u/Business-Test-2031

Spent an entire day applying to AI startups last month. Could only do 5 companies with 6 hours of research in total. One decent cold message per company if I was lucky. Felt like a terrible trade.

So I spent the 2 days fixing it through AI automation and have spend a month building an entire pipeline.

It sources early stage AI startups with active hiring signals, researches each founder, finds a real connection between your background and what they're building, and drafts personalized outreach in your voice.

Runs every 4 days at 6 AM automatically, surfaces 35 companies with messages ready to review and send with Founder's linkedIn.

What took me a full day now takes 20 minutes. Now figuring out what to do with it. Three honest options:

1. Do it manually. 5-6 hours, 5 companies, repeat forever while also trying to interview and build things. This is what I was doing. It works but it eats your entire job search bandwidth. No time time to build a project or prepare for the interviews.
2. Self-host it. I can open source the repo. But it's not free still, you're looking at Claude Code ($20/mo), Anthropic API (~$15-20 per run), Firecrawl credits, a Postgres database setup, Docker to run it locally, and a weekend to set it up. And then it still needs to be personalized to your background. Realistic cost is $150+/month and real setup effort.
3. $19/month hosted. Create an account, go through a short onboarding interview, pipeline personalizes to you and runs automatically. Dashboard for reviewing and approving messages before anything sends. Cheaper than running it yourself, none of the setup.

Built this for my own job search and it's been running for a month.

Thinking about opening the hosted version to a small group before deciding whether to just open source everything.

Curious how others are thinking about it?

I don't have a big network and want to validate the idea+serve someone as manual conceirge without spending money on the buidling the product that no one wants.

I don't know how, who to reach out? What should my message me to people.
Should I look to understand their problems first, offer to catch up on a call on the first email/cold call.

Then understand their problem and offer a solution?

And where to find these people? How do I get to know the emails, signals they'd be interested?

I don't have money to buy ZoomInfo's subscription.

Does cold outbound even work?

I could build something using claude code but then it is me building another thing to solve my problem and doing the manual work of updating things there. Looking for what's working etc.

Any suggestions?