What we built

The SDR product (sdraiagents.com) started as a "send more cold emails with AI" tool. After 30 days we deleted all of that and rebuilt around one insight: the AI-slop wave was about to make every recipient block AI cold email entirely. The wedge wasn't more sends — it was less sends with sharper signals.

The shape of what we shipped

The product reads behavioral signals (recent funding, hiring intent, tech-stack changes, pricing-page visits) and weighs them ~10x heavier than demographic filters. A 50-prospect list with 5 real signals outperforms a 5,000-prospect blast every time.

The whole engine runs through a 12-gate policy cascade before any send:

• Identity gates (valid target, has consent, not blocklisted)
• Volume gates (domain quota, channel quota, global rate limit)
• Quality gates (content score, no banned terms, brand-voice match)
• Timing gates (outside quiet hours, respects cooldown, scheduled window open)

First failed gate = reject + log. We never override a gate to "just send this one."

The honest result

This isn't a "we hit $50k MRR" lesson. The honest result is: our deliverability stayed clean through the AI-slop wave that tanked every "spray and pray" tool. That's the only thing that matters for outbound — your domain reputation.

What the next lessons cover

• Lesson 2: the behavioral signal weighting framework — the exact formula, why decay matters, and the demographic gates we weight near zero.
• Lesson 3: the 12-gate cascade in code — every gate, with the production check and the reason it exists.