Hacker News startup outreach
Every month Hacker News runs a Who is hiring thread, and hundreds of companies post exactly what they need, often with an address to write to. Your agent reads that thread over the public API, keeps the posts matching the keywords you care about, and pulls out the company, its site and any email the poster published themselves. For the ones without an address it fetches their site and its contact pages over plain HTTP and takes the one meant for enquiries rather than the first it finds. Show HN and Launch HN work the same way if you would rather reach people who just shipped.
Each email opens on the actual role or launch, because a first line that proves you read their post is the difference between a reply and a delete. It can only say what you put in your outreach profile, so it cannot invent a statistic, a customer or a price, and if you have not set a price it says terms depend on the engagement rather than making a number up. It never writes to the same person twice, across any of your workflows. It drafts everything for you to read first and sends nothing until you turn it on. Measured at about $0.42 a run and five minutes, with no API keys to sign up for and no proxy to configure. It runs over your business's own connection.
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the one concrete offer I am making, any proof points that are actually true and checkable, my price line or empty if I do not publish one, the single next step I want people to take, and the keywords that mark a Hacker News post as relevant to me.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.