This one started on a road trip. My brother and I were driving down to our folks' place in St. George, geeking out about everything Claude could suddenly do. This was back when Claude Code was pretty new and vibe coding was just starting to blow up, and I was itching to build something real with it — not a toy, something I'd actually use.
So I started brainstorming with Claude: what would genuinely be useful to me? And the answer was sitting right there. I network a lot. I'm always trying to connect with people in similar spaces, learn from folks who clearly have something worth sharing, and grab the occasional coffee chat. But LinkedIn cold outreach is so often miserable. People reach out and it's immediately "hey, help me with this," with nothing offered in return. It reads as exactly what it is, and it almost never works.
The thing is, good outreach isn't a mystery. There are specific moves that make it land:
- lead with value, not with an ask
- open with some version of "how can I help?"
- set clear expectations so the other person knows what you actually want
- keep it short and concise
- have real follow-ups ready that give value — "this article seemed relevant to what you're working on," or "I ran into this lesson recently and thought of our conversation, thanks again for the time"
- be politely persistent enough to actually land the first meeting
So I built a skill that does all of that. It's not a spam cannon. It works from who the person actually is and why I'm reaching out, and it drafts something specific enough that no template could have produced it. The part I'm most careful about is that it sharpens my voice instead of replacing it — the goal was never to automate relationships, it was to kill the friction that kept me from reaching out in the first place.
This began as a Claude Skill and grew into a semi-functioning prototype. I didn't want to host it anywhere serious, so it stayed a scrappy vibe-coded project — but it was the first vibe-coded thing I made that delivered real, repeatable value, and I've genuinely kept using it every time I'm figuring out how to expand my network.
Outreach is really just connecting with a few extra steps. Take the friction out, and you end up doing more of the thing that actually matters.