Dealoneby Belkins
The method

The whole method, published.

A method you can check beats a claim you have to trust. Here is everything we would do to your product, in order, with the hours each part takes and the parts nobody can do for you.

Cohort 001 is four seats, run by hand by one person. Nothing on this page describes software finding your buyers. It describes a Belkins operator reading pages you could open yourself, with a model helping him read faster and draft first versions.

01

Four moves. Fourteen days. Eight hours.

The Deal Sprint is $1,000 and its scope is contractually capped at eight operator hours. That cap is in your contract, not just on this page, because a price and a scope that are not pinned to each other will drift apart, and the one that drifts is always the scope. The clock is 336 hours from your kickoff call.

MoveWhat it coversOperator hours
01Kickoff, readiness verdict, signal review3.5
02Shortlist and enrichment1.5
03Voice kit, sequence, deliverability pre-check2.0
04Delivery call1.0
Total8.0

Read that table again before you read anything else, because it contains the least flattering fact on this page: the eight hours buy you two calls with us, the kickoff and the delivery. They do not buy us sitting on calls with your buyers. That is the Live Desk, it is $600 a month, it is opt-in, and you can say no to it and still keep everything the sprint produced.

02

The four moves, in full.

01
Move one

We read the public record for people already saying your problem out loud.

It starts with a 60-minute recorded kickoff call. Two sentences get written down verbatim and are never edited afterwards: your one-line description of what you built, and your guess at who buys it. Your guess is not treated as an input. It is treated as a prediction, logged before any research exists, so that later we can measure how often founders are right about their own buyer. Nobody in this market writes that number down. We intend to.

The call ends with a readiness verdict said out loud and written within two hours. One of three words. GO, we start. FIX FIRST, there is a gap we can close in five days or less, usually domain authentication or a missing payment link, and the clock pauses while you fix it. REFUND, you cannot personally service one customer next week, or there is no product a stranger can touch, or there is no mailbox to send from: full refund inside 24 hours and we stop. Refusing your money at hour one is cheaper for both of us than a disputed fee in month three.

Then the reading. A person opens pages a logged-out visitor can open. A model reads each result into a structured row. The operator accepts or rejects every single row, and records how strong he thinks the trigger is on a one-to-five scale before any outreach exists, so his prior can be scored later against what actually replied. Rejected rows are not deleted. They stay in the table with the reason they failed. The negative space is the part with information in it.

You receive
The readiness verdict in writing, with the specific reason and the specific fix. The buyer-signal map: rows, not prose. Every kept row carries a verbatim quote in the buyer's own words, a live URL, the publication date, and the signal type that surfaced it. Every rejected row carries its disqualifying reason.
How long
Kickoff on day 1 or 2, once your intake form is in. The signal map lands within 72 hours of kickoff, so day 5.
You do yourself
Show up and answer plainly. Hand over at least 800 words of your own existing writing: old sales emails, a changelog, a rambling post. That is the corpus the voice kit comes from, and if it is thin the sequence will sound like us. And name every company you have already contacted. That list is fixed before the shortlist ships and those accounts are excluded from the fee for good.
02
Move two

Three best-evidenced buyers, each with the dated thing that put them on the list.

The kept signals get clustered by hand into buyer patterns, and three accounts come out of it, each carried by a specific individual and a specific dated artifact. This is the step with no software in it at all. A model can group rows by similarity. It cannot tell you that two of those rows are the same company under two brand names, or that the third is a competitor's employee doing research.

Every candidate then has to clear the six-point bar below. All six. Not five.

You receive
One page per buyer, six blocks each: name, title, company, size and location; the quote verbatim with the live URL and publication date; the signal type that surfaced them; why now, one sentence tying the dated artifact to a reason this month differs from last month; the opener, ninety words or fewer in your voice, quoting their words back at them; and the disqualifier, the single fact that would kill this buyer and how you would find out. Every buyer page names its own way of being wrong. Plus a short recorded walkthrough of why these three and not the others.
How long
48 hours after the signal map, so day 7.
You do yourself
Approve or veto inside 24 hours. Vetoes are recorded with your reason, because your vetoes are data about your own product. If you sit on it for four days, the sprint clock does not stop for you.
03
Move three

Four messages in your words, from your mailbox, that you press send on.

The voice kit is extracted from your kickoff transcript and the writing you handed over: your signature phrases, your sentence length, how often you use contractions, and a banned-words list of things you would never say. The test that the kit worked is not a score. It is you reading the banned-words list and saying "yes, I would never write that."

Then the sequence. A model drafts first. The operator rewrites. The rewrite is measured and the edit distance is stamped on the artifact as a byline. Every message quotes a real signal from the buyer's own page or it does not ship. Four steps on day 0, day 3, day 7 and day 14, then it stops. There is no fifth touch and no switch to direct messages when email goes quiet, because a channel switch to a stranger who ignored you four times is not persistence.

Before any message is queued, your sending domain gets a deliverability pre-check through Folderly. If SPF, DKIM or DMARC fail, nothing goes out until they are fixed. New contacts are capped at twenty a day from one mailbox. We watch bounce rate against 3% and complaint rate against 0.1%. Burning your only domain to hit a two-week deadline would be a stupid trade and we will not make it on your behalf.

You receive
The voice kit including the banned-words list. The four-step sequence, drafted for you to approve, each message carrying its own edit-distance byline. The deliverability pre-check result on your sending domain, with the specific fixes if it fails.
How long
Runs in parallel with move two. In your hands before the delivery call on day 14.
You do yourself
Read every message out loud before you approve it. If a sentence is not something you would say, change it, because the buyer will meet you on the reply and the voice has to match.
04
Move four

The part everyone else leaves you to do alone.

Inside the sprint, move four is one call: the delivery call, where the artifacts get handed over and you get told, plainly, what we think your odds are and what we would fix.

The calls that matter more are the ones with your buyer, and those are the Live Desk, a separate $600 a month you opt into month by month, capped at three months, with an auto-stop. We are saying this here rather than burying it, because "we are on your sales calls" is the most attractive sentence on our whole site and it is not what the $1,000 buys.

On the desk, before every buyer call you get a one-page prep sheet at least four hours ahead. No prep sheet, no call: it gets rescheduled. Seven blocks: their words verbatim with URL and date; who they are; why we think they buy; the three likeliest objections for this pattern with the response we currently believe in; the price and the minute to name it, written as an instruction; the one question that must be asked; and the next-step ask, word for word.

On the call, the operator is a silent observer on a live side-channel to you. He does not speak to your buyer unless you have introduced him and that is recorded. He may never pose as you. Recording consent is asked for verbally in the first thirty seconds, by you, and if the buyer says no we take notes instead.

You receive
The delivery call inside the sprint. On the desk: a prep sheet before every call, an objection card within 24 hours of any new objection, reply drafts within two hours of a positive reply, and a close packet drafted inside sixty minutes of a verbal yes. One page, one price, one link, one date, sent by you from your address.
How long
Delivery call on day 14. On the desk, the six monthly hours split as two hours of reply triage, one hour of list refresh, and three hours across two live calls including prep and debrief.
You do yourself
All of it, in the moment. You are on the call. You say the number out loud. You sign the customer. This is the most common reason we turn people down, and if reading that made you want to ask whether we could just take the call for you, the honest answer is no, and you should not apply.
03

What has to be true before we call someone a buyer.

Three buyers is the thing your $1,000 buys, so it needs a definition tight enough that you can audit it yourself and tell us we got it wrong. First, the word: a buyer is a named person. Nothing else earns it.

TierWhat it isWhat we are allowed to call it
1A named individual, at a named company, with a dated public signal and a verified reachable channelBuyer. Counts toward your three.
2A named company and a known role, no individual identified yetTarget. Never presented to you as a buyer.
3A role at a type of company, such as ops managers at 20 to 50 person shopsSegment. An input to the message, not a deliverable.

You can already describe your segment. That is not what is missing. What is missing is a name and an inbox next to it, so tier 2 and tier 3 do not get to wear the word.

All six of these must hold. Five is a fail.

1. A dated artifact
Authored by that person or directly attributable to their organization, inside that signal type's freshness window. The named-individual requirement is carried by the tier table above: nothing below tier 1 gets to the bar at all.
2. Their words, not ours
The problem stated verbatim, with a live URL and the publication date on it. Our inference about their problem is not evidence. Their sentence is.
3. Function ownership
Their title, or hiring-manager attribution on the job post, or their stated role on the review, shows this person owns the problem or approves the spend.
4. A verified channel
The address passes a deliverability check before it ever enters a sequence.
5. No conflict
Not a competitor, not an existing customer, not someone you already approached. Checked against the list of contacts you named at kickoff. We keep it inside the six rather than beside them, because a name you already own is not a buyer we found.
6. Serviceable size
Inside the company-size band you can actually deliver to. A buyer you would drown servicing is not a buyer.

On freshness windows. Each signal type has its own, because artifacts go stale at different speeds. Every freshness window we currently use is an assumption, set from how quickly the underlying artifact stops describing a live situation. None of them is measured yet, and all of them get re-fitted against observed reply rate by artifact age once there is data to fit against. We would rather publish that they are guesses than let you assume they are findings.

And when the bar refuses to clear. If only two buyers clear it, you get two, in writing, saying so, plus $333 back. If you would rather have the whole $1,000 back instead, you say so and you get it. We never pad the third with a tier-2 target dressed up as a person. That single rule is why the rest of this page is worth anything: a shortlist that always contains exactly three names is a shortlist with a quota, and a quota is the opposite of a bar.

04

Three kinds of public evidence, and what each one is actually worth.

Everything below is a page a logged-out visitor can open. A person opens them and reads them. There is no crawler, no monitor, no scraper and no harvest anywhere in this product, and that is not a compliance posture, it is a description of how four seats run by one person actually works.

The complaint signal

Public forum and community threads

In niche professional places rather than startup places. Reddit is the obvious one and we say so rather than hiding it behind a euphemism, because reading a public thread is not a restricted act and pretending otherwise would be the tell.

Tells you: the problem in the buyer's own unprompted words, which is the vocabulary your opener should be written in. At its strongest, someone walked into a room of strangers and asked for a vendor.

Does not tell you: that they have budget, or that they own the decision. Plenty of loudly frustrated people cannot sign anything.

The spend signal

Public job ads and contractor postings

Tells you: money is already leaving the building for this outcome. A job description listing the manual task by name means someone approved a salary to solve it, and your price is a rounding error against that salary. A contractor posting is better still, because it puts an hourly rate on the exact output your product produces. That is the purest evidence of willingness to pay that exists in public.

Does not tell you: dissatisfaction. Nobody in a job ad says the current approach is failing. And the post stops being true the day the role is filled.

The displacement signal

Public review pages for what they use today

Tells you: this person already pays for this category, which removes the hardest objection in a first sale, and they have written down in public the thing their vendor does not do. Renewal or migration language on a recent review means there is a date on their calendar you did not have to create.

Does not tell you: who they are. Reviewers are usually partly anonymized, which is exactly why these start life as tier-2 targets and only become buyers if a named individual can be established through licensed data.

Where contact data comes from

Licensed providers, under a DPA

Contact details are bought from licensed B2B data providers, under their terms and under a data-processing agreement. Nothing is harvested off a platform. If a licensed provider does not have a working address for a person, that person does not become a buyer, no matter how good the signal was.

05

What is a person, what is software, and what would have to be true before that changes.

The fourth column is the one worth your time, because "we will automate this later" is free to say and means nothing without a number attached. Every row has a measured trigger, and a step cannot be automated before its trigger fires. The trigger has to be a saved view returning a threshold with a stated n. Not a feeling.

Two rules sit above the whole table. No pattern is automated until it has shown up in at least three different founders, because a pattern from one founder is a fact about that founder's product, not about the market. And automation is revocable: if an automated step's quality metric drops below its trigger for two consecutive weekly reviews, it goes back to manual within 48 hours and stays there until the threshold is cleared again.

StepTodayWhat changes laterWhat would have to be true first
Signal searchTooling plus a personScheduled searches file raw results automatically. A person still accepts or rejects every row.At least 3 query templates proven, each having produced a contact for at least 3 different founders, plus at least 200 signals across at least 6 founders, plus a measured keep-rate of 25% or better. Reverts if keep-rate falls under 15% for two weeks.
Buyer shortlistA person, onlyA rules-based score, not a model, replaces the operator's manual ranking as the default sort.At least 10 closes with unbroken lineage from query to deal, and the operator's top-quartile picks replying at twice the rate of his bottom quartile across 200+ touches. If human judgment does not beat the bottom quartile, the score does not get automated, it gets deleted.
Outreach draftingModel drafts, person editsThe draft goes straight to you without an operator rewrite.Median operator edit distance under 20% across the last 10 founders' sequences, and no founder rejecting a message at the read-aloud step. Reverts the moment median edit distance goes back above 30%.
Follow-up cadenceCode schedules, you sendTiming, suppression and channel logic run without a hand on them.Cadence unchanged for 10 consecutive founders, bounce rate under 3%, zero spam complaints in 30 days, and the deliverability gate enforced in code rather than as a habit. A single spam complaint reverts it.
Call prepA person assembles itAuto-assembled from the signal, contact and objection tables. The operator approves rather than builds.New objections in under 20% of the last 20 calls, meaning the written library already covers four out of five things that come up, plus at least 10 active objection cards each used 3 times or more.
The live callA person. Always, for nowAsync coaching after the call first. Real-time prompting during the call is last, deliberately.For async: model objection-tagging agreeing with manual tagging at 85% or better on a 30-call holdout. For real-time: that, plus call prep green for 30 straight days, every top-ten objection type carrying 3 recorded responses with results, offline replay against 50+ calls surfacing the right card inside 3 seconds at 80% precision, and 20+ recorded founder-freeze events with the topic logged. It stops permanently if it ever prompts a founder to say something false.
Closing the dealYouNothing. There is no trigger in this row.This one is not on the ladder. You sign the customer, we do not sell as you, and we take nothing on a deal we did not source.

One condition applies to every row and it is not a yield trigger. A step may only be automated against an official platform API inside its own tier terms, licensed job-posting data, or licensed contact data under a data-processing agreement. A step that cannot be automated compliantly is unbuildable, not merely unwise, and it stays in the left-hand column forever.

06

Three refusals.

We never pad the list. If only two buyers clear the six-point bar, you get two, we say so in writing, and $333 comes back. One buyer, the same again. The temptation here is obvious and constant: a tier-2 target dressed as a named person would fill the gap and you would probably never notice. Padding once would make every other sentence on this site worthless, including the fee, which is the whole argument for taking us seriously.
We never send as you, and we never log in as you. Every message leaves your mailbox, in your words, after you have read it out loud. No shared credentials, on any account, ever, including the ones you would happily hand over on day one to save yourself an afternoon. Sending as you would burn your domain on our schedule rather than yours, and an outreach thread where the founder never actually wrote anything falls apart the moment a buyer replies with a real question.
We never take money from a founder we cannot help. Refused before the scoring even runs, publicly, with the actual reason. Two more get routed rather than refused: if you have collected any revenue at all your problem is repeatability rather than existence, and that is a Belkins conversation. If the only thing wrong is your sending reputation, you get parked until Folderly has fixed it, then you can apply again.

A program that will take $1,000 from anybody is a program whose fee promise means nothing. Refusing loudly is not a personality trait here, it is the mechanism that makes the rest of the page load-bearing. And because the gates refuse most of the people who ask, there is a $199 First-Customer Workshop for the people we turn away. It is not a way into the cohort. Buying it does not improve your application, does not count toward a Deal Sprint, and is not looked at when we decide.

07

The rule that takes the word AI off this website automatically.

Every artifact we hand you carries a byline generated from the data rather than typed by hand. It reads either Produced by: Deal Lead (human) or Drafted by: model, edited by operator, edit distance 34%. That percentage is measured, not estimated: it is how much of the model's draft the operator had to change before it was fit to send.

The reasoning is simple enough to check. If a person is rewriting more than two words in five, the model is not doing the work. A person is doing the work with a rough first draft in front of him, which is a real and useful thing, but it is not what a reader hears when a page says AI. At that point continuing to say it would be a claim we could not substantiate from our own instrumentation, so the instrumentation removes it instead of waiting for someone to decide to be honest. The tripwire only ever fires in the direction that costs us the more attractive word.

It runs on the same measurement as a build decision, in the opposite direction. Automatic drafting only gets promoted past the operator's rewrite when median edit distance falls under 20%, and it gets demoted again above 30%. One number governs both what we are allowed to claim and what we are allowed to build, and the claim threshold is the loosest of the three. We cannot quietly ship the automation while the copy stays honest, or keep the copy while the automation quietly rots.

If the median operator edit distance across the last ten sequences goes above 40%, the word AI comes off this site within 48 hours.

It cannot fire yet, and pretending otherwise would be its own dishonesty. The rule is defined on a median across the last ten sequences, and Cohort 001 is four seats, so at four sequences there is no window to take a median over. Until then, every artifact still carries its own individual edit-distance byline from the very first sequence, so you can see your own numbers while the fleet-wide rule is still filling up. A tripwire nobody can read is decoration. This one you can read on your own delivery.

Ready to see whether your product clears the bar?

The application is free, there is no card on it, and a person reads it, usually inside a day. If we do not think we can get you a first customer, you get told so and told what we would do instead.