A new client is worth £10k+ to Claudia's startup. I built her an AI agent that goes and finds them. Her name is Scout.
Scout clocks on at 5am. By the time Claudia has got to the office, Scout has trawled through her LinkedIn, found the top ten people she should reach out to today, and drafted exactly what to say to each one.
Scout pays for herself.
The problem Claudia actually had
Claudia Gasson is a career psychologist. Her startup, Waddyado, does outplacement: looking after a company's people when it is making redundancies. It is thoughtful, genuinely useful work, and it sells to HR directors.
Here is the hard part. Those HR directors are inside businesses going through something difficult, and they are rarely advertising it. There is no neat list to buy. The signals exist, but they are scattered across filings, announcements, news and LinkedIn, and reading them properly is a full day's work that a founder does not have.
So the job was never "send more messages". It was "work out who is worth a message at all, and know enough to say something human".
What Scout actually does
Scout works overnight, so the thinking is done before the day starts.
She runs Claudia's LinkedIn Sales Navigator searches, seeks the signals that say a company is going through change, sources the companies, then researches the decision makers behind them. She rates everyone against Claudia's ideal customer, and each morning she hands over a shortlist of ten with a reason attached to every name.
That reason is the bit that matters. Not "Chief People Officer, public body, 900 staff", which anyone can read off a profile. More like: a forced cut went through in June off the back of a budget crisis, and her team is carrying it. The exposed group is the people who stay. Survivor guilt, a stretched People function, an engagement problem nobody budgeted for. So open on the staying, not the leaving.
That is the difference between a list of names and something you can act on before your first coffee.
Scout drafts what to say too, in Claudia's own voice, and syncs into the tools she already runs on: Attio and Apollo. Claudia decides who to approach and she presses send herself. Nothing goes out on its own. Scout does the homework, a human does the handshake.
The unglamorous bit: checking the signal is real
Before Scout, Claudia had built a sensible enough flow with off the shelf tools. Alerts into a data provider into a sequence. It ran for three months and returned nothing.
So the first thing I did was not build. It was test. I took the bought "this company is making redundancies" signal and went and checked it, one company at a time, against what had actually happened. It was wrong six times out of six. The LinkedIn side did better, but still only a fraction of the flagged companies had a real, recent, in-window redundancy.
That is the whole game, and it is the part nobody sells you. Most lead-gen tooling is confidently wrong at scale. Scout is built to check its own homework, rate honestly, and hand over ten it can defend rather than a hundred it cannot.
Why an agent and not a tool
There are plenty of products that will scrape a list and blast it. That is not this.
Scout is bespoke. She is built around how Claudia's business actually wins work, on Claude, and Claudia owns her. No per-seat subscription, no black box, and when the market shifts, Scout shifts with it, because the rules are hers to change.
The commercial logic is simple enough that it barely needs a spreadsheet. At Waddyado, one won contract is worth roughly £10k. Scout has to be right occasionally to be worth having.
This is the shape of the work
I have spent 20+ years shipping products for the BBC, Novartis, Channel 4, Butternut Box, Surfers Against Sewage and Sworkit. I now build bespoke AI agents like Scout for small business founders, and show them how to run their own AI team on Claude.
Scout is the new business one. There are others: Alex, a chief of staff who has your morning triaged before you open your laptop. Leah, who runs your marketing experiments. Finn, who reads your numbers so you do not have to. Same idea every time. A real job, done properly, day in and day out, owned by you.
There is a lot more on Scout, including how a campaign gets built, at scout.nickkuh.com.
I have just started my consultancy and I am looking for more Claudias. If you have a business where one new client is worth real money, and finding them is the bottleneck, book a 20 minute intro chat. No cost, no pressure, and I will give you a straight answer on whether there is something here worth building.
Thanks to Claudia for letting me publish this one.