🚀 Launching Skyp!

Welcome to Skyp Mode, the newsletter of Skyp AI outbound for founder led sales.

Skyp is launching! Want to be a founding customer?

You’re getting this inaugural issue because you signed up on the Skyp waitlist or connected with me about founder-led sales (Maven lesson perhaps?). This newsletter will focus purely on tactical founder led sales and GTM. Please forward it!

What is Skyp Mode?

Like you, we’re figuring out our GTM. This newsletter is an experiment, and a play on “founder mode”. We’ll be sharing tips and tricks that we learn–using our own tools, or other tools–to help other founders. Helping founders grow is what we are here for. There may also be some stories about building in public, including how we’re building agentic AI. But it’s all about founder’s growing their companies.

What is Skyp?

Skyp is the AI tool that makes sending outbound insanely easy for founders and small teams. It isn’t an “AI SDR” – it doesn’t do everything for you, it just does what you’d want and expect it to. It writes emails. Personalizes them (not in a crappy, AI-sounding way). Makes it easy for you to edit them if and when you want (which, surprisingly, is not possible in other AI email tools). And of course, it sends them–or, rather, gets them delivered where they’ll be seen and read. The important stuff.

As a founder you can really open the hood and understand what’s working. You can make this channel work for you without investing crazy time–because we did that part for you. You can just get results, know how you got results, and keep getting results.

What Skyp doesn’t do is just as important as what it does. It doesn’t research contacts–there are lots of great tools for that, like apollo.io, or newer ones like promptloop.com. You can use those tools and drop lists of contacts into Skyp in seconds. Of course, you can drop lists from Hubspot or wherever into Skyp also–it’s great for follow up and warm outbound, too.

There’s no pretense of being human–it’s an AI tool. We didn’t give it a first name or profile pic or a Slack account (though that last part may change).

It exposes everything. You can see the settings that lead to the emails. We’re committed to adding more and more visibility so you can tune the emails exactly how you want them.

The setup is done for you. From your very first campaign, you can click 4 times and have personalized, amazing emails hitting target inboxes. No drag-and-drop flowcharts or rules to set up. It just works. Fast.

I’ve interviewed 75+ founders and salespeople to understand their needs. I think we’ve nailed it. Now the question is–will you try it, and let us know?

Did I mention a co-founder?

Many of you talked with me when I was building solo. Since then I realized that a partner would make it far easier to build a truly awesome app and company.

Julian Gay was working on a similar idea, AI agents in email, and we realized that by combining forces we could build something bigger. So here we go!

Why are we building Skyp?

Julian and I are repeat founders. We’re building Skyp for ourselves and people like us. Every founder needs to do outreach at some point. No founder (that I’ve ever met) enjoys that part of the job. Whether it’s reaching out cold before a conference, trying to get VC attention, or even doing proper follow up after a successful conference–it’s not the building that most of us thought we would be doing. It’s just the grind.

There are shortcuts–but they all suck. Agencies take your money and do a lot, then stop paying as much attention. Or sending you leads. Plus, you don’t really learn the tricks and tactics if you outsource.

Hiring your own SDR has some advantages–but lots of risks. Sure, you learn. But you also have to learn–because you have to teach your SDR the ropes. Now you’re managing a junior employee (or contractor in a far flung country) and that comes with its own issues, not to mention cash burn. Sure, Optimizely’s first SDR paid for his salary in 3 weeks. But he’s exceptional. Most first SDR hires don’t work out–but they all cost money and time.

Then there are the AI SDR companies. I looked at all of them, and was unimpressed by anything other than how much money they raised. In my humble opinion the products try to do too much–the research, the personalization, the writing, the sending, the replying, the booking. Agencies have never been great at doing all of those things–dumping a lot of bad leads in, sending them mediocre emails, and then failing to properly follow up–and from what I’ve heard the AI SDR companies aren’t always great, either. As sexy as turning driving your GTM over to an AI sounds, you still need a human in the loop.

Finally, of course, you could do it yourself. I met a founder (who is reading this, I hope 🙂) who sent 100 people a hand-done email sequence. Took her a lot of time. It’s great to get into the weeds and go all founder mode on cold email–but you don’t have to.

We built Skyp to be better than all of this–a lot better. The workflows a founder (or solo salesperson) can use to send great emails and get them delivered. To nudge you to the best practice, the most effective–without getting in your way. You can just click a few times and get the campaign out, or wordsmith however much you want to wordsmith. Over time we plan on opening up a lot of the prompt and other settings so you can truly tune Skyp exactly how you want. Or, just use the stock version-which is arleady way better than any alternative.

Founding customers

Skyp is ready to launch! Did I bury the lede there?

We are launching with a handful of customers at a time. If you want to be a founding customer, grab a kickoff time. We’ll talk pricing, engagement, and get your first campaign launched–all on one 20 minute call. Seriously, it’s that easy.

Until you click the button or ask us to stop, this Skyp newsletter will continue to liven up your inbox with tips and tricks for outreach and GTM.

Happy building and selling!

Alex & Julian

Co-founders