What actually runs at night.
No magic, no black box — a pipeline with four honest stages. Here's exactly what happens between midnight and your morning coffee.
1 · Watch — public signals only
The engine continuously reads public sources: job postings, funding announcements, launch news, and founder posts. These are buying signals — a company hiring its first sales rep, or announcing a round, has a fresh, concrete reason to need certain products right now. Nothing is scraped from behind a login, and no private data enters the system.
2 · Filter — reject almost everything
Two gates, in order. First a fast deterministic filter scores every signal against your niche keywords — no AI involved, so it's cheap and predictable. Only what survives goes to the second gate: an AI qualifier with strict instructions to say no — competitors, job seekers, poor fits, and plain noise are rejected and remembered so they're never processed twice. One recent morning: 77 companies in, 74 rejected.
3 · Draft — AI writes the opener, you own the pitch
For the few that pass, the AI writes only the personalized part: a greeting and a short analysis grounded in that company's actual news. Your pitch and call-to-action are your own words, stored in your profile and attached verbatim to every draft — so the selling copy never drifts, and the AI can't overpromise on your behalf. Hard rules: no invented facts, no guessed email addresses, honest conditional language.
4 · Morning — a human decides
The drafts land in your briefing queue. You read each one, edit if you like, and send from your own inbox — replies come straight to you. Nothing is ever sent automatically. The engine finds and writes; the sending is deliberately, permanently yours.
Where it runs
Coldstart runs on EU infrastructure (Germany), with data stored in the EU and transactional email sent from EU regions. The stack is boring on purpose: .NET, PostgreSQL, and a fully automated nightly pipeline — plus daily backups. Built and operated in the Netherlands.