Playbooks

Playbook Reviewed · not yet fact-checked

Situation

You are a founder selling your own product. No SDR, no sales team — maybe a co-founder splitting calls with you. Your target market is narrow, 50–100 accounts that genuinely fit, and you need meetings from it this quarter without gambling the company's main domain on cold-email mistakes.

Who this is for

The play

1. Targeting

50–100 accounts, two to three contacts each. Never buy a list — build it against your ICP with prospect search or the find prospects from an ICP workflow, and double-check it before it enters a sequence. The small list is the feature, not a limitation: at this size every message can be genuinely specific, and specificity is the only edge a founder has over a volume shop.

2. Sequence structure

Reply pre-fills the delay between steps as you add them — 0 days before the first step, then 2, 4, and 7 days for the next positions (weekends count; one day of delay is 24 hours). Edit them in the step editor if you want more room.

3. Messaging angles

• Write as a founder, not a rep — "I built this because" reads differently from a pitch
• Keep the body to about five sentences with one clear call to action; short emails outperform long ones
• Get personal in the first line and put the important information at the top
• Keep subject lines short — the guideline is 50 characters or less — and skip spam-trigger words like "Free"; drafting 15–20 subject line options before picking one is Reply's documented practice
• Never write in all caps or lean on exclamation marks
• Finish with a real signature — the four documented components are your first and last name, your job title, the company name or logo, and a link to the website — because a credible sign-off adds the trust a cold note needs

For a founder nobody has heard of, the signature is the credential. Beyond those four basics, the documented additions are a LinkedIn link at minimum — it validates who you say you are — plus a phone number, and whichever extras fit what you sell: a blog link, a free resource, a short video, social icons, a logo with a call to action, or a data point that supports the product. Two items belong there for legal reasons and can sit in the footer: a physical mailing address and an opt-out message. Reply's free email signature generator builds the HTML from a template and copies it out ready to paste. One trap: when you add a photo or logo, use an externally hosted image link — a link into internal storage such as Google Drive will not render for recipients.

4. Timing and cadence

The infrastructure sets the pace, not your impatience. A new domain needs its DNS configured and checked first — see SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — and then 2–3 weeks of warm correspondence with real contacts (opens, replies, marking not-spam, forwards, across several mail providers) before any cold sends. A new mailbox on an existing active domain still needs 1–2 weeks. MailToaster warm-up is included with a paid Reply subscription, signs you in through your Reply session, and gives one warm-up seat per connected mailbox — see email warm-up.

Then start low and ramp: Daily Ramp-up mode's default starts at 10 emails a day and adds 3 per day until 100, with a randomized 300–450 second delay between sends. Reply's documented example schedule starts at 15 emails a day and only reaches 200 by day 20. The hard ceiling is 400 emails a day per email account on paid plans (200 on trial), and a sequence's daily limit can never exceed the account's — for this play you will never need the ceiling. When replies are slow, fix the message, not the volume.

5. Handling replies

You are also the AE, so reply the same day — a founder answering personally is part of the product demo. Interested replies go straight to a scheduling exchange; objections get a real answer, not a template. Every reply stops the sequence automatically (reply detection), and conversations collect in the inbox so nothing slips while you are building.

Templates

The template below is an illustrative example, not a sourced product template. Double-brace placeholders are Reply variables; nonstandard ones like {{PainPoint}} must exist as custom fields before launch.

Subject: {{PainPoint}} at {{Company}}

Hi {{FirstName}},

I'm the founder of {{MyCompany}}. Before this I ran {{PreviousRole}}, and
{{PainPoint}} quietly ate a day of my week — so I built the thing I wished
had existed.

We now do {{OneLineWhatItDoes}} for teams like {{CustomerExample}}.

You run {{Function}} at {{Company}} — is this a problem worth 20 minutes?

{{SenderName}}

Expected results

Common mistakes

• Sending from the main company domain to save setup time
• Trying to connect a generic mailbox — Reply only accepts business domains for sending, not gmail.com or yahoo.com addresses
• Skipping or shortcutting the 2–3 week warm-up because the list is small
• Raising volume when replies are slow instead of fixing the message
• Writing like a rep — the founder voice is the entire advantage of this play
• Signing off with a bare first name — the contact details in the signature are what make an unfamiliar founder credible
• Expanding to 500 accounts "to be safe" and losing the specificity that made it work

Build this in Reply

1. Register a separate business sending domain and set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on it — Reply does not accept generic domains like gmail.com as sending accounts.
2. Connect mailboxes on that domain and run warm-up for 2–3 weeks before any real outreach — MailToaster is included with a paid subscription, one seat per connected mailbox.
3. Configure sending limits: enable Daily Ramp-up (default 10 a day, increasing by 3) and keep the default 300–450 second delay between sends.
4. Build the account list — find prospects from an ICP — and import contacts.
5. Create the sequence with the steps above, then launch and answer every reply yourself.

Related

• Email deliverability
• Sender reputation
• Launch an outbound campaign
• LinkedIn outreach
• AI SDR for lean teams — when you are ready to hand the writing to an agent

Build with Reply

• REST API: docs.reply.io — email accounts, limits, and sequences
• MCP: agents.reply.io/mcp — run the whole setup conversationally from an agent
• CLI: agents.reply.io/cli — scriptable account and sequence management
• Agent skills: agents.reply.io/skills — packaged launch workflows