Get Paid: Let Claude + Clay Find Your Clients and Write the Outreach

By now in this series you can make Claude build tools, save money on bookkeeping, produce ad creatives, and run deep research. Every one of those is a skill someone will pay you for. So the real question stops being 'can Claude do the work?' and becomes 'how do I get paid?' To get paid you need an offer and you need clients. Finding clients is where almost everyone stalls — not because the work is hard, but because the sourcing is. To sell a service you have to find the right people, research each one individually (what they make, what they're missing, where you could actually help), prove you understand them with a message that isn't a generic template, and then do that hundreds of times. Done by hand it's soul-crushing, so it never gets done. This guide hands that entire job to two tools working together: Clay finds and verifies the people; Claude researches each one and drafts the message. You stay the human who reviews and sends.

The automation is worthless without a crisp offer, because the whole point is to find people who match it. Don't open Clay until you can write your offer in one sentence. The cleanest offers in this series reuse a skill you already proved: help creators make better videos, build their data visualizations, edit their footage, or generate their ad creatives — the exact things earlier parts taught you to do. Pick ONE outcome and one audience. Specific and checkable always beats 'AI marketing help'.

1. Name the audience precisely: e.g. 'YouTube creators in my niche with 10k–200k subscribers'. Tight ranges make the lead search returnable.
2. Name the single outcome you sell: 'I edit your long-form into 3 short clips a week' or 'I turn your raw footage into a captioned explainer' or 'I build the data visualizations for your videos'.
3. Name your proof: the skill from Parts 1–4 you can actually deliver. Your message will be only as strong as the work behind it — don't claim what you can't ship.
4. Write the gap you fix. For a creator that might be 'great content, no thumbnails / no shorts / flat data slides'. The agent will look for exactly this gap in each lead's real work.

Clay is a sales-data platform that finds people and returns their verified emails, social profiles, and company info — pulling from a large third-party data network (Clay's own marketing cites 150+ providers). The big advantage of pairing it with Claude: Anthropic and Clay built an official connector, so the data is already verified — you don't scrape anything or guess whether an email is real. Connecting is genuinely two steps. Note the honest scope below.

1. In Claude, open the Connectors page (the + under the message box → Connectors, or Settings → Connectors). Find Clay in the connector directory.
2. Click Connect → choose your Clay workspace → Authorize. If you don't have a Clay account, one is created automatically and you get starter credits.
3. Back in the chat, confirm Clay's tools are enabled (click into the connector menu and check it's toggled on / 'good to go') before you prompt — a missing toggle is the #1 reason the prompt 'can't find any contacts'.
4. That's it. No API key, no scraper, no spreadsheet. Clay now hands Claude verified contacts on demand.

Here is the whole system in one prompt. It does four things: (1) uses Clay to find N matching creators, (2) spins up a researcher sub-agent per lead to study their recent work and pull their verified email, (3) has each researcher draft a 3-sentence DM — reference a real video, name the gap, offer one specific fix — and (4) runs a checker agent to verify every draft cites that person's real work, not a hallucination. This is the long, boring, hundred-task job: where older models would quit or start hallucinating after ~40 leads, a long-endurance model (Claude Fable 5 in the demo) is built to grind all the way through. Copy the block, swap the bracketed bits, and paste it into Claude with Clay connected.

1. Set N small the first run (5–10 leads) so you can sanity-check quality before scaling to 50–100.
2. Tighten the audience and the gap to YOUR offer — vague audience = vague leads.
3. Run it and let it work. The longer it runs, the more it's doing the research you'd otherwise do by hand.

Paste this into Claude with the Clay connector enabled. Everything in [brackets] is yours to edit.

• Use Clay to find [10] [YouTube creators] in my niche with roughly [10k–200k subscribers] who make [educational tech videos]. For EACH person found, spin up a dedicated researcher agent that does the following independently:
• 1) Go through their recent videos and pull what their content is actually about — their style, their best-performing topics, and one specific recent video by title.
• 2) Get their verified email and main social handle from Clay (do not guess or fabricate — if Clay has no verified email, mark the lead 'no verified contact' and skip drafting).
• 3) Draft a 3-sentence direct message that: references that ONE real recent video by name, names the specific gap I fix ([their data slides are flat / they have no short-form clips]), and offers ONE concrete fix I can deliver ([3 captioned shorts a week]). No generic flattery, no template language.
• Then run a single checker agent over ALL drafts: verify each message references that person's REAL work (cross-check the video title and topic actually belong to them), flag any draft that cites a detail you can't confirm, and reject any message that reads like it could be sent to anyone.
• Output a table: name | verified email | social | recent video referenced | the 3-sentence draft | checker verdict (pass/flag). Save it to a file called outreach-list.md. Do NOT send anything — leave every message as a draft for me to review.

When the run finishes you should be able to scan the list and trust it. Use this as your acceptance checklist — if the output fails any of these, refine the prompt and re-run rather than sending.

• Each row names a REAL, specific recent video by title — not 'your recent content' or a made-up title.
• The gap named is true for that creator (flat data slides, no shorts, weak thumbnails) — spot-check 2–3 against their actual channel.
• The fix is something YOU can actually deliver from a skill in this series.
• The email is marked verified by Clay — and leads with no verified contact are skipped, not faked.
• The DM is 3 sentences, specific, and would obviously not work if copy-pasted to anyone else. If a message would fit any creator, it failed.
• The checker column flagged the weak ones honestly. If everything is 'pass', be suspicious and re-check manually.

This is the highest-value and highest-risk piece in the whole series. The agent finds real people and writes to them beautifully — which is exactly why it must never hit send on its own. One confidently-wrong line to a real prospect costs more than the entire list is worth. This is the same review-before-action discipline the series has flagged twice: in Part 2, where a computer-use agent that can cancel a subscription needs a permission gate before it clicks; and here, where outreach needs a human between draft and send.

1. Have the agent write drafts to a FILE or sheet — never wire it to an email or DM API that actually sends. Drafted ≠ sent.
2. Keep the checker agent step: a second pass that verifies each draft cites the person's real work, not an invented detail.
3. YOU read every message before it goes out. Fix tone, kill anything that feels off, delete the flagged ones.
4. You are the send button. Send them yourself, spaced out, like a human — not a blast.
5. Respect each platform's rules: automated cold DMs are banned in many places. Personalized messages you wrote-with-help and send yourself are a different thing entirely.

Run this once and you have a lead list. Write down the shape and you have a service you can quote and repeat. Every sellable version follows the same four beats — the same productize pattern used across this series.

1. Scope — one outcome, one audience, in a sentence ('25 researched [niche] creators with a personalized drafted DM each, referencing their real work').
2. Connect — Clay for verified contacts; that's the data layer you don't have to build.
3. Workflow — the copy-paste prompt above is your reusable recipe: find → research-per-lead → draft → check.
4. Handoff — define the artifact: outreach-list.md (or a sheet). State explicitly what you deliver (researched, drafted leads) and what stays human (the review and the send).

Claude on the Payroll is five jobs you can hand one capable, long-endurance agent. Each part stands alone, but they're designed to wire into a single repeatable machine: the agent builds the skill, saves you money running it, markets it, researches the market, and — this part — finds the clients and drafts the outreach to sell it. That loop is where this was heading all along.

• Part 1 — Build: ship a working tool from a plain-English goal. guides.kno2gether.com/fable5-payroll-goal
• Part 2 — Bookkeeper: a computer-use agent that reconciles spend and cancels waste — with a permission gate before it clicks. guides.kno2gether.com/fable5-payroll-bookkeeper
• Part 3 — Ad-maker: generate and self-sort ad creatives into approved/rejected. guides.kno2gether.com/fable5-payroll-admaker
• Part 4 — Red-team / research: deep, multi-source research rigour — a research method, NOT financial advice (any trading or money figures shown in the walkthrough are illustrative, not a recommendation). guides.kno2gether.com/fable5-payroll-redteam
• Part 5 — Clients (this guide): Clay + Claude find the people and draft the outreach. guides.kno2gether.com/fable5-payroll-clients