Selling is the part of business everyone swears a machine cannot do. But most of selling is not the handshake. It is finding the right people, learning about them, and writing something worth reading. Hours of grunt work for every minute of real conversation. District is my attempt to hand that grunt work to machines. The first version has three agents working in a loop. One finds local shops. One reads their reviews. One writes each shop a real email about their own work.
It never sends the same shop two emails, and each email costs about a nickel. A second version with a new design is on the drawing board.
The loop
District is the name I give the outbound software I build. The first version shipped in late 2025. It is three agents working one loop, around the clock. A scout walks through towns and business types methodically, collecting each shop's public listing and up to 100 of its reviews. A writer finds and checks the right contact. Then it writes that shop an email grounded in its own reviews, the things real customers actually praised. And a router keeps it all paced, holding a stock of ready leads and a hard daily send cap.
The least exciting features matter the most. If the system crashes mid-run, it picks back up right where it stopped. No shop is ever emailed twice. And if two copies run at once, they can never grab the same shop.
Why build instead of rent
My first outbound setup was rented. Apollo, Clay, Instantly, Smartlead. It worked, but every layer belonged to someone else. So did every limit. So I rebuilt the whole thing as my own software. Now each email costs about five cents to research and write. The whole loop lives under one roof.
Owning it meant owning deliverability too, the part the rented tools hide. Deliverability is whether your email lands in the inbox or the spam folder. It has to be earned. I ran that layer by hand. I warmed up fresh sending domains slowly. I scored every template before it could send. And once, I dug my way out of a full spam spiral after a jump in volume tripped the filters. Those lessons are built in now. The system guards my sending reputation the way you would guard a credit score.
The ten-minute email
Everyone can tell when the same email went to a thousand people. And by now, everyone can tell when AI wrote the first line too. Love what you are doing at XYZ. Congrats on the recent launch. That trick is dead. Plugging one personal sentence into a blanket message does not make it personal.
A real email is short, and the whole thing is built from real context. Who this person is, what their business does, what their customers praise, and the problems you can spot from the outside. When an email reads like someone spent ten or fifteen minutes on you before writing a word, it gets answered far more often than blasts do. That is the standard District is built to. Every email starts from that pile of context about one shop. And because machines do the studying, the depth holds at scale. The first version could run 125 emails a day. Each one was researched like it was the only one.
Who should be getting your ten-minute email?
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