, then hand the work over to the client's own developers.
An outreach tool that sends from the founders' own inboxes
The application imports the contact spreadsheet, sorts each contact into partner, associate or general by job title, and uses Claude to personalise the subject and body of an editable template without altering the core message. Nothing sends by itself.
- Sending
- Each founder signs in with their own Microsoft account. Drafts and sends go through their own Outlook mailbox, so replies land where they always have.
- Triage
- A one-by-one review queue. Read the draft, edit it, send it or skip it, then the next one.
- Reconcile
- Sent Items is read back to update contact status, so the list stays accurate without manual bookkeeping.
- Reporting
- Activity by date and by company, with open tracking.
- Handover
- The repository, the tone and style guide, a design specification, a recorded walkthrough and a briefing call with the marketing manager.
Handed over, adapted, live
From written brief to a working application, a walkthrough video and repository access for TrustLogic's developers.
The first list loaded: law-firm contacts across eight firms who had opened two or more emails in the previous six months.
TrustLogic's own developers adapted the code into the company's Microsoft tenancy over a weekend. Within three weeks its internal technology update listed the email app as implemented in the live site.
The pilot results were never recorded, so there is nothing to report on opens, replies or leads. What can be said is that the tool was handed over, adapted and put into use.
Stratum was asked onto the weekly technology sprint as an adviser on systems and technology.
That was already mind boggling. We would save so much time doing it and would get so much more done.
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Strata: Viktoriia Nechepurenko — Unsplash