§ 01 · 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.
Where the time goes.
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.
Visual structure at a glance.
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:30
list
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 for any Claude Code project where you want consistent cold email output without re-prompting rules each session
22:20
model
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 for structuring multi-step sequences where each step needs a fresh angle
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."
Things they pointed at.
04:26toolSpokenly
How they asked for the click.
26:45
next-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.
Word for word.
HOOK opening / re-engagementCTA the pitch
00:00HOOKI 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.
00:20HOOKWe'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.
00:34HOOKSo 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.
00:44HOOKSo 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.
00:54HOOKThis 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,
01:15also known as an integrated development environment. And 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.
01:30Then we have the good old desktop app. So you have Mac OS or Windows. You just basically download the app.
01:37You have the chat, Cloud Code, and even Cowork, which are very powerful. They're all great.
01:42In 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. But for this scenario, I would just recommend you get familiar with the way various ways of how to actually use Cloud Code.
01:57And 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
02:05and in the upper right, you just click resources, you're gonna see that we have agent tools and CLIs. And for this, you're gonna need to get instantly CLI if you're using instantly for this scenario.
02:16And 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. If you're an agency or you manage multiple clients, you're gonna want to install the Instantly CLI
02:38at the project level. So, really, you just remove this. Honestly, it's just gonna be just like this.
02:44N 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. Finally, you're gonna want to go to instantly.
02:54In order to get your API key, you just need to go to the lower left here. You're gonna click on settings. And then from there, you're gonna click on integrations,
03:02go to API keys, and then just create yourself an API key. We're gonna call this Claude code demo,
03:10and we're gonna select all scopes, and we'll go ahead and copy it from there. And we have our new API key. Now from here, the IDE that I use all the time is Cursor.
03:19Basically, 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
04:08so it can, uh, reference those files. So we have our CSV right here. Now I have my brand new chat session.
04:14Again, I have different levels of permission, which you're gonna wanna configure to how you want to work. For the most part, I would recommend being on auto mode so that way you don't do anything crazy.
04:24So I'm gonna use an app called Spokenly, which is a speech to text application. So I personally like to speak to my agents and use the keyboard for fine tuning and things like that.
04:35So this is a brand new project in which we are going to enrich and clean up the CSV in here,
04:44which is geared towards going after our ideal customer profile for
04:51SpaceX. In this example, we will be using this list to target
04:56and generate cold emails in a campaign in order for us to offer different lines of SpaceX,
05:05in rural areas where businesses can actually benefit from high speed Internet such as Starlink. So what I want you to do is to firstly pull into context about SpaceX.
05:17I want you to establish skills in order to know more about SpaceX as it relates to
05:25your taskings and requirements. And then I also want you to in implement skills
05:32in order for you to know what cold email good cold email looks like. Firstly, every cold email
05:39has to be very carefully considered and spoken to the person as if you wrote the email on a one to one basis. There will be no templates. There will be no
05:49custom merge tags that are inserted as a piece of the entire copy. There are no templated pieces of copy.
05:58Every 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
06:23this 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. The way to do it nowadays
06:41is 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
07:00let them know about something that they may not already know that is interesting, insightful, and most importantly,
07:09The biggest thing here is that we are reaching out to prospects in which we have no idea who they are. They 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,
07:35there's no, I hope this email finds you well. And 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
07:50in an optimized way that could be easily read on a mobile device. So, therefore, we're talking one to two sentences per paragraph.
07:58The frameworks that I want you to implement as skills are as follows. We have the greeting because everybody needs to be nice and say hello first name. The first name variables
08:10defined by Instantly is in what you call camel case. A lot of times you'll actually get snake case, but it's actually camel case.
08:18Finally, what I want to make sure that you do ultimately is that your goal is to reach the prospect and peak their curiosity
08:28in such a way that makes it easily welcoming and in such a way that they want to know more about you. A call to action
08:39should ideally be something that is a no brainer. It's not necessarily asking for a meeting. It's not necessarily
08:46asking 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
08:56that they are really trying to learn more about it. They're gonna do one of three things. They're gonna either not respond or they're going to respond and say kick rocks, unsubscribe,
09:09or hey, I'm interested. Or 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.
09:22They'll do all the things because a lot of buyers are very intelligent now, and they won't ever respond. But you know what they will do is they will actually self serve and probably book a meeting,
09:34or they will probably just sign up on their own. So that is usually the outcome that is going to happen. But nonetheless,
09:41what 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,
10:40and we will get started with some lead generation. Alright. So it has written a bunch of different markdown files in which you can see right here if we break this out.
10:50We have cold email skills and we have SpaceX knowledge skills. So 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,
11:05which is obviously subjective here. But 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.
11:16So it's very simple to actually review here. So for now, we'll go ahead and pass on that and get this lead generation machine up and going. Alright.
11:24Great. Now from here, you will see that we have a CSV list that is already scraped and prepared for us.
11:31What we wanna do is to go into the CSV. What 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.
11:43And then I want you to use Python and also install polars in order to quickly navigate
11:51and understand what we're looking at from a list perspective. And then I want you to segment what you believe
11:58is going to be a short win and break this into either segments or cohorts
12:05in order to scale this as quickly as possible to know that what we're working with is quality data and good to go. So please look at that, understand where they are, and which Starlink product was gonna be
12:20advantageous 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
12:39and requires way less RAM. So that way your computer doesn't go, oh, I'm screaming here.
12:45Right? So I installed it, multistep. K.
12:47You know, we're going through. Polar's truncated in the middle of the industry list. Okay.
12:51That's interesting. Pulling pulling the full breakdown plus a few signals. So, yeah, sometimes you gotta kinda steer it, and we'll see
12:59what 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. And while that is working, we're actually gonna set up, uh, instantly CLI.
13:16So I'm actually gonna go here. We're gonna start a new session. We're gonna go back to our files.
13:23And then I'm actually going to click on this. We're gonna start a new full or a new file. We're gonna call it .env.local.
13:32I'm gonna type in instantly API key equals,
13:38and I'm gonna paste it. And then we're gonna hit command s to save, and then we'll close it. Then we're gonna go here.
13:43We're gonna say, I want you to install instantly CLI using
13:49using command n p m I instantly
13:55CLI. Please install this at the project level,
14:01not user global. And let me know once this is set up.
14:08We have the instantly API key that is in our ENV file which is
14:16ENV dot local. So 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.
14:28So definitely do not expose those. Allows you to keep things, you know, safe and secure. Perfect.
14:33And it just like that installs. We have instantly CLI, which is now in packets dot JSON, which we can pull up, but it basically says, hey.
14:41These are the dependencies that you need in order to run this whole thing. And then let's see here at the project root. Nothing went global.
14:50Couple of things. K. Loading instantly CLI
14:53by default. K. Like, need a symlink.
14:56Let's see here. Verify that the CLI works. Yes.
14:59Please verify that the CLI works. So it says it's working. It's authenticated.
15:05K. We're good to go. We have our workspace.
15:09Alright. Beautiful. And we are done.
15:11Alright. And 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.
15:18So you could see right here, this goes over the copy. The 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.
15:29A few neighboring operators have started dropping legacy GEO and four g. So I was talking about the network. This is kinda where we wanna iterate and make sure that it really sticks out to them.
15:38It needs to be really obvious to them that's like, oh, how did you figure that out? We'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,
16:00I really want to dive in to the rural areas of when it comes to latency,
16:08slow networks, having a whole lot of reliability, and therefore also can be improved through
16:16having a dedicated satellite or dedicated dish for Starlink satellites. So 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.
16:33In 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. So ideally,
16:53the first hook sentence needs to be extremely short
16:58and vital and relevant to the prospect. The second sentence
17:03needs 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,
17:17and you are able to solve that problem or that pain point or improve their current situation. And 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
17:42a 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,
18:00then yes, that's a good thing. Again, 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.
18:11They are likely already getting cold emails, and so we want to be as relevant, as short, and as concise
18:20and specific as possible. We also need to make sure that no paragraph is too long.
18:26We need to have maybe one or two sentences at best and ensure that we have new lines to make sure it is spread out. And this should be optimized in such a way that could be read on a mobile device
18:38in about five seconds, no more. So 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.
18:48So you can see here that oftentimes I'm getting an error here. So 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.
19:00And, 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. Although, 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
19:25remote Permian pads run on its least reliable link. Cellular and legacy satellite choke on real time SCADA
19:32and 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? That's a good one.
19:43And then right here, the largest operator in Permian still runs on four connectivity vendors. Wells, DJ.
19:49Okay. Perfect. One dedicated Starlink layer is how a few peers made that consistent.
19:55If I put together a short snapshot of how they did it, would that be useful to you? Spot on. Love it.
20:00At 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? So that's the goal here.
20:09So from here, we are going to so it's all done. I went ahead and approved it already. So we're gonna say, great.
20:16I want to now push this to instantly use instantly CLI to create campaigns
20:25around this, uh, one to one personalized
20:29copy, and let's get the campaign
20:34created and with the right sequence
20:39steps. Let's do a three sequence campaign.
20:43And step one will obviously be immediate. Step two will be three days after. Step three, let's do seven days.
20:51But on the second email, I want there to be no subject line because that will be in the same thread. And on step two,
21:01we 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,
21:19step 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
21:36so that way they can actually learn. Because 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
21:47a little bit more details than the first one. The third email
21:51needs 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,
22:06but we need to reframe it in a way that potentially is unique to their situation
22:13because most people in b to b will do transactions and buy from vendors for three reasons. That is to
22:22make 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,
23:58I can go ahead and I could see the campaigns were created, which is great. So 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.
24:10Now you will see you have, you know, your typical ones of email, email provider, your ESG or security gateway. You have your status, contact company,
24:20all 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,
25:06uh, scenario in which they can prove their situation. And then we have a very low friction or really no friction, valuable call to action on a hypothetical.
25:17If I sent a snapshot of how other terminals did exactly that, would that be worth a look? Leading into everything here. There is no small talk of, I hope this email finds you well.
25:27There's no just bumping this at the top of the inbox. Right? 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
25:39one or email one. And, we have step two, worth adding the part that most teams miss. The problem on a remote pad usually isn't the outage.
25:47It's the latency floor. Right? So it's actually taking the second email as an additional opportunity
25:53to share more insights or explain more. And 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.
26:06It could be seven days later. So 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.
26:20You wanna make sure the new lines are good. You wanna sure it renders appropriately. You do wanna do a deliverability score.
26:26So we have perfect. Alright. Spam score is zero.
26:29CTAAgain, each one of these points, the lowest we can get is actually the best to do it. Right? So that, in my opinion, is best way to do it that we have seen in 2026.
26:38CTAIf 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. So click this video right here where it breaks down exactly what we would do to start a brand new agency in 2026 from scratch.
26:53CTABy the end of it, you'll have everything you need to start making your first dollars. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you over there.
— full transcript
§ 05 · For Joe
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.
