I'm Building an AI SDR in Public

I'm going to write here every week about a thing I'm building: what it does, what it costs, what works, and what breaks. Especially what breaks.

This is the first one, so here's where it came from, where it honestly is today, and the parts I still don't know.

It started with an expensive hobby

On my free time I race cars. To race next season I need sponsors, so at the start of the year I began looking for potential partners.

That's when I found out how brutal cold outreach actually is.

I'd spend an evening working out which businesses near a track might plausibly care, reading about them, deciding whether they were a fit. Then I'd go looking for someone to write to. And over and over, what I'd find at the end of all that work was a contact form, or a contact@ address.

Anyone who has done this knows the feeling. You've just spent two hours qualifying a company, and the only way in is a form that goes to whoever checks it, if anyone does. I knew my email would just land in the void.

Dozens of hours. Almost nothing to show for it.

Nothing I could find did the hard part

So I went looking for a tool, the way you do.

What I found was a category full of sequencers. They handle sending, scheduling and follow-up cadence, and every one of them assumes you arrive already holding a list. Which is the exact part I was trying to escape.

At the other end sit the data vendors. They'll sell you contacts, which is genuinely useful, and leave you to work out which of them are worth contacting.

Between those two products is where all the actual work lives, and almost nobody sells into it. Cold outbound is really three jobs: find candidates who plausibly fit, decide which are worth an email, and get a real named person at an address that works, at a business that still exists. The tools do the fourth job, which is the easy one.

So I built it

Giving up wasn't an option, so I started building an agent to do it for me.

It goes out and finds companies in a market, checks each one against what a good partner looks like, identifies the decision maker, verifies the address genuinely belongs to that person, and writes the first email. Then it stops and waits for me to approve before anything sends.

That last part isn't a limitation, it's the point. I've spent my career in supply chain, where the lesson is that delivering the wrong thing on time is still a failure. I wasn't going to build something that sends confidently and apologises later.

The email that changed it

A few days in, I got a reply. It said: "I want to hear more about your story."

I was over the moon. First because someone had actually written back, and second because the agent worked. That reply came from a business I would never have found by hand, and I hadn't spent a single evening looking for it.

It's two replies and a phone call now. I know that's a small number and I'd rather say so than dress it up. But something had shifted: the work was happening while I did other things.

And then the obvious thought arrived

I'm not the only person with this problem. I might not even be in the top half of people who have it.

Every small B2B company has someone spending a chunk of their week on the part I'd just handed to a machine. A two-partner law firm. An IT managed services provider. A staffing agency owner doing outbound between client calls. Most of them have less time for it than I do, and none of them are going to hire an SDR to fix it.

So I looked at my Google Sheets prototype and thought: this could probably help other people too. I spent the next several days working almost around the clock to get it to a point where it would be useful to more than just me.

That's ApexOutreach.

Where it actually is

Since the whole premise here is honesty, here is the unvarnished status.

Zero paying customers. Two accounts run on it, both mine, which makes me my own first customer and my own worst bug report.

The daily target is 15 leads. That number isn't marketing. Ten to twenty a day from a single inbox is the band that doesn't get your sending domain flagged, and going past it is how people quietly destroy their own deliverability without noticing until the replies stop.

And the quality bar is brutal on purpose. Last week I ran it across five markets and it evaluated 100 businesses to produce 11 I would actually email. Most of the rest had no findable address, or a name and an email address I couldn't prove belonged to the same human. I checked twelve of them by hand afterwards, expecting to catch the machine being lazy, and got three.

That was the week I stopped thinking of the discard rate as a bug.

What I don't know yet

This is the part I'm most interested in writing about, because I genuinely don't have the answers.

I don't know whether anyone will pay for this. I have a price, and no evidence.

I don't know whether the deliverability orthodoxy is true. Everyone says you must warm a new sending domain for weeks before you use it. So I bought three domains, warmed one, ramped another normally, and left the third alone. In about three weeks I'll know something, and I'll publish it either way.

I don't know whether the pipeline can hit three good leads in every market, or only in the easy ones. Professional services are easy. Local trades are not. That gap might be a tuning problem or it might be a fact about the world.

And I don't know what breaks next. In the first week of building, the list of things I had to fix was longer than the list of things I set out to build, and several were embarrassing in a specific, instructive way. The kind where a guard existed, and worked perfectly, and was wired to the wrong field.

The deal

I'll write this up as it happens. Real bugs, real causes, real numbers, including the ones that make me look careless. Nobody believes AI SDR tools work, because most of them don't, and I can't argue anyone out of that. Showing you the inside of one while it's being built is the only honest move I have.

Next week I'll tell you about the time my own agent wrote a racing sponsorship pitch to a marketing consultant, mentioned my wife by name, and invited him to a paddock.

If you'd rather see what it does than read about what it does, tell us who you sell to and we'll send you three real decision-makers in your market plus the exact email we'd send the first one, free: apexoutreach.app/find. No signup, no card, no list.