Cold email pipeline

Six stages over a directives folder the user configures once. The stages that touch data call RouterGrowth capabilities; the stages that judge (grading, writing) run on you. Two gates: the final list and copy, and the first live send. Everything between them runs on its own.

Research → List → Grade → Verify → Write → Send
  brief    raw    keep    clean   per-    inbox the
           leads  ICP     list    lead    workspace
                  only            copy    owns

Raw lead lists are 30 to 50% wrong-ICP. Grade and Verify exist so the campaign does not email agencies, dead sites and wrong-geo firms, tank the reply rate and burn the domain.

Before you start

• Load the core routergrowth skill (https://www.routergrowth.com/SKILL.md) if it is not loaded. Confirm access with the free balance tool or routergrowth balance.
• Check directives/ exists in the working project. If not, copy the directives/ folder next to this file into the project and ask the user to fill icp.md, lead-source.md and email-copy.md. Those three are mandatory; the others have sensible defaults.
• Run the free email.inboxes. The campaign sends from an inbox the workspace owns on a verified domain. If there is none, stop and run the cold email infrastructure setup first (domain.search, domain.register, email.domain, domain.dns, email.inbox: the guide at https://www.routergrowth.com/use-cases/cold-email-infrastructure), each purchase behind its own confirmation.
• Inspect people.search, contact.find, contact.verify, web.scrape and email.send once and show the prices. Quote the campaign as a whole before stage 2.

Stages

1. Research (once per ICP)

Write directives/research-brief.md: what these buyers care about, the daily friction, the words they use, the events that make now the right time. Use your own web search and fetch when you have them; web.search and web.scrape when you do not or a site blocks you. Every claim in the brief carries a source URL. Reused across campaigns.

2. List

Translate the user's sentence through directives/lead-source.md into people.search filters:

routergrowth run -c people.search -i '{"titles":["founder","managing director"],"industries":["financial services"],"locations":["Lyon, France"],"company_headcount":["2-10","11-50"],"limit":100}' --max-cost 0.50 --wait 90 -o out/leads-raw.json

Or start from accounts (the hiring-signal-outbound skill, or company.search for a query and location) and search people inside them. Apply negative-keywords.md at search time where a filter supports it. Output: out/leads-raw.csv.

3. Grade

For each company, read its website and assign a category from directives/qualification.md: ICP to keep; agency, saas, freelancer, enterprise, wrong-geo, dead-site, unclear to drop or hold. Fetch with your own tool when you have one; web.scrape ({"url": ...}) when you do not. Pre-classify with the negative keywords, then read the fetched text yourself for every unclear row and a sample of ICP rows. The rubric judges, not the keywords. Output: out/leads-graded.csv, all rows kept with category and category_reason, so the user can audit the filter.

4. Verify

On ICP rows only:

1. Free dedupe first: routergrowth history --file emails.txt says who this workspace already contacted. Drop them.
2. Email missing: contact.find with first name, last name and company domain. No-match is released, not billed.
3. Every email: contact.verify. Keep valid; drop invalid; hold catch_all and unknown in their own column.
4. One row per company unless the user targets named individuals; two contacts per company at most.
5. Clean merge fields: strip legal suffixes (Inc, Ltd, SARL, Lda), fix ALL-CAPS names. A broken merge field is an instant blast tell.

Output: out/leads-verified.csv.

5. Write

Per-lead copy from directives/email-copy.md fused with the research brief. Rules: the first line is written from that lead (role, company, one site detail); the angle follows the tier in the directive; one call to action; plain text; 120 to 160 words; the product facts match the live site (verify, never invent a feature or a trial term). Write the J+0, J+4 and J+10 rows per lead with a stage column.

Output: out/campaign.csv with to, first_name, company, tier, stage, subject, body.

Gate 1: show the count, the category breakdown, the verification breakdown, three sample emails, and the quote for the send. Wait.

6. Send

1. Send one test to the user's own address from the campaign inbox and ask them to check it lands in the inbox, not in promotions or spam.
2. Gate 2: the user confirms the first live batch.
3. Send from the owned inbox, plain text, with a reply-to and an unsubscribe line:

routergrowth run -c email.send -i '{"inbox_id":"<id>","to":"alex@example.com","subject":"...","text":"...","reply_to":"you@yourdomain.com","unsubscribe_url":"https://yourdomain.com/unsubscribe"}' --max-cost 0.01

Ramp on a fresh domain: 5 to 10 a day for the first three days, 15 through day seven, then 25 to 30. Never burst: spread a day's sends across the day. Log every send to out/sent-log.json with the run ID, the stage and the timestamp; the sdr-daily skill reads it.

Rules

• Inspect once per capability, quote the whole campaign at stage 2 and the send at Gate 1. Stop before a batch over about $1 unless the user asked for that volume.
• max_cost on every run, max_total_cost on every batch_run.
• Only email people the user is entitled to contact under the law that applies to them and to the recipient. B2B first-party outreach with an identifiable sender and a working opt-out is the floor; the user decides what their jurisdiction needs and the skill does not lower it.
• Never send from a shared or unverified domain. Never send HTML, images or tracking pixels in a first touch.
• Never fabricate a product fact, a number or a first line. If the research does not support a hook, use a plain one.

Output

The four CSVs in out/, the sent log, and a summary: leads raw, kept after grade, kept after verify, sent, total charged, with run IDs. Then hand the loop to sdr-daily.