Split a side business into small agents for leads, outreach and call prep
Idea + starter prompt, not run by us yet
For: Founders with a day job who have evenings and weekends for their own business
A founder sells industrial-insulation software alone on top of a full-time job. About 16 agents, coordinated in Paperclip and driven by Claude and GPT, cover lead research, enrichment, tailored cold emails, CRM updates, blog posts, LinkedIn comments, scouting Reddit threads, call prep and transcription. The founder reports a 3.3% reply rate on 214 cold emails and a first pilot customer. The funnel is still thin.
Steps
- List the repeated jobs in your business and start with only two or three, such as lead research and CRM updates.
- Give each agent one clear job, one input and one output.
- Keep sending in your hands. Draft emails for review and follow your local anti-spam rules.
- Track real numbers: emails sent, replies and calls booked, as the author did.
- Take the sales conversations and demo yourself.
Starter prompt
Trial first: design the agents against [5] made-up leads in a spreadsheet called [trial-leads], with invented names and companies. Do not use real people yet. I run a small business selling [product] to [type of customer] and I only have evenings. Help me design a small team of agents, starting with: [lead research, CRM updates, call prep]. For each job, define what goes in, what comes out, where the output is stored and when a human must check it. Show me the design first. Everything is a draft in a spreadsheet. Stop and wait for my yes before any email is sent or anything is posted. A draft is not permission. Collect no personal data you cannot source, and follow the unsubscribe and consent rules in [my country]. I will not paste passwords into this chat.
Original post: Reddit · found via agentusecases.ai. Written up in our own words. We haven't run it, so test it on made-up data first.