vc-outreach-agent

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Solo Founder OS agent #3 — finds investors, drafts personalized cold emails per (investor, project) pair via Claude, manages replies via a markdown HITL queue. Never auto-sends. Always your edit, your hit-send.

Built by Alex Ji — solo founder shipping Orallexa and VibeXForge. Born from this thought:

I have 50 investor names in a spreadsheet. Hand-writing 50 personalized cold emails takes 10 hours. Sending the same templated email 50 times gets 0 replies. There has to be a better default.

What it does

investors.csv  +  project.yml
                  ↓
              Claude (Sonnet 4.6, prompt enforces no-bullshit constraints)
                  ↓
              queue/pending/<timestamp>-<project>-to-<investor>.md
                  ↓
        ┌────────────────────────────────┐
        │  Human review in Obsidian      │
        │  (edit / approve / reject)      │
        └────────────────────────────────┘
                  ↓
              queue/approved/  →  v0.2 SMTP sender
              queue/rejected/  →  archived, no send

The drafter prompt enforces these rules — anything else gets parsed-and-fallback to a template:

1. Open with ONE specific line tying the investor's thesis to the project. No "I follow your work" filler.
2. Sentences 2-3 lead with traction, not vision. One number, one shipped artifact, one demand signal.
3. Sentence 4: ONE specific ask. "15-min call this week" — never "any thoughts you have".
4. Body under 110 words. Subject under 8 words.
5. Banned vocabulary (hard fail): synergy, disrupting, passionate, leverage, innovative, cutting-edge, revolutionize, "I'd love to", "circle back", "touch base", "thought leader", "in the AI space", "exciting opportunity".
6. Tone: peer-to-peer, terse, no exclamation marks, no emojis.

Install

git clone https://github.com/alex-jb/vc-outreach-agent.git
cd vc-outreach-agent
pip install -e .
cp .env.example .env  # fill in ANTHROPIC_API_KEY

Usage

# 1. Describe your project once
cat > orallexa.yml <<EOF
name: Orallexa
one_liner: AI-powered quant trading agent
stage: pre-seed
raise_amount: \$500k
deck_url: https://orallexa.com/deck.pdf
founder_name: Alex Ji
founder_email: alex@orallexa.com
why_now: LLMs commoditize signal — execution is the moat now.
traction:
  - Sharpe 1.41 over 698 backtests
  - DSPy pipeline shipped 2026-04
EOF

# 2. List investors in a CSV (columns: name,email,firm,role,thesis_hint,linkedin,twitter,notes)
# (the thesis_hint column is the key one — that's what makes each email feel personalized)

# 3. Fan-draft into the queue
vc-outreach-agent draft --project orallexa.yml --investors investors.csv

# 4. Review at ~/.vc-outreach-agent/queue/pending/
#    Open each .md in Obsidian, edit if needed, then move to:
#      ../approved/  to send
#      ../rejected/  to skip

Why HITL is non-negotiable for cold outreach

Auto-send for cold investor emails is a category error. Two reasons:

1. One bad email burns the relationship. Investors talk to each other. A rude or off-base auto-sent email kills not just this round but next round too.
2. The 1% of personalization that actually matters comes from your context, not Claude's. "Hey, I noticed you led the Round at X — I'm going to need exactly that playbook." Claude can't know which investors you've met IRL.

v0.1 is queue-only. v0.2 will add SMTP send for approved drafts (still requires you to move the file). v0.5 may add auto-send for low-stakes follow-ups, but cold first emails always go through HITL.

Roadmap

• v0.1 — Drafter (LLM + template fallback) · markdown HITL queue · CSV/YAML input · 14 tests
• v0.2 — SMTP sender for queue/approved/ (Gmail/Postmark/Resend/Sendgrid) · dry-run mode · 25 tests
• v0.3 — Investor enrichment (Twitter / LinkedIn pull) — auto-build thesis_hint
• v0.4 — Multi-touch follow-ups (T+5d, T+12d) with declining conviction
• v0.5 — Pipeline analytics: open rate / reply rate / meeting rate by thesis_hint pattern

MCP server (Claude Desktop / Cursor / Zed)

Draft an investor email inline from your AI assistant.

pip install 'vc-outreach-agent[mcp]'

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vc-outreach": {
      "command": "vc-outreach-mcp",
      "env": { "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY": "..." }
    }
  }
}

Tools: draft_email(...) · list_pending() · list_approved()

License

MIT.

🧩 Part of the Solo Founder OS stack

A growing collection of MIT-licensed agents that share solo-founder-os as their base — cron, eval, reflexion, AnthropicClient, HITL queue, notifiers. Each agent is independently useful; together they cover the full one-person company workflow.

🌐 The whole stack is live in production at vibexforge.com.

Each agent's own row is omitted from its README. Install whichever solve real problems for you — pip install <agent-name>.