RICK ACQUISITION / APPLY / $800 PER MONTH

THIS FORM IS THE PRODUCT CONFIG.
EVERY FIELD BECOMES A LINE THE AGENT RUNS.

Onboarding a client here is supposed to be a directory plus a warmed sending domain. If it needs code, the abstraction leaked and that is our bug, not your problem. So this form is not a lead-capture form pretending to be a conversation — it is the campaign pack, typed in by you, field for field. Scroll and you will watch the YAML build itself at the bottom of the page.

It takes about 25 minutes and you cannot fake your way through the proof-pack section. That is deliberate. Read the part in red before you start typing.

// WHAT THIS AGENT HAS ACTUALLY DONE, AS OF 2026-08-31

Before you fill in 30 fields, here is the whole record. Nothing is rounded up and nothing is missing. If any line here is a dealbreaker, close the tab now and keep your $800.

So what are you actually buying? Not a track record — there isn't one. You are buying a mechanic: the audit IS the outreach. The agent computes a real number about each prospect from public data before it writes anything, and the cold email leads with that number instead of a pitch. The one reply we have came 27 minutes after a stranger read his own rating in a subject line. One reply is not a pattern. It is the reason this page exists rather than proof that it works.

// WHY WE MAKE YOU WRITE DOWN WHAT WE MAY NOT SAY

Section 05 asks you for three things most intake forms never ask for: proof points with a source URL, pre-approved answers to objections, and a never_claim list. That last one is the field applicants push back on. Here is the honest reason it is mandatory.

An autonomous agent with no never_claim list confabulates. Not maliciously — it fills gaps, because filling gaps is what generative systems do. This codebase has done it. It once emailed a real therapist about a website she had never submitted to us. She had not asked for anything. The sentence was fluent, personalised, and entirely invented, and it went to a real human being with a real practice. On 2026-08-14 a separate failure sent five cold emails to five real founders with three empty verdict boxes in them, because a template rendered a field nobody had measured.

Both bugs are now structurally impossible rather than "fixed": copy is templates plus computed slots, a touch that is missing a field is skipped rather than rendered blank, and the claims linter fails the whole build if any figure in prose is not sourced. But the linter can only refuse what you have told it to refuse. never_claim is where you tell it. Empty list, no campaign.

What the linter enforces on every template before a single email can be enrolled, all of it checked by the same linter that refuses to build a campaign containing an unsourced number:

// INTAKE — SIX BLOCKS, EACH ONE A FILE IN YOUR PACK

Required fields are marked *. Nothing here is a sales qualifier in disguise; every field is read by the code. If you genuinely cannot answer 03 or 05, that is a real NO and section 07 explains why we would rather tell you now than take a month of your money.

RECEIVED. NOW A HUMAN READS IT.
Your pack draft is in Vlad's inbox. Within 1 business day you get one of three answers: fit (with a Stripe link and a kickoff date), no fit (with which of the seven criteria you failed, in writing), or one question — usually about your trigger signal, because that is the field that decides whether any of this can work. Nothing is charged before you get that answer, and nothing sends before you approve copy.
Before you submit: this intake is sent through FormSubmit to [email protected] for application review. Do not include passwords, API keys, private customer lists, health data, or other sensitive personal data. Read the privacy policy; contact [email protected] to request access or deletion.
01 — IDENTITY & SENDING DOMAIN → client.yaml
The human a warm prospect gets handed to. Must be a person, not "the team".
This is not a cosmetic choice. It becomes sender.stance and lands in never_claim automatically: pick referral_partner and every template that says "we at <vendor>" fails the linter. Pepper is a referral_partner pack, which is why its copy says "I am not with Pepper — I introduce people to them."
A subdomain you are willing to burn. Never your primary domain — cold volume on the domain your invoices go out from is how a company loses its email.
Honest answers only. "warm" when it isn't means the first batch bounces and the whole domain is scorched. This field sets your realistic first-send date more than anything else on this form.
Legally required in the footer of every cold email. A template without it fails the linter before it can be enrolled, so this is not optional and there is no way around it.
02 — ICP → icp.yaml
One primary contact per company. We do not email four people at the same firm.
Rough is fine, a guess labelled as a guess is fine. The arithmetic that matters: your reachable universe has to outlast the send cap. At 20/day the list needs to survive 90 days of sending without running dry, or we spend the ramp period re-sourcing instead of selling.
This becomes a hard suppression list at send time, evaluated per recipient and fail-closed. Include current customers and live opportunities — the fastest way to look automated and stupid is to cold-pitch someone who already pays you.
03 — THE TRIGGER SIGNAL → signals.yaml
This is the whole product, so read the question slowly. The mechanic is that we compute something true about a specific company before we write to them. That only works if the thing is publicly observable, per company, without a login. For Pepper it is a review rating and review count — a company in trouble on a review platform announces it to the world. What is the equivalent number for your buyer?
Name the actual source. "We'd scrape it" is an answer, but we check that source's robots.txt and terms first, and we do refuse: Trustpilot, for instance, disallows all crawlers by name, so that lane needs their official API key or it does not run.
A number and a comparison, not a vibe. This becomes the gate. Everything below it is not contacted, and a company we cannot measure is never guessed at — it is marked insufficient_signal and a human looks at it.
The single highest-value field on this form and the one nobody expects. Pepper's version: a bad rating caused by trust friction (slow payouts, KYC hoops) is a buy signal, but a bad rating caused by a genuinely broken product is a hard exclude — reputation work cannot fix it, the takedown gets refused because the reviews are true, and the client burns. Your product has the same fork. Find it now or find it in a reply from an angry stranger.
04 — THE OFFER → offer.yaml (part 1)
The CTA is a word, not a calendar link. It is what got our one reply.
Vague next steps are where warm replies die. If you can't describe it in one sentence, the prospect can't decide to want it.
Becomes the pre-approved answer to "what does it cost?" — an objection that arrives on roughly every thread and that the agent may not improvise.
05 — THE PROOF PACK → offer.yaml (part 2) — MANDATORY

Three proof points minimum, each with a source we can point at. "Source" can be a public URL, a page in a deck you attach, or "our own numbers, and here they are" — but it cannot be "everyone knows". If a claim has no source, the linter strips the template that uses it, and a template that loses its evidence is just a pitch.

PROOF POINT 1 *
PROOF POINT 2 *
PROOF POINT 3 *

OBJECTION → YOUR ANSWER, VERBATIM

The agent classifies an inbound reply and then sends your answer. It does not compose one. Write these the way you would say them out loud, including the caveats — the caveat is usually the part that converts.

OBJECTION 1 *
OBJECTION 2 *
OBJECTION 3 — THE UNCOMFORTABLE ONE *
Any touch that would speak for you on compliance stays unrenderable until this box has your words in it. That is a hard block in the linter, not a preference.

NEVER_CLAIM — WHAT THE AGENT MAY NOT SAY, EVEN IF IT WOULD HELP

Three lines are added to every pack automatically and are not removable: no guarantees, no claiming the recipient contacted you first, and no claims about this agent's own results — because it has none, and a tool that inflates its own record is exactly the tool you should not let email your market.
06 — CAPACITY & EXPECTATIONS → pack: capacity
Enforced at send time as a hard stop, not a suggestion. When the week's handoffs are used up, sending pauses. No volume-priced tool does this; it exists because an unserviceable lead is worth less than no lead, and a client who churns because they drowned is worth less than one we never signed.
Today's ceiling is 20/day; the written warm-up table tops out at 50/day. Put your real number here even if it is 500 — if it is, we will tell you no rather than take the money.
Not automatically a no. But if the claim that makes your pitch land is the exact claim you are not licensed to make, the audit has no payload and we should both find that out today.
07 — LAST FIELD

No card on this page. Nothing is charged until a human has read the pack and told you it fits.

// YOUR PACK, AS THE AGENT WILL READ IT

Built live in your browser from the fields above — nothing is uploaded to render this. This is the actual shape of clients/<slug>/. If it looks thin, the campaign will be thin, and it is much cheaper to notice that here.

clients/your-slug/ — draft 
# start typing above and this fills itself in

// SEVEN WAYS TO BE A NO

Published because you deserve to know the criteria before you spend 25 minutes, and because a client we should have refused costs us more than an empty slot does.

Everything asserted on this page about what the agent has done is computed from production logs and published daily, including the days that look bad: /receipts and /this-week.