Playbook: hunt leads across DACH on autopilot
New clients rarely arrive on their own. This playbook sets up a small sales team inside one of your companies. A Lead Researcher searches free, public sources in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and fills a spreadsheet. An Outreach Copywriter drafts first messages and follow-ups. You decide what goes out, one message at a time.
What you’ll learn
- How to set up hunting from a preset, and pin it to your always-on VPS.
- How to approve leads, then drafts: from the Outbox or from your phone.
- How public tenders turn into bid plans (“Go — we bid”).
- How sequences, reply detection and warm-up keep follow-ups polite and out of spam.
Before you start
- A company for the business you’re selling for.
- An e-mail channel for that company in Settings → Channels, with your SMTP app password. Add an IMAP host too: that’s how replies are read.
- Optional but recommended: a Team-Hub on a VPS, so hunting doesn’t depend on your laptop being on.
1. Set it up
- Open the company and go to ▶️ Run it → 🎯 Leads. The first time, it opens on ⚙ Setup.
- Next to Start from an example, pick the closest preset: Software / app agency, Craft business (Handwerk) or Consulting / coaching. It fills in the form; everything stays editable.
- Go through the fields:
- What does … sell? and Who is an ideal lead — and what signals a need?
- Search phrases (German + English), Regions (e.g.
DE, AT, CH, Bayern, Wien), OpenStreetMap business categories and Mastodon hashtags. - Leave 💼 Watch the German job board and 📰 Watch the news on. A company advertising a job for what you sell needs the capacity: that’s a warm lead.
- Portals & feeds to watch: paste the RSS feed of any portal you’d browse yourself, one per line. Job or project boards, your city’s business news, your IHK.
- Content calendar — platforms: leave it empty for no Content Marketer, or write e.g.
linkedin, blog. - Not a lead: who to leave out. The agency preset already excludes other IT firms, since they’re competitors, not clients.
- Your signature / sender: your name, company and postal address. It’s used in e-mails and letters, and doubles as your legal notice (Impressum).
- New qualified leads per day (target).
- Under Where does the hunting run 24/7?, pick your VPS (🛰
— remote, always on ) instead of This machine (only while it’s on). Only machines paired with the sync scope are listed. Saving switches auto-sync to that machine on and sends the team there at once; leads, drafts and source results sync back to you for review.- The researcher uses your default worker model. On the VPS, it needs that provider’s key there (Fleet → 🔑 Keys); without one it falls back to the VPS’s default model. Setup shows which model, and when the last hunt ran.
- Click 🎯 Start lead hunting.
Setup creates the team and its schedules, plus a starting set of sources. The first run starts at the next 2-hour mark.
| Worker | What it does | When |
|---|---|---|
| 🔎 Lead Researcher | Searches free, open sources and fills the spreadsheet | every 2 h, 06:00–22:00 |
| ✍️ Outreach Copywriter | Drafts first messages and due follow-ups | every 2 h, 07:30–21:30 |
| 📣 Content Marketer | 3 posts a week, a newsletter in the first week of each month (only if you listed platforms) | Mondays 09:00 |
Running Setup again later (Save & update hunting) updates everything and duplicates nothing.
2. Watch the sources learn
🌐 Sources lists every source the researcher works through: the job board, news, your portal feeds, OpenStreetMap, EU tenders (TED), Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Overflow and Mastodon, plus SearXNG if you run your own. The app fetches each one itself and the researcher qualifies the results; it opens a company’s own website or legal notice only to complete a lead. No paid APIs, no logins, no CAPTCHA tricks, no invented contact details.
After every run it records what each source yielded. Productive sources are revisited every 12 hours. After 3 empty runs a source goes on probation; after 6 it retires and gets a monthly re-check.
3. Approve leads
Open 📋 Leads. Each row has a status, a score, a type, the organisation and contact, and a Fit reason. Edit any cell in place. Filter by status, country or Score ≥.
Tick the good ones and click ✓ Approve (n). That tells the copywriter it may draft for them; drafts appear in the Outbox after its next run. ✕ Reject takes the rest off the table.
Need the list elsewhere? ⬇ Excel, ⬇ CSV, ⬇ CRM… (HubSpot or Pipedrive CSV) or two-way 🟩 Google Sheets sync.
4. Approve drafts, one by one
Open 📨 Outbox → To review. Every card can be edited before you decide:
| Card | Button | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| ✓ Approve & send | Sent from this machine, or queued if today’s warm-up limit is reached. | |
| ✉️ Letter | ✓ Approve & print letter | A print-ready letter opens. Post it, then click 📮 Mark posted. |
| 📣 Post | ✓ Approve & copy | The text is copied. Publish it yourself, then ✓ Mark published. Nothing is posted automatically. |
| 🏛 Bid plan | ✓ Go — we bid | See the next step. |
✕ Reject discards a draft. Nothing is sent without your click.
From your phone it’s the same approval. With the phone console on, tasks lists the drafts with codes; show <code>, then approve <code> or edit <code> <new text>.
5. Tenders → bid plans
Public tenders from TED show up in 📋 Leads with the type 🏛 and the time left: “12 d left”, “due today” or “closed”. You don’t win a tender with a cold e-mail, so a tender gets a 🏛 Bid plan in the Outbox instead, with a link to the Tender notice.
- Read the plan and the notice. Decide.
- ✓ Go — we bid commits to it; ✕ No bid lets it go.
- After a go, the card moves to Bids, letters & posts in progress. 📄 Open tender takes you to the notice to prepare and submit your bid.
- When it’s in, click ✓ Bid submitted.
📊 Pipeline counts Open tenders, and how many close within 14 days.
6. Follow-ups and replies
- 🔁 Sequences. When a first message goes out, the lead joins the company’s outreach sequence. Setup creates “Erstkontakt + 2 Follow-ups” (day 0, +4 days, +7 days) and a “Willkommen” flow for signups. Each later step is drafted when it’s due, and you approve it like any other message. Who is on which sequence shows everyone’s step, with a Stop button.
- 💬 Replies. Answers are read from the e-mail inbox over IMAP and classified: 🔥 interested or 💬 reply stops the sequence; ⏳ not now stops it and sets a reminder in 90 days; 🏖 out of office moves the follow-up back a week; 🚫 unsubscribe and ↩️ bounce take the lead out of all outreach, for good. Leads never get an automatic answer: you reply yourself, or ask a worker to draft it. Click ✓ Handled when you’re done.
7. Stay out of the spam folder
A new mailbox that suddenly sends lots of cold mail lands in spam. Under 📊 Pipeline → 📬 Sending health:
- The warm-up starts with 10 / day, adds 5 each day, up to 50 / day. Change it and click Save.
- Approved mail beyond today’s limit waits in Queued and goes out on weekdays between 08:00 and 18:00.
- 🔍 Check SPF / DKIM / DMARC checks your sending domain and tells you how to fix anything missing.
Try it
- Run Setup with the preset closest to your business, pinned to your VPS.
- After the first runs, approve three leads in 📋 Leads.
- When their drafts arrive, edit one in the Outbox and approve it. Reject another from your phone with
reject <code>. - Check 📊 Pipeline: sent today against the warm-up limit, and the SPF / DKIM / DMARC result.
Recap
Setup gives a company a researcher and a copywriter that hunt free DACH sources around the clock on your VPS. You approve leads, then every draft, from the Outbox or your phone. Tenders become bid plans you commit to with ✓ Go — we bid, sequences follow up politely, replies stop them, and warm-up keeps your mail out of spam. Next: how this very Academy is made.
📖 Reference in the docs: Lead-gen · Company → Leads · Outreach approval
➡️ Next: Playbook: the content studio