Guide
How to go from an empty console to a customer, in the order it actually happens.
What this platform is for
It finds small businesses in a US city, researches each one until it knows who runs it and how to reach them, throws away the ones not worth writing to, and helps you write to the rest. The value is not the volume — it is that by the time a business reaches your Leads screen, someone has already checked it is real, current, and run by a person you can name.
The one number that matters is how many leads carry a person’s name and a working address. A hundred of those beats ten thousand rows of info@.
The everyday loop
Once you are set up, this is the whole job. Half an hour a day.
Set yourself up — once
Setup →Fill in your name, company, reply-to address and postal address. The postal address is a legal requirement on commercial email in the US, and bulk sending refuses to run while it is empty — a PO box counts.
Then, under Domains and mailboxes, connect the domain you send from and its mailbox. You need the SMTP host, the login and the password from wherever you bought the mailbox.
Find businesses
Scrape →Pick a city and the trades you sell to, then run it. The screen fills in as it goes and shows a funnel: how many businesses were found, how many survived each stage, and why the rest were dropped.
Read the funnel. “A chain, not an owner” and “their domain accepts no mail” are the system saving you from businesses you could never have sold to. Nothing is thrown away — everything below the bar is shelved with its score, so you can lower the bar later without scraping the city again.
Read the shortlist
Leads →Kept leads land here, best first. The score is out of 100 and it is computed, not stored — hover it and it tells you every reason it is that high or that low.
Look for a name in the contact column. That is the difference between writing to a person and writing to a reception desk, and it is what the whole research stage exists to produce.
Write
Write →Select leads and generate drafts. Everything lands in the queue as pending — nothing sends itself. Read them. If a draft reads like it was written by a machine, it will be answered like one.
Send
Released drafts go out through your own mailbox. The counter in the top-right shows what is left today; when it hits zero, you are done until tomorrow. That is the system working, not a limit to argue with.
Answer
Inbox →Replies are matched back to the lead that produced them. A reply is the only outcome that counts — reply rate, not send count, is how you tell whether any of this is working.
The rules that keep you out of spam
These are not preferences. Breaking any of them costs you a domain, and a burned domain is a week of warm-up and another registration fee before you can send at all.
- One mailbox per domain, 100 a day at most. A domain is what mailbox providers score you on. Two mailboxes on one domain do not double your capacity — they double what one bad week destroys.
- A new mailbox starts at 20 a day. It rises by 20 each day and reaches its cap on day five. A brand-new address sending a hundred on its first day is the clearest spam signal there is. If your cap looks low on day one, that is the ramp and not a bug.
- Need more volume? Buy another domain. Not a bigger cap. Buy the domain, buy one mailbox on it, add it in Setup, and it starts warming the same day.
- Never send to a guessed address in bulk. A batch of guesses bouncing is the fastest way to lose a domain. The console labels what it knows — see below — and a guess is labelled as one.
- Honour every unsubscribe, immediately. It is automatic here. Do not work around it.
What the labels mean
The console never claims to have checked something it has not. These four words are the whole vocabulary, and they mean exactly this:
- confirmed
- Their mail server was asked about this exact address and accepted it. The only label that is a fact. It cannot be produced by a scrape run in this browser — only by the deep pass run from a laptop — so you will not see many, and that is honest rather than broken.
- likely
- Printed on the business’s own website, at a domain that accepts mail. Nobody asked their server, but they published it themselves. Safe to write to.
- unknown
- The domain takes mail but this address was never checked, or it was built from a person’s name. Write to these one at a time, never in a batch.
- rejected
- The domain accepts no mail at all, or the address is malformed or disposable. Do not send. It will bounce, and bounces are what cost you the domain.
If something looks wrong
- A scrape kept nothing. The bar is too high for that city. Lower “Keep leads scoring at least” in Setup — the shelved businesses come back without re-scraping.
- No mailbox in the top-right. You have not connected one, or you are not signed in to the shared database. Both are in Setup.
- A mailbox says “not answering”. Open the panel — it prints what the server actually said. Nearly always a wrong password or the wrong SMTP host.
- Few leads have names. Turn on “Find the names of the people who run them” in Setup. It costs a second read of each site and it is the single biggest lever on lead quality.