AI-Powered SDR System

The Problem

Early-stage outbound sales is brutal. You need to find the right people at the right companies, get their contact info, write personalized emails, send them on a cadence, track replies, follow up with the interested ones, and remove the ones who aren't. It's hours of repetitive work per day, and it's exactly the kind of work that keeps a founder from doing everything else they should be doing.

Hiring an SDR is expensive. Most outbound tools are designed for sales teams with 10+ reps, not a founder doing it alone. And the manual version — Googling contacts, copy-pasting into a spreadsheet, sending emails one by one — doesn't scale past a handful of prospects per day.

The Solution

We built an AI system that handles the entire outbound process autonomously. Give it a description of your ideal customer profile and it goes to work: collecting contact information, building prospect lists in Google Sheets, crafting personalized outreach, sending emails on a managed cadence, and monitoring for replies.

When someone replies, the system reads the response and takes action — flagging interested prospects, logging notes on the sheet, or removing people who've opted out. The whole thing is orchestrated through a chat interface. You tell it what to do in plain language, check in when you want, and it handles the grind.

How We Thought About It

There's no shortage of AI email tools that will "write outbound for you." Most of them generate generic messages that read like they were written by a bot, because they were. The open rates are terrible and the reply rates are worse. They automate the sending but not the thinking.

We approached this differently. The AI doesn't just blast emails. It researches the prospect, understands the ICP criteria, and writes outreach that reflects actual knowledge of who they are and why they'd care. It's the difference between "Dear Decision Maker" and something a human would actually read.

The chat interface was a deliberate choice. We could have built a dashboard with buttons and workflows, but the reality is that managing outbound is a conversation: "add these companies," "pause the cadence for this person," "what's the reply rate this week." A chat interface handles all of that naturally without needing a purpose-built UI for every possible action.

Google Sheets as the backend might sound scrappy, but it was the right call. The user can see exactly what the system is doing at any time — every prospect, every status, every note. Full transparency, no black box. And they can manually override anything just by editing a cell. AI handles the volume, humans keep control.

The Result

• Autonomous prospecting and outreach with no daily manual effort
• Chat-based interface for managing the entire pipeline in plain language
• AI reads and acts on replies — flagging interest, logging notes, handling opt-outs
• Full visibility into every action via Google Sheets — nothing hidden
• Founder-grade outbound at a fraction of the cost of an SDR hire