26:33Lead Gen Jay · Tutorial
How Claude Code Replaced My Entire Cold Email Strategy
A 26-minute playbook for turning micro-SaaS apps into cold email lead magnets that average 4% reply rates.
March 24thThe argument in one line.
Delegating cold email copy to an AI agent only works when the agent receives a detailed opinionated brief that bans templates enforces a word count and defines exactly what a soft CTA sounds like.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You run outbound sales or a cold email agency and want to collapse the research-to-send workflow into a single agentic session.
- You use Claude Code or Cursor and want to see how to chain an external CLI tool into an AI coding agent.
- You send B2B cold email and suspect your copy is the bottleneck but are not sure how to diagnose it.
- You manage multiple client outreach campaigns and want a project-level npm dependency pattern for CLI tools.
SKIP IF…
- You do not send cold email and have no plans to.
- You are looking for a general Claude Code tutorial -- this is almost entirely Instantly-specific.
The full version, fast.
The video argues that AI-written cold email fails not because of the model but because the brief is too vague. The presenter dictates a rigid ruleset to Claude Code -- no templates max 100 words mobile-readable hook in 6-12 words follow-up adds insight not a bump -- and Claude turns that into skill markdown files governing every draft. The agent then uses the Instantly CLI to segment a scraped CSV by Starlink product fit write fully personalized emails per prospect and push three-step campaigns directly into Instantly without leaving the IDE.
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00:00 – 03:30
01 · Claude Code orientation plus setup
Overview of Claude Code access methods navigating to topoffunnel.com for the Instantly CLI creating an API key.
03:30 – 10:30
02 · Voice-dictated context brief
Brandon dictates a detailed project brief via Spokenly covering the offer ICP cold email philosophy copy rules and CTA framework. Claude scaffolds SKILL.md files.
10:30 – 15:15
03 · CSV segmentation with Polars
Claude sets up a Python venv installs Polars explores the CSV schema and distributions and segments the list into cohorts by Starlink product fit. Instantly CLI installed at project level.
15:15 – 19:15
04 · Calibration round plus copy refinement
Claude generates 5 sample emails per Tier 1A sub-segment. Brandon iterates on weak hooks. Second session after an API error. Final copy approved.
19:15 – 26:30
05 · Campaign creation via Instantly CLI
Claude creates 3-step campaigns for all sub-segments. Brandon verifies leads uploaded per-lead personalization confirmed sequence threading correct spam score zero.
26:30 – 26:59
06 · Outro CTA
Talking head outro recommending next video on starting an agency in 2026.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- AI-written cold email fails when the brief is vague not when the model is weak.
- A 100-word cap forces the model to cut filler that would have killed reply rates anyway.
- Follow-up email two should add a new insight not say bump -- most people do not remember the first email.
- Storing cold email rules in a SKILL.md file means every future Claude session inherits the playbook without re-prompting.
- Polars is faster and uses less RAM than Pandas for CSV exploration on a local machine.
- Installing a CLI at the project level keeps client work isolated and prevents API key bleed across projects.
- B2B buyers act on three motivators only: make money save money or save time.
- Voice-dictating a context brief to an AI agent is faster than typing and produces more opinionated constraints.
- A zero spam score is achievable with personalized plain-text email.
- The CTA goal is not a meeting -- it is a one-word yes to a hypothetical which gets far more replies.
Nine rules that make AI-written cold email actually work.
WHAT TO LEARN
The model is not the bottleneck in AI cold email -- the brief is and a nine-rule document stored as a SKILL.md file changes every output that follows.
- Banning templates and merge tags forces the agent to research each prospect individually rather than slot names into shared copy.
- A 100-word hard cap eliminates the filler sentences that kill reply rates before the reader reaches the ask.
- The hook sentence should reference something specific to this company that could not appear in any other email on the list.
- Follow-up email two is not a bump -- it adds a new piece of information the prospect did not have after the first email.
- B2B buyers transact for three reasons: make money save money or save time -- assigning one to each sequence step gives each email a genuinely different angle.
- Storing rules in a SKILL.md file means a new Claude Code session inherits the entire playbook without re-prompting.
- Installing a CLI at the project level rather than globally keeps API keys and dependencies isolated per client or campaign.
- A zero spam score is achievable with plain-text personalized email -- the formatting choices that make email look polished are the same ones that trigger spam filters.
Terms worth knowing.
- Instantly CLI
- An npm package that exposes Instantly.ai campaign management as command-line commands letting an AI coding agent create campaigns add leads and configure sequences programmatically.
- SKILL.md
- A markdown file placed in a Claude Code project that defines domain knowledge or behavioral rules the agent reads at the start of every session acting as a persistent system prompt for that project.
- Polars
- A Python DataFrame library written in Rust significantly faster and more memory-efficient than Pandas for large CSV exploration tasks.
- ICP
- Ideal Customer Profile -- the specific firmographic and behavioral description of the buyer most likely to convert used to filter and segment a lead list.
- Tier 1A sub-segment
- The highest-priority cohort within the ICP list identified by the AI after analyzing the CSV -- companies with the most immediate and obvious fit for the offer.
Things they pointed at.
04:26toolSpokenly
Lines you could clip.
03:12
“There is absolutely zero trust. So it is critical that the copy that we send is extremely relevant that every single sentence and every single word is carefully crafted.”
21:07
“Everybody loves to be reminded on why we did not reply in the first place. So therefore it is actually a waste of a perfectly good opportunity.”
26:38
“If you want to make sales you still have to reach out you have to follow up and you have to have a repeatable system that turns leads into clients.”
Word for word.
00:00I just built a complete lead generation pipeline end to end in just a few minutes all while using Clot, and it literally does everything. This is wild because we're in a time where this used to take my team and I countless hours of repetitive manual steps, and honestly, no AI tool has ever come close to getting it to the quality that it needs to be until now.
00:20We've sent over 2,000,000,000 cold emails for businesses across pretty much every industry that you can think of. So I've personally seen exactly where AI tends to break down. So in this video, I'm gonna show you how to build this entire system from scratch.
00:34So you can just copy me and start to automate your lead generation with AI and send emails that actually book meetings. Let's dive in. Firstly, you gotta get yourself familiar with Claude.
00:44So in this case, I'm using Claude Code. And just as a quick overview, there are several ways that you can get started with Claude code. Number one is the terminal, the good old CLI.
00:54This is one of the very basic black screen where you just type in a command and you have yourself a chatbot where you can literally do everything from, you know, end to end to right from the terminal. There's no additional apps.
01:06Your Windows or your Mac machine or even Linux is definitely going to have the CLI there. Then you have Versus Code or Cursor. So essentially an IDE, also known as an integrated development environment.
01:18And this is the way that I personally like to do it because you actually bring it into an environment where you see the list, you see tabs, you can go to websites, you can generate a lot of things all inside of one window. Then we have the good old desktop app.
01:33So you have Mac OS or Windows. You just basically download the app. You have the chat, Cloud Code, and even Cowork, which are very powerful.
01:41They're all great. In this scenario, it could basically do a lot of the same thing, but it's all about just whatever harness that you're gonna be using. Then we also have the web and JetBrains, which we won't go into.
01:51But for this scenario, I would just recommend you get familiar with the way various ways of how to actually use Cloud Code. And then from here, next up, you're gonna need to give context and capabilities. So as part of the capabilities, right now, if you go to top of funnel.com and in the upper right, you just click resources, you're gonna see that we have agent tools and CLIs.
02:11And for this, you're gonna need to get instantly CLI if you're using instantly for this scenario. And this is gonna allow the agent that we're about to use to actually not only verify leads, but create campaigns and do all that kind of stuff. So if you just simply go to install from NPM, that is going to bring up this site right here, and you're gonna have one command in order to install this.
02:33If you're an agency or you manage multiple clients, you're gonna want to install the Instantly CLI at the project level. So, really, you just remove this.
02:42Honestly, it's just gonna be just like this. N p m I for install and then instantly CLI. So we're gonna go ahead and copy this, and then we're gonna hop over into cursor.
02:51Finally, you're gonna want to go to instantly. In order to get your API key, you just need to go to the lower left here. You're gonna click on settings.
03:00And then from there, you're gonna click on integrations, go to API keys, and then just create yourself an API key.
03:06We're gonna call this Claude code demo, and we're gonna select all scopes, and we'll go ahead and copy it from there. And we have our new API key.
03:15Now from here, the IDE that I use all the time is Cursor. Basically, like I said, it's an integrated development environment in which I actually have just one window where I can view all my files and folders and scripts and CSVs, which you'll see get built out here.
03:32What you're gonna wanna do is go to the marketplace here, and you're gonna wanna make sure that you have Cloud Code actually installed. And we're gonna just gonna go ahead and click on Cloud Code right there. And then from here, you could see I've already prepared a list.
03:46This is a list that I've scraped, but if you use something like instantly super search or any other data provider, you're gonna be able to pretty much narrow down the leads of your ICP, and then you're gonna want to download that CSV. Just bring it into an empty folder right on your hard drive, and then what you're gonna wanna do is to actually make your cursor or Claude code that current working directory so it can, uh, reference those files.
04:10So we have our CSV right here. Now I have my brand new chat session. Again, I have different levels of permission, which you're gonna wanna configure to how you want to work.
04:19For the most part, I would recommend being on auto mode so that way you don't do anything crazy. So I'm gonna use an app called Spokenly, which is a speech to text application.
04:29So I personally like to speak to my agents and use the keyboard for fine tuning and things like that. So this is a brand new project in which we are going to enrich and clean up the CSV in here, which is geared towards going after our ideal customer profile for SpaceX.
04:52In this example, we will be using this list to target and generate cold emails in a campaign in order for us to offer different lines of SpaceX, in rural areas where businesses can actually benefit from high speed Internet such as Starlink.
05:12So what I want you to do is to firstly pull into context about SpaceX. I want you to establish skills in order to know more about SpaceX as it relates to your taskings and requirements.
05:28And then I also want you to in implement skills in order for you to know what cold email good cold email looks like. Firstly, every cold email has to be very carefully considered and spoken to the person as if you wrote the email on a one to one basis.
05:46There will be no templates. There will be no custom merge tags that are inserted as a piece of the entire copy.
05:56There are no templated pieces of copy. Every single email needs to be carefully crafted as if you research the company for an unknown amount of time, but let's just speculate to say about twenty minutes to an hour so much so that you know exactly what you do.
06:14Imagine if you are a business development representative or a sales development representative and you are personally researching this person who is the ICP on the CSV list, and you really understand their potential pain points in such a way that you would like to reach out to them and pique their curiosity and start conversation.
06:38The way to do it nowadays is not so much to go direct value proposition because nobody nowadays likes to be sold to directly unless they have a very much of a pain point.
06:52Instead, what we need to do is to reach out to these professionals who we reach out to and instead let them know about something that they may not already know that is interesting, insightful, and most importantly, The biggest thing here is that we are reaching out to prospects in which we have no idea who they are.
07:16They have no idea who we are, and therefore, there is absolutely zero trust. So it is critical that the copy that we send is extremely relevant, that every single sentence and every single word is carefully crafted, that there's no small talk, there's no em dashes, there's no, I hope this email finds you well.
07:37And it needs to be able to be read in roughly three to five seconds. And the email needs to be probably no more than 100 words, and it needs to be formulated in an optimized way that could be easily read on a mobile device.
07:54So, therefore, we're talking one to two sentences per paragraph. The frameworks that I want you to implement as skills are as follows.
08:03We have the greeting because everybody needs to be nice and say hello first name. The first name variables defined by Instantly is in what you call camel case.
08:14A lot of times you'll actually get snake case, but it's actually camel case. Finally, what I want to make sure that you do ultimately is that your goal is to reach the prospect and peak their curiosity in such a way that makes it easily welcoming and in such a way that they want to know more about you.
08:37A call to action should ideally be something that is a no brainer. It's not necessarily asking for a meeting.
08:45It's not necessarily asking for them to do anything. It's purely insightful in such a way that it is obvious and very easy for them to say yes that they are really trying to learn more about it.
09:00They're gonna do one of three things. They're gonna either not respond or they're going to respond and say kick rocks, unsubscribe, or hey, I'm interested.
09:10Or there's the third one which is they will not respond but they will actually go to your website, they'll sniff you out, they'll check out your LinkedIn, they'll check out your YouTubes, they'll check out your website. They'll do all the things because a lot of buyers are very intelligent now, and they won't ever respond.
09:28But you know what they will do is they will actually self serve and probably book a meeting, or they will probably just sign up on their own. So that is usually the outcome that is going to happen.
09:40But nonetheless, what I would like you to do is to always send an email with the intention of getting a reply regardless if it is a yes or no, but we wanna make it as easy as possible for the user to actually catch their attention, understand what we're trying to say in order to improve their current state or resolve a pain point, and then ultimately start a conversation.
10:04So you can see right there, I took a bit of time to actually talk to the agent. I'm giving it full context around what I wanted to do.
10:12Now the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give it instantly CLI, but I'm trying to make this a crash course and just make it as easy as possible. You can already see it's starting to create some, uh, markdown files and scaffolding this project right here. And from here, once it's done, you wanna do two things.
10:30You wanna verify for quality and accuracy, and then you wanna refine. And then from here, I will demonstrate exactly once it's done cooking to actually go into the CSV, and we will get started with some lead generation.
10:42Alright. So it has written a bunch of different markdown files in which you can see right here if we break this out. We have cold email skills and we have SpaceX knowledge skills.
10:54So you can see it's a skill dot m d, also known as a markdown file. So this is, uh, one of the file formats that makes it super easy to tokenize for AI as well as read for humans, which is obviously subjective here.
11:07But if you do a little shortcut called shift command v, it'll actually populate into a really nice kinda Notion like file where it's marked down. So it's very simple to actually review here.
11:19So for now, we'll go ahead and pass on that and get this lead generation machine up and going. Alright. Great.
11:24Now from here, you will see that we have a CSV list that is already scraped and prepared for us. What we wanna do is to go into the CSV.
11:35What I want you to do is to start a virtual environment so that way we can isolate this project from the rest of our machine. And then I want you to use Python and also install polars in order to quickly navigate and understand what we're looking at from a list perspective.
11:55And then I want you to segment what you believe is going to be a short win and break this into either segments or cohorts in order to scale this as quickly as possible to know that what we're working with is quality data and good to go.
12:14So please look at that, understand where they are, and which Starlink product was gonna be advantageous for us to reach out to first. So you notice right here, I'll set up the VENV, install polars, and explore the CSV.
12:28There are two types of libraries that are used a lot with CSVs that we use, polars, then you have pandas. Those are the two types. Polars is much faster and requires way less RAM.
12:41So that way your computer doesn't go, oh, I'm screaming here. Right? So I installed it, multistep.
12:47K. You know, we're going through. Polar's truncated in the middle of the industry list.
12:51Okay. That's interesting. Pulling pulling the full breakdown plus a few signals.
12:56So, yeah, sometimes you gotta kinda steer it, and we'll see what that does. But now what it's doing is it's generating a Python script and using polars to actually analyze the CSV that we have, and then it's gonna break it down and come back to me with everything that we need.
13:12And while that is working, we're actually gonna set up, uh, instantly CLI. So I'm actually gonna go here. We're gonna start a new session.
13:21We're gonna go back to our files. And then I'm actually going to click on this. We're gonna start a new full or a new file.
13:29We're gonna call it .env.local. I'm gonna type in instantly API key equals, and I'm gonna paste it.
13:39And then we're gonna hit command s to save, and then we'll close it. Then we're gonna go here. We're gonna say, I want you to install instantly CLI using using command n p m I instantly CLI.
13:56Please install this at the project level, not user global.
14:04And let me know once this is set up. We have the instantly API key that is in our ENV file which is ENV dot local.
14:18So what the ENV dot local is is definitely a file that you wanna keep confidential. That's where your APIs are stored and anything you deploy, it needs to have API keys stored on there. So definitely do not expose those.
14:30Allows you to keep things, you know, safe and secure. Perfect. And it just like that installs.
14:35We have instantly CLI, which is now in packets dot JSON, which we can pull up, but it basically says, hey. These are the dependencies that you need in order to run this whole thing.
14:45And then let's see here at the project root. Nothing went global. Couple of things.
14:51K. Loading instantly CLI by default.
14:54K. Like, need a symlink. Let's see here.
14:57Verify that the CLI works. Yes. Please verify that the CLI works.
15:03So it says it's working. It's authenticated. K.
15:06We're good to go. We have our workspace. Alright.
15:09Beautiful. And we are done. Alright.
15:11And just after a few minutes, we have our sample set for calibration. So that's something that we can review to make sure it's good. So you could see right here, this goes over the copy.
15:20The Microsoft powered upstream stack at XML only works if the link from each premium pad holds top across hundreds. So it's basically stating a fact here. A few neighboring operators have started dropping legacy GEO and four g.
15:33So I was talking about the network. This is kinda where we wanna iterate and make sure that it really sticks out to them. It needs to be really obvious to them that's like, oh, how did you figure that out?
15:43We're actually gonna stop this and we're gonna say, based on the feedback that you have sent of the calibration, we have five emails per the tier one a of the subsegment. And specific to Christopher Wright, who is head of field communications at ExxonMobil, I really want to dive in to the rural areas of when it comes to latency, slow networks, having a whole lot of reliability, and therefore also can be improved through having a dedicated satellite or dedicated dish for Starlink satellites.
16:22So I would say that with the hook on this specific one and really for the rest of them, we need to have a much stronger hook because the first sentence is the most vital piece of it. In other words, it needs to speak to them so clearly that it grabs their attention because you literally have about one to two seconds before they either mark you as spam or they actually read on in which we want to have them read the second or the third paragraph.
16:52So ideally, the first hook sentence needs to be extremely short and vital and relevant to the prospect.
17:01The second sentence needs to be in a way that leads with the pain point and something about their situation that you noticed in such a way that you have relevant proof, good trust, and you are able to solve that problem or that pain point or improve their current situation.
17:23And that is part of the second or the middle part of the email. And then we need to have a soft CTA or call to action that makes it so easy for them to say yes and needs to be in a persuasive soft manner such as would you be open to taking a look or if I could provide you a snapshot or if I could provide you something that's specific to this in which I would need you to tailor this to them, would that be valuable to you?
17:52Things like that where if they were to apply sure, that's an interested lead. They would reply, yes, this is interesting, then yes, that's a good thing.
18:01Again, the goal here is to start a conversation, not necessarily going straight for the kill or the close because these types of people are professionals. They are likely already getting cold emails, and so we want to be as relevant, as short, and as concise and specific as possible.
18:21We also need to make sure that no paragraph is too long. We need to have maybe one or two sentences at best and ensure that we have new lines to make sure it is spread out.
18:33And this should be optimized in such a way that could be read on a mobile device in about five seconds, no more.
18:41So with that said, please generate a new sample set of copy, and we need to make sure that we approve of this before we go at scale. So you can see here that oftentimes I'm getting an error here.
18:51So this is pretty much very rare, but a lot of times what I'll do is I'll just start a new chat session and then we'll just continue from there. So we will start a new chat session. And, this is part of the benefit of having your code base already established because context will just transfer over, and we don't need to explain everything.
19:09Although, I'm going to explain because we don't want to waste time.
19:15Alright. So we have our new copyright here, and we're gonna go see what we have for Christopher Wright. So we're saying, Christopher, ExxonMobil's remote Permian pads run on its least reliable link.
19:29Cellular and legacy satellite choke on real time SCADA and methane telemetry okay. If I sent a one screen snapshot of what that looked like at a comparable Permian site, would that be worth a look?
19:42That's a good one. And then right here, the largest operator in Permian still runs on four connectivity vendors.
19:48Wells, DJ. Okay. Perfect.
19:50One dedicated Starlink layer is how a few peers made that consistent. If I put together a short snapshot of how they did it, would that be useful to you? Spot on.
20:00Love it. At this point, it's just a lot easier especially for cold email to say, hey, would you like to try it or would that be worth a look? Right?
20:07So that's the goal here. So from here, we are going to so it's all done. I went ahead and approved it already.
20:15So we're gonna say, great. I want to now push this to instantly use instantly CLI to create campaigns around this, uh, one to one personalized copy, and let's get the campaign created and with the right sequence steps.
20:40Let's do a three sequence campaign. And step one will obviously be immediate.
20:46Step two will be three days after. Step three, let's do seven days. But on the second email, I want there to be no subject line because that will be in the same thread.
20:59And on step two, we should not and never just follow-up or bump this to the top of the inbox because everybody loves to be reminded on why we didn't reply in the first place.
21:12So, therefore, it's actually a waste of a perfectly good opportunity to actually provide additional insights. So therefore, step two actually needs to be a value add follow-up.
21:25In other words, that we need to be able to provide additional insights or reframe the same message in a way that actually explains it a little bit differently so that way they can actually learn.
21:38Because a lot of times, people don't even remember a cold email that they received five minutes ago. So it is worth the second email to actually provide a little bit more details than the first one.
21:50The third email needs to have a new subject line, and this will result in a net new email that they probably don't even remember they got the first two. So what I want you to do is to word this in a way where we are still sending the same message, but we need to reframe it in a way that potentially is unique to their situation because most people in b to b will do transactions and buy from vendors for three reasons.
22:21That is to make money, save money, or save time, and that's it.
22:27So if we approach them at the first one about saving time or saving money or improve, you know, their situation just like I mentioned on any one of those three where Starlink is actually going to be a better, faster, cheaper solution.
22:42Then on the third email, we just need to do the same thing. We don't need to necessarily overlook it. However, there's always a different approach that we can actually do.
22:51So I need you to draft up all three for this sample set. And then once that's done, we will run this at scale, but I need to see this in instantly and with all three steps.
23:02And let's go ahead and create this. Alright. So with some tough love, Anthropic and Claude Code have finally come in clutch.
23:09So with this one, what I had to do for this is I actually started a new chat because the first one I had, I was just getting constant just errors there. So I figured, okay.
23:18Well, Anthropic's being a little moody. Uh, we're just gonna go ahead and start a new chat session. If we scroll down, I won't bore you with all the details.
23:25It was basically making a bunch of commands in order to actually produce the campaigns, which it did. And then I noticed, uh, the other thing too is once it actually creates a campaign, which we'll look at here in a second, you just wanna verify for two things, which is quality and accuracy to make sure you as the human know you're gonna send good emails for which you want.
23:45So that was one of the things it said right here as root cause. It says campaigns created, all good to go, copy is solid.
23:52Now just verify for it. Right? Now if we just go right into instantly and you go to your campaign section, I can go ahead and I could see the campaigns were created, which is great.
24:02So we're gonna go ahead and click on this one for the tier one a. And we could see right here, we have our sample set of leads already uploaded and good to go. Now you will see you have, you know, your typical ones of email, email provider, your ESG or security gateway.
24:17You have your status, contact company, all of the, uh, standard ones. But then what you'll notice here is we have message one, message two, message three, and then we have the subjects.
24:28K? Then we have the normalized first name. So if we go into sequences, you can see right here, this is the kind of copy that I like.
24:35And if we were to go to preview, you could see right here where it says Christopher. All of this looks really good. And if we were to choose other leads, it is a completely different email.
24:46It's not so much the actual copy that you're using. It is the frameworks around the copy. If we were to go again to say Douglas.
24:53Right? We have the hook. K?
24:55And then we have facts about your current state and, you know, revolving around it of a pain point. And then we have something that is a proposed solution or a, uh, scenario in which they can prove their situation.
25:09And then we have a very low friction or really no friction, valuable call to action on a hypothetical. If I sent a snapshot of how other terminals did exactly that, would that be worth a look?
25:21Leading into everything here. There is no small talk of, I hope this email finds you well. There's no just bumping this at the top of the inbox.
25:30Right? So if we were to go to step two, you can see again right here, we are leaving the subject line empty because it's gonna be in the same thread of subject one or email one.
25:40And, we have step two, worth adding the part that most teams miss. The problem on a remote pad usually isn't the outage. It's the latency floor.
25:48Right? So it's actually taking the second email as an additional opportunity to share more insights or explain more.
25:56And then you will notice on the third one, which is generally what we like to do, is we will actually make a brand new net new email, and we'll do it, I'd say I mean, it could be three days. It could be seven days later.
26:07So if I were to go to preview here, it's really just kind of another unique approach of really reaching out to that person to gauge their interest. So really, the two things here again, we wanna verify for quality and accuracy. You wanna make sure the new lines are good.
26:22You wanna sure it renders appropriately. You do wanna do a deliverability score. So we have perfect.
26:27Alright. Spam score is zero. Again, each one of these points, the lowest we can get is actually the best to do it.
26:33Right? So that, in my opinion, is best way to do it that we have seen in 2026. If you want to make sales, you still have to reach out, you have to follow-up, and you have to have a repeatable system that turns leads into clients.
26:45So click this video right here where it breaks down exactly what we would do to start a brand new agency in 2026 from scratch. By the end of it, you'll have everything you need to start making your first dollars.
26:57Thanks for watching, and I'll see you over there.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Two billion cold emails sent. That is the number on screen before anyone speaks -- a social proof graphic Instantly uses to establish authority before the tutorial begins. What follows is not a concept pitch but a live working session: one practitioner one AI agent and a raw CSV of prospects turned into live multi-step campaigns in under half an hour.
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:30list
The 9-Rule Cold Email Brief
- No templates no merge tags -- every email is one-to-one
- Max 100 words
- 1-2 sentences per paragraph
- Mobile-readable in 5 seconds
- No filler openers no em-dashes
- Hook 6-12 words ultra-specific to this prospect
- Middle: credible peers-did-this proof without pitching
- CTA: one-word-reply ask (would that be worth a look?)
- Follow-up 2: fresh insight not a bump; Follow-up 3: reframe via make/save money or save time
The complete ruleset Brandon dictated to Claude Code as a SKILL.md file that governs every cold email draft the agent writes.
Steal forany Claude Code project where you want consistent cold email output without re-prompting rules each session
22:20model
B2B Buyer Motivation Triad
- Make money
- Save money
- Save time
The three reasons B2B buyers transact. Used to assign each email in the sequence a different motivator.
Steal forstructuring multi-step sequences where each step needs a fresh angle
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
26:45next-video
“Click this video right here where it breaks down exactly what we would do to start a brand new agency in 2026 from scratch.”
Standard end-screen CTA. No email list pitch no product upsell.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
