Hacker News startup outreach
ObjectiveConversations with startups at the exact moment they need help, without buying a lead list.
Consumption~$0.42 per run (20 harvested, 8 emailed)
Runtime5 to 6 minutes
ScheduleOnce a day
How it works
You get warm conversations with startups right when they have budget and a need. Every month hundreds of companies tell Hacker News what they're hiring for or what they just shipped. Each morning you get a handful of personal emails sent to the ones that match who you sell to, at the address they chose to publish.
Your emails read like you did your homework. Each one opens on the role or launch they actually posted, and only says what's true about your business, so replies come from interest rather than confusion. Nobody gets emailed twice, and nothing sends until you've read the drafts and switched it on.
It costs about $0.42 a day. You don't need lead lists, API keys or a proxy.
Paste this into your connected agent
Read https://mcp.nodo.com/start.md and set up Nodo for me
Attach the released workflow nodo-hn-startup-outreach to my business.
Before anything else, check my business has a device with the CLI capability. This one needs no browser at all, it reads Hacker News over the public API and fetches contact pages over plain HTTP. There is no proxy to set up either, it runs over my own connection.
Then help me fill in two resources. First outreach_profile: my business name, the first name that signs my emails, what we do in two or three plain sentences, who we sell to, the one concrete offer I am making, any proof points that are actually true and checkable, my price line or empty if I do not publish one, the single next step I want people to take, and the keywords that mark a Hacker News post as relevant to me. Be specific with the keywords, because a broad list finds more posts and qualifies them worse. Also ask me for exclude_domains so it never writes to my own company or my customers.
Second outreach_smtp_account: a dedicated mailbox to send from, not my main inbox. This needs an app password, not my account password, and for Gmail two-factor has to be switched on first or the app password screen does not exist. I will enter the password myself in the Nodo settings, so do not ask me for it in chat.
Run it once with auto_send false and show me the drafted emails before anything goes out. I want to read them and check the tone before you send a single one.
Once I am happy, set auto_send true and schedule it daily. Start with a small batch_size. Note that the default signal, who_is_hiring, reads the current month's thread, which is thin in the first day or two of a new month, so if a run comes back nearly empty around then that is why. show_hn and launch_hn are the alternatives.
People do reply to these, so tell me about the nodo-outreach-reply-responder-wf template too, since it answers them from this same mailbox and shares the same contacted log.