How it works
Six steps. One of them takes a month.
The slow part of cold outreach isn't writing or software — it's warming up a new sending domain, which takes two to four weeks. Keep Your Chain enforces that ramp from the day you start it, and pairs with a warmup partner for the first month. Everything else takes an afternoon.
Connect sending domains
Cold email goes out from a second domain you own — getacme.com alongside acme.com, pointing at the same website. That way, if cold email ever dents a domain's reputation, it's never the one your invoices and customer email go through. Everyone doing this well does it this way. Plan on two or three per product, about $12 a year each.
You'll add the domain to Microsoft 365 (where the mailboxes live) and paste six records into Cloudflare. We give you the exact values with your tenant name filled in, check them on demand and every night, and won't start a ramp until they all pass. About fifteen minutes per domain, or one click if you give us a Cloudflare DNS token.
See the records
| Record | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
MX | getacme-com.mail.protection.outlook.com | Replies and bounces reach the mailbox |
TXT SPF | v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all | Microsoft authorised; hard-fail everything else. Exactly one SPF record |
CNAME DKIM ×2 | selector1/2._domainkey → …onmicrosoft.com | Aligned DKIM earns the full authentication pass — then enable it in Defender |
TXT DMARC | v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=…; adkim=s; aspf=s | Quarantine anything pretending to be you; reports to a mailbox you read |
CNAME autodiscover | autodiscover.outlook.com | Optional — Outlook apps find the mailbox on their own |
Root + www | 301 → your product site | A sending domain that resolves to nothing is a trust signal against you |
Ramp — enforced, plus a warmup partner
A brand-new domain that suddenly sends 30 cold emails a day looks like spam. So Keep Your Chain ramps every mailbox: 10 a day in week one, 20 in week two, 30 after — and nothing raises it past that. For the fragile first month we recommend a warmup partner (Warmup Inbox or Mailreach, about $25 a mailbox) that exchanges friendly mail with real inboxes; you connect it once and we note it on the domain. Each mailbox — a real person, not a persona — ramps on its own schedule, because providers score the address as well as the domain.
What that means for volume: cold sends ramp from 10 a day per sender to about 30 by week three, and stay there. That ceiling is deliberate. Two people on three domains is roughly 180 new conversations a day at full ramp — plenty for founder-led outreach, not enough for a 500-a-day SDR program.
Find prospects with a reason attached
The list is built from competitor presence, not from "companies in general." Public review pages for competitor apps name businesses already paying for your category — the highest-intent list there is. Storefront scraping confirms what is installed. An enrichment provider finds the person; every address is verified before it enters a sequence.
Honest caveat. Prospect discovery is built for software businesses selling into e-commerce stores. If that isn't you, bring your own list — a CSV with names, emails, and companies — and everything from here on works the same. Some competitor apps also live where a scraper cannot see (inside a checkout page); Keep Your Chain shows detection coverage per product, so you know when detection is confirmation and when the review list is the real source.
Write a sequence that can only reply
Four steps, prose, one named competitor, one specific gap, one two-second ask. The editor previews every step against a real prospect. Reply-in-chain is locked. Bullets are discouraged — they turn a note into a newsletter, and newsletters go to Promotions.
Hi Dana, I noticed you have Fairing installed — it's a bit pricey and doesn't have these features:
- Feature one
- Feature two
- Feature three
We're giving away 2 months free! Click here to learn more.
Dana,
Saw Fairing on Halcyon's checkout. Solid tool, but you are paying a per-order rate for what is usually a two-question survey.
Luv Survey does the same thank-you-page ask, keeps the answers next to the order, and if you use Claude it will set the whole thing up from one prompt.
First two months are on us. Want the prompt?
Adams · Customer Luv · Manhattan Beach, CA
Send inside the ramp
Sends go out in the prospect's local business hours, weekdays, with jitter, under per-sender and per-domain caps the health monitor enforces. No open-tracking pixel. No link rewriting — a visible domain that differs from the destination is a phishing signature, and it is worse than the raw link. Steps one and two carry no links at all.
Reply from one inbox
Every reply, across every domain and every seat, in one threaded inbox with a classification and, for engaged replies, a draft. Reply from there and the chain stays intact. Your booking link only ever reaches someone who already answered — which is where it converts anyway.
The state machine
What moves a prospect, and what it triggers.
| State | Trigger | Next | Side effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| prospect | Approved in the UI, or by rule | sequenced · step 1 | Step one queued for the next send window |
| sequenced | Delay elapsed, silence | step n+1 | Threaded follow-up sent |
| sequenced | Human reply, any address in chain | engaged | Stop; push with draft; pause siblings at the company |
| sequenced | Install or signup event | installed | Stop cold track; welcome flow from your real domain |
| sequenced | Out of office with date | deferred | Next step at return + 1 business day |
| sequenced | Referral to a colleague | referred | Stop; new contact created, pending approval |
| sequenced | Bounce | bounced | Stop; address flagged; counts to domain bounce rate |
| any | Opt-out language | suppressed | Global, permanent |
| sequenced | Last step + 5 days, silence | exhausted | Company cooldown before another product track may start |
| installed | Uninstall event | churned | Surfaced for a manual note; never auto-resequenced |
Install signal
One signed request from your app.
From your install handler and your uninstall webhook, post one event, HMAC-signed with a shared secret:
POST https://app.keepyourchain.com/events/install
{ "shop": "halcyon-skin.myshopify.com", "app": "luv-survey", "ts": 1789000000 }Keep Your Chain matches the shop to the company captured at prospecting time, ends the cold track, tags the contact installed, and emits a trigger for your welcome flow — which runs from your real domain through the transactional sender you already use. The CRM's job is over the moment they become a customer.
Want first access?
Waitlist members get first access when plans open, with founding pricing held for a year. One email when we open, nothing else.