$2m to stop hiring humans??

Author

Julien Lieben
September 03, 2026

Hey ColdIQers! Back from holidays already?

We hope they were wonderful, that your mind is rested and, most importantly, that your head is fresh enough for what comes next.

We did not take a single day off this summer, busy building our product, where you can run your entire GTM from Claude Code… or wherever you want.

Since we opened our beta in July, we shipped:

  • Verified emails and mobile numbers on a waterfall

  • Signals from funding, hiring, and job changes

  • Company and people search across 40+ sources

  • Best skills for outbound from our senior GTM engineers

  • NEW: Mailboxes, domains, and warm-up for the sending side via APIs

  • NEW: Website visitors turned into enriched leads

  • Coming soon: running your entire GTM motion from Slack

Our end-of-summer sale is still there, up to 25% off, if you want to test it.

Let's get into it.

Tool of the week

They spent $2M telling San Francisco to stop hiring humans. Then they painted over their own billboards.

Artisan ran "Stop Hiring Humans" across SF, London, and New York, and this year covered it with "Don't stop hiring humans" and "I'm not taking your job". Their founder's line is now: stop hiring the wrong ones.

Ava still works the top of the pipeline & gets better every day: she builds the list, writes the sequence, sends it, and clears the scheduling replies.

Data source of the week

Your agent is only as good as what it knows about a company today.

Explorium feeds the likes of Artisan, Lemlist, Salesforge, Outreach, and Bombora.

On top of an API & filters, the events: hiring trends, leadership changes, the movements that tell you when a company is worth writing to rather than simply who works there.

This week they shipped their "AgentSource V2”, a big upgrade to the API with an async contact waterfall: fire the request, keep working, collect the emails and numbers as they resolve.

Firmographics tell you who fits. Events tell you when to move.

If your agents work from a list that was true in July, close that gap.

Play of the week

Want to watch a campaign built from a voice prompt?

Michel recorded the whole thing. He sets up the email infrastructure inside of Hypertide, the skills file, and the ColdIQ APIs, then voices one play and lets two agents run two variants at once.

Fifteen minutes later, both sit in Instantly, personalized and ready to review.

You'll learn:

  • What has to exist before an agent can run a campaign

  • How to qualify on cold-calling intent from job posts

  • Why giving the list away beats pitching it

If your engineers still spend two days stitching tools together, watch this ↓

Thanks for being with us!

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