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B2B SaaS · startup partner programs

Startup discovery and outreach platform: from public launch sources to verified, personal first contact

A daily pipeline that finds early-stage startups in public launch sources, verifies their contacts and runs personalized, rate-limited outreach with opt-out handling, reply tracking and CRM hand-off.

Client
Client confidential
Industry
B2B SaaS · startup partner programs
Year
2026
  1. 01 Collect new launches
  2. 02 Crawl sites, extract contacts
  3. 03 Verify addresses
  4. 04 Score & deduplicate
  5. 05 Manager approval
  6. 06 Rate-limited personal sending
  7. 07 Reply tracking & CRM hand-off

Challenge

A SaaS company runs a program that offers early-stage startups its product on special terms. New startups appear every day on launch platforms, in developer communities, in startup directories and on regional boards, and finding them by hand is slow. Contacting them was only acceptable if each message was personal, sent within strict limits, identified the sender and could be refused with a reply.

Solution

We built a daily pipeline that collects new launches, crawls each startup's website for contact channels, verifies the addresses, scores the lead and queues a localized, A/B-tested first message. Sending runs under per-day, per-hour and per-domain limits with a warm-up ramp. Replies and bounces are read over IMAP: any reply stops the sequence, AI classifies it, and positive leads go into the client's CRM. Managers work in a role-based dashboard with approval queues, template and sender management, per-variant analytics and CSV export.

What we delivered

  • Source connectors for public launch platforms, developer communities, startup directories and regional boards
  • Website crawler that extracts contact channels, with optional headless rendering for JavaScript-only sites
  • Email validation and verification, lead scoring and deduplication
  • Localized, A/B-tested outreach sequences with a warm-up ramp and sending limits
  • IMAP reply and bounce tracking, AI reply classification and CRM hand-off
  • Role-based dashboard (viewer, manager, admin) with approval queues and per-variant analytics
  • Pre-flight command that checks sender DNS (SPF, DMARC, MX), credentials and limits before go-live
  • About 160 automated tests running in CI, plus schema migrations

Functionality

  • Idempotent daily runs: unique keys on source, domain, queue item and sent message, and an atomic claim that prevents double sends
  • Deduplication by normalized domain, with a recontact window
  • Website crawler that honors robots.txt, stays on the target domain and uses timeouts and retry limits
  • Every template must carry a postal address and an opt-out line, checked when it is saved
  • Opt-out replies honored automatically
  • Contacts in certain jurisdictions go to manual review instead of automatic sending
  • Warm-up ramp that freezes and steps back when the bounce rate rises, with delivery status synced back from the email provider
  • AI-written openers limited to one line with no links, with a neutral fallback; AI reply labels never override a manager's label
  • Fail-closed dashboard that refuses to start publicly without authentication; hashed passwords, login lockout and role-restricted write actions

Integrations

  • Email-verification API (OAuth 2.0 client credentials)
  • Client CRM REST API (OAuth 2.0 client credentials)
  • SMTP sending and IMAP reply and bounce tracking
  • Delivery-status sync from the email provider
  • Google Gemini API for reply classification and openers

Technologies

  • Python 3.12
  • FastAPI
  • SQLAlchemy 2 + Alembic
  • PostgreSQL 16
  • Jinja2
  • httpx + BeautifulSoup
  • APScheduler
  • Playwright (headless Chromium)
  • Docker Compose
  • Nginx + Let's Encrypt
  • pytest
  • GitHub Actions

Result

In production for the client. The daily run is idempotent, so a restart cannot send the same message twice. The platform also became the shared core for three more systems for the same client, each running as an isolated instance.

One core, four isolated instances

This platform is the outreach core behind three more systems for the same client: an agency partner sourcing engine, an affiliate reactivation system and an affiliate recruitment engine. Each instance runs with its own database, dashboard and sending identity, so data and sender reputation never mix. They share one thing on purpose: a global suppression list. An opt-out, refusal or bounce recorded by any instance is honored by all of them.

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