Find 50 customers
in 12 minutes.

Pin down your ideal customer.
Five prompts. Twelve minutes total.

Most founders skip this and pay for it later. Before you write a single email, you need to be able to finish this sentence in one breath: "My customer is X, located in Y, with problem Z, who currently uses W." These five prompts get you there. Paste each one into ChatGPT (or Claude). Answer honestly.

Build the 50-prospect list — the manual way.

This is the part nobody talks about. Customer-discovery is fun. Building the actual list of 50 verified companies with verified email addresses is brutal. Here's how it's done by hand.

Step A — Source the candidates (60 minutes)

1. Run your search queries from Prompt 5 in Google. Open the first 10 results, harvest company names + website URLs into a spreadsheet.
2. Cross-reference with Google Maps if your customer is local — search for the business type in your area, scroll the map, harvest names + URLs.
3. For each candidate, click through to their website and skim the homepage to confirm they actually do the thing.
4. Target: ~80 candidates (you'll lose 30+ to disqualification in the next steps).

Step B — Verify they exist and qualify (90 minutes)

1. For each candidate, manually open their website and read the About page, Services page, and any "Our Team" section.
2. Note: do they look active (recent blog posts, current copyright date)? What size do they appear (team page count, office locations, client logos)? Any signs of recent changes?
3. Drop anyone who's: too big to care about you, too small to afford you, looks dormant, or has been clearly acquired.
4. You'll be left with about 50 qualified companies.

Step C — Find the right person (60 minutes)

1. For each company, identify the role you actually need to reach. Operations Director? Founder? Compliance Manager?
2. Open the company's website again — check the Team / About / Contact page. Note the name of the person in that role.
3. If the team isn't listed, look at recent press releases or blog post bylines on the same site, or Google "[company name] [role]" for news mentions.
4. Once you have a name, guess the email pattern from the company domain (firstname@, firstname.lastname@, f.lastname@) and verify with a free checker like mailtester.com.
5. About 30% will be wrong on the first guess — re-try the next pattern.

Step D — Final cleanup (30 minutes)

Deduplicate. Standardise the spreadsheet (Name · Company · Role · Email · Trigger · Source · Notes). Make sure each row has a personalisation hook — something specific to THAT person, not just "I noticed you work at X". This is what separates the 8% reply rate from the 1% rate.

Total time: 4 hours, give or take. And every time you want a fresh batch — every time the last batch is exhausted — you do it all again. This is why most solopreneurs send 5 emails a week instead of 50.

Eight cold-email templates that hit 8% reply rate.

All eight follow the same shape: specific observation → consequence → light ask. Replace the bracketed parts. The opening line is the only thing that matters — if it doesn't earn the second sentence, the rest is wasted.

Important: these templates only work if you actually have the 50-prospect list to send them to — and if each one is personalised with a real observation about THAT person. Sending Template 01 with "saw [trigger event] this week" left as the literal text is how you become spam. The list-building work in Chapter 2 is where the leverage is.

The honest math: 4 hours vs 12 minutes.

You can do everything in this playbook by hand. Tens of thousands of solopreneurs do exactly that. The question is whether your hour is worth more than what it costs to skip the boring parts.

No magnet replaces doing the thinking. The thinking is in chapters 1 and 3. The thing MiraReach replaces is the boring 4 hours in chapter 2 — the list-building, the verification, the spreadsheet wrangling. That's it. That's the whole pitch.