How I get Claude to find one verifiable detail before writing a cold email opener
An opening line that could be pasted into any cold email to anyone is worse than no opening line at all. "I noticed you're doing great work in your space" — anyone who has ever received a cold email spots that in half a second. What fixed it was narrowing what I ask for. I do not ask Claude to write an email. I ask it to find one specific, checkable fact about how a company operates across its locations — something that is only true because they run several sites and not one — and to build two sentences around that fact. Then I verify the fact myself before anything goes out. That step is not optional. It is the entire difference between a personalised email and a personalised-sounding guess. The constraint that shaped all of this: I start from a list of company names and nothing else. No scraping LinkedIn — that is off limits where I work. Everything has to come from what the company already made public.