draft-outreach

Draft Outreach

Builds an email draft from four inputs:

1. Ground-truth (who the user is, what they do, freelance brand if applicable).
2. Company research (the brief outputs in research/companies/<slug>/).
3. Target contact (name, role, email — usually from find-contact).
4. Template (the markdown template the user wants to base it on).

Always saves to drafts/ and shows the user for review. Sending is a separate skill (send-outreach).

Inputs

$ARGUMENTS:

• Required: <company> — first positional.
• One of:
  • --contact-rank=<n> — pick from the most recent find-contact result.
  • --contact="<name> <email>" — supply directly.
• Optional: --template=<cold-pitch|warm-followup|consulting-pitch|job-followup|interview-followup> (default: based on heuristic — cold-pitch for first-touch, warm-followup if prior outreach exists in crm/outreach.md, interview-followup if invoked within 24h of a logged interview event).
• Optional: --lens=<employer|client|partner> (default from CRM row, fallback employer).
• Optional: --brief-as=<personal|business> — overrides ground-truth freelance-brand choice. Affects which sender will be used downstream.

Examples

/career:outreach draft acme --contact-rank=1 --template=cold-pitch
/career:outreach draft snowglobe --contact="Jane Doe jane@snowglobe.ai" --template=consulting-pitch
/career:outreach draft myrofish --contact-rank=2  # template auto-picked

Procedure

1. Resolve config + paths

${CAREER_DATA_DIR}/config.json → WORKING_FOLDER, PREFERRED_EMAIL_SENDER, SECONDARY_EMAIL_SENDER.

Compute slug. Confirm:

• ${WORKING_FOLDER}/ground-truth.md exists and is populated.
• ${WORKING_FOLDER}/research/companies/${slug}/ has at least company-overview.md (warn if not — drafts without research read generic).

2. Resolve template

If --template provided, use it. Otherwise heuristic:

• Existing crm/outreach.md row for this company with status in replied | meeting-booked | meeting-done → warm-followup.
• Logged interview event within 24h (check meetings/ if present) → interview-followup.
• Lens is client → consulting-pitch.
• Otherwise → cold-pitch.

Read the template's EXAMPLE.md (and any user-customised template file beside it — templates/<template>/<custom>.md).

3. Resolve contact

If --contact-rank=<n> and a recent find-contact result exists in conversation, pick that row. Otherwise prompt user for the explicit contact.

4. Read inputs

• Ground-truth: who-i-am, looking-for, domains-of-interest, freelance-brand (if --brief-as=business).
• Research: company-overview (mandatory if exists), recruitment-profile (if exists, for hiring context), cultural-fit (if exists, to anchor "why this company specifically").
• Outreach log: confirm no recent outreach to this same contact (anti-loop).

5. Draft

Fill the template's {{variables}}. Hard rules:

• {{specific_observation}} must come from a real, cited fact in the research briefs. If no cite-worthy fact exists, ask the user for one before proceeding.
• {{your_relevance}} comes from ground-truth, not from generic boilerplate.
• {{ask}} is single, low-stakes, concrete (e.g. "20 minutes next week").
• For consulting-pitch: {{narrow_offer}} must be a single scope, not a menu.
• Length follows the template's frontmatter length constraint. If the draft exceeds it, tighten.

6. Save draft

Path: ${WORKING_FOLDER}/drafts/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<slug>-<contact-slug>.md.

Frontmatter:

---
status: draft
template: <template>
company: <company_name>
slug: <slug>
contact:
  name: <name>
  email: <email>
lens: <lens>
sender: <personal|business>
sender_email: <resolved from config + brief-as>
created: <ISO datetime>
sent_at: null
---

Body: subject line + email body in plain markdown.

7. Present for review

Show the draft to the user with this footer:

Draft saved: drafts/<file>

To send:    /career:outreach send drafts/<file>
To edit:    open the file directly, then re-run /career:outreach send

Do not auto-invoke send-outreach. Stop here.

Guardrails

• Never invent facts. The "specific observation" must trace to a research-brief citation.
• Never auto-send.
• Length budget honoured.
• Single ask.
• Subject lines: short, specific, never click-baity.

Failure modes

• Ground-truth missing or thin → bail with "run /career:ground-truth first; drafts without ground-truth read generic and burn the contact."
• No research briefs for this company → warn, offer to run /career:research-brief overview first or proceed with thin context (user choice).
• Template missing → list available templates.
• Anti-loop hit (recent outreach to same contact) → block with explanation; user can override with --force.

Idempotency

• Re-running creates a new dated draft file (does not overwrite).
• Editing an existing draft file in place is supported; send-outreach reads from disk, not from this skill's output.