CASE STUDY — /work/outreach-pipeline
An outreach pipeline where nothing sends without a human tap
This is the system that runs cold outreach for my own consulting practice, right now. HubSpot is the state machine, Claude drafts every email, and a Telegram approval gate sits in front of the send — nothing goes out until I’ve read it and tapped Approve.
The problem
Cold outreach either scales by removing the human — spam, generic, low trust — or stays fully manual and doesn’t scale. This pipeline automates everything except the one decision that matters: whether this specific email, to this specific person, is good enough to send.
The pipeline
daily schedule, 10:00 CEST · pulls contacts from HubSpot filtered by status
status-based router · first contact, follow-up 1 (day 4), follow-up 2 (day 7), or disqualify after 7 more days of silence
each branch prepares stage-specific drafting instructions · first email vs. value-add follow-up vs. final, low-pressure close
Claude (Sonnet 4.5) writes the email from a researched, human-written observation about the recipient · never invented details
draft arrives on Telegram with Approve/Decline buttons · nothing below this line runs without a tap
direct Zoho Mail API integration · native thread-reply support so follow-ups land in the same conversation, not a new inbox thread
outcome (sent, replied-to-thread, or declined) written back to HubSpot as status change + logged engagement · drives the next day's timing
An engineering note, for honest color rather than marketing: the first version used n8n’s built-in Gmail node, which couldn’t reliably thread follow-up replies the way a real conversation should look in the recipient’s inbox. I rebuilt the send/reply layer as a direct integration against the Zoho Mail REST API — more work, but correct threading behavior in both Gmail and Outlook clients, tested end to end.
Live run: contact drafted, approved on Telegram, sent — no scripted staging.
What this is — and isn’t
The email content shown in the recording above is a generic sample from an unrelated industry — not a real prospect’s information. The architecture in the recording is exactly what runs my own outreach: same gate, same threading, same state tracking.
This is a working system in active use, not a proof of concept. It sends real email to real prospects every day it has something worth sending, and the cost per draft is €0.006. The interesting part isn’t the model. It’s the gate — one human decision, placed exactly where reputation is at stake.
I build this kind of system for companies, on their infrastructure. The scoping starts with a €600 audit.