Skip to main content
Pick the play by what happened to the buyer, not by what you sell. A play is one outreach strategy: target inputs, drafting instructions and, often, a cadence of follow-ups. Finders route candidates to a play, and the Queue lets you approve them and send in a batch. The Plays page lists the strategies, their channels and editable cadence steps.

​
Match the reason for contact

The signal decides the play. Use the Run form or CLI command the play offers. Not every play has both. Queue-only plays run through a batch send. Voice and SMS motions have different target requirements from email. x-amplify-dm and community-reply produce text you post yourself, on X, Reddit or Hacker News. Generating the draft sends nothing; Mark sent or Mark posted records it.

​
Review before sending

A draft should connect the person’s real signal to a useful offer. Your product brief and founder facts supply the context. Blank credentials or missing evidence should not be invented. Check lint flags, recipient identity and sender routing before approving. Institutional plays need institutional context. sources-sought, for example, uses a specific notice and agency. design-partner-loi moves from conversation to a scoped pilot to a non-binding letter of intent, and rejects owner-operator buyer types before drafting. A finder can route its rows to design-partner-loi instead of its own founder-to-founder play by setting play: "design-partner-loi" and buyerType (enterprise, government or hardware) on its trigger. The play writes for an institutional evaluator rather than a founder: the first email opens on their company and asks whether they own the problem, the follow-up offers a design-partner conversation, and the last step proposes one scoped pilot and closes. A trigger is ready for this routing only once it has both a valid buyerType and an edge; dedupe covers both plays, so switching the setting on a trigger never lets the same person through twice.

​
First-touch format

firstTouchFormat is an opt-in, measured test of the first email’s shape. Leave it unset and nothing changes. Set it on a trigger to one of:
  • standard: the play’s own prompt, unchanged.
  • brief: a binding limit on top of the play’s prompt: at most 3 sentences and under 70 words, no opening observation about the reader, one ask, and a register pulled from a coarse read of the title (executive, lead, individual contributor, or unknown). A draft that comes back over budget gets one tighter redraft; it’s held back if it’s still over.
  • split: each prospect is fixed to one arm (standard or brief) by a stable hash of their email, so the comparison is controlled rather than self-selected. firstTouchSplit sets the share that lands on brief (default 0.5).
Follow-ups are unchanged by any of these settings; only the first email’s shape is affected. See Measuring angles and formats for how the split’s results show up in the dashboard.

​
Manage the conversation

A cadence follows up until the prospect replies or you stop it. Many plays attach one: a value follow-up and a final breakup message, with timing editable in Plays. cadence advance polls inbound mail and fires due email steps. Set linkedinContinuation: true for the workspace or on one trigger, and an email cadence that ends without a reply carries on to LinkedIn: an invite, a first message once accepted, and a close. Each is a draft you review on Cadences. A recorded email reply stops the prospect’s live cadences. You can also stop a cadence by hand and record why. Bad timing and other eligible stops may enter breakup-revive after the configured cold window; not-a-fit and do-not-contact stay excluded. A LinkedIn reply stops email cadences too, once it is synced and matched to the prospect or you mark it by hand (LinkedIn). An accepted connection alone is not a reply.

​
Add direct mail to selected motions

Mail is optional per motion and approved per prospect in Cadences. In Plays, choose Automatic, Always include or Off, where the letter goes in the sequence, and how long to wait. Business and founder return addresses are prefilled from saved data. Each prospect can use a generated letter or its own PDF/JPEG. See the direct-mail guide for setup and sending.