Enterprise Outreach Lab

Where we store the bets: hypotheses, target accounts, wedge, messaging, insights. We fill the open boxes together.

Goal: learn, not close Channels: cold email + LinkedIn Updated 2026-06-17

01 Goal

What are we trying to learn?

Learn at what company size maintenance/WO automation is a real, budgeted pain — not close revenue.

No means to deliver an enterprise rollout today. So every touch is discovery: find the pain, the buyer, the budget. Logos are for learning, not for invoicing — don't burn the good ones on a pitch we can't yet fulfill.

02 Hypotheses

The bets we're testing. Click a status pill to cycle it (testing → validated → killed → queued).

03 ICP

Who we target — and just as important, who we exclude. "Any enterprise" is the answer this section exists to kill.

Target

  • Market-rate / higher-rent (class A & luxury) — most $ at stake per dropped WO. Target first.
  • Regional mid-market / lower-enterprise operators, ~1k–30k units.
  • Owner-operator or VP-ops who still personally feels WO volume.
  • Multifamily, quality operators — reputation-driven, low turnover.
  • Reachable — findable email, LinkedIn-active leadership.

Exclude

  • National giants (Greystar-scale) — procurement, in-house tooling, security review we can't clear yet.
  • Pure SMB (< few hundred units) — that's the at-risk H1 segment, not the test.
  • Third-party-only PMs with no owner-side pain or budget.
  • Affordable / Section 8 / nonprofit operators — captive tenants (low churn), mission/grant budgets, slower procurement. Deprioritized, not dead.

Prometheus (~28k) sits at the top edge of the band — "big, but not too big." That edge is the bet.

3·1 Account selection

How we go from one name to a real list: where to source operators, then how to rank them.

Sources

  • NMHC Top 50 (managers / owners) — ranked by units. Pick the band below the giants (~#20–100) — that's our ICP. Fastest top-down path to right-sized operators.
  • apartments.com — sweep a target metro, read the management-company name off listings. Bottoms-up; good for local density. (your idea)
  • LinkedIn / Sales Navigator — company search by industry + geo + headcount → then the execs.
  • Email — Apollo / Hunter / RocketReach to find + verify addresses and the pattern.

Ranking rubric

Goal is discovery — so weight reachability + fit over "ability to buy" (we're not closing yet).

CriterionWhat we scoreWeight
FitUnits in ~1–30k band, multifamily, regionalhigh
PainDecentralized vendors / legacy systems → more follow-up painhigh
ReachabilityExec findable on LinkedIn, email pattern knownhigh
Strategic valueMarquee regional name, reference-able latermed
UrgencyGrowth, recent bad reviews — squishylow
Ability to buyN/A — discovery, not a saleskip

3·2 Geographic focus

Where we hunt first.

Bay Area — most ideal. Prometheus is here, so you can meet execs in person; the Bay is a dense cluster of right-sized operators; and the existing SMB list already gave you Bay Area muscle. Expand to broader Northern California only after the Bay is swept.

04 Target accounts

Ranked best-first. Tier rolls up fit + pain + reach into one call; Why is the reason. Click a status pill to advance it.

TierCompanyUnitsGeoSegmentStatusWhy this rank

Tiers: S flagship · A strong · B caveated · C parked (affordable/Sec 8, deprioritized per H3). Add accounts by editing the source; statuses persist locally until we re-promote.

05 Product wedge

The one specific problem we lead with.

Follow-up to completion — tracking every open WO and chasing the vendor until the work is verified done.

Andrew's biggest manual time sink. The bet: this pain is ~linear for SMB (a few jobs, held in your head) but super-linear at scale — hundreds of jobs across many vendors/properties is where the loop breaks. That gap is the enterprise hypothesis. It's also a better "pay a lot" story than triage: a dropped job = re-work, tenant churn, liability.

5·1 Value model — what's a dropped WO worth?

The real question: if a work order slips, what do they actually lose? Hard ROI vs the bear case.

Cost bucketWhat happens when follow-up fails~$ / event
Avoidable turnoverResident doesn't renew over bad maintenance$4–8k
make-ready + Bay Area vacancy + concession
Damage escalationSmall leak sits → water / mold remediation$3–20k
the pure "nobody confirmed it was done" cost
Habitability / legalUnaddressed → rent abatement, fines, suit$10k+
CA is tenant-friendly; tail risk, low frequency
Vendor leakageDup dispatch, paid-not-done, emergency premiums10–20% of spend
recovered by tracking alone
Follow-up laborCoordinator time spent chasing~$18k / 1k units / yr
reclaim ~half with a tool

Back-of-envelope (per 1,000 units, then ×28 for Prometheus — all assumptions, verify)

  • ~4 WOs/unit/yr → 4,000 WOs / 1k units
  • ~3% mishandled → 120; ~10% escalate to a real cost event → ~12 events
  • blended ~$3.5k/event → ~$42k/yr loss + ~$9k reclaimed labor ≈ ~$50k / 1k units / yr
  • ×28k units → ~$1.2–1.4M/yr; cut 3× for safety → ~$400–500k/yr

Bull

At scale these losses are real, recurring, CFO-legible. A $1–3/unit/mo tool ($336k–$1M/yr at 28k) clears 1.5–4× ROI even discounted.

Bear — your instinct

The expensive failures already get caught — the tenant screams about the leak. What truly slips silently is the cheap stuff (squeaky hinge, ~$0). If so, the marginal WO we save is worthless → ROI collapses → H1 confirmed.

Discovery resolves this. Don't ask "is follow-up annoying" (yes, mildly). Ask: "tell me about the last dropped or delayed WO that actually cost you real money." War stories → real pain. Blank stares / all small → H1 confirmed.

06 Messaging hypotheses

Goal is discovery, so these are research asks, not pitches — founder voice, low ask, give-to-get. A/B the angle; we learn which framing makes an exec reply. Swap [Name]/scale per account.

Angle A · Founder research safe, highest reply — flatters scale, no pitch, hardest to ignore
Subj: quick q on work-order follow-up at Prometheus Hi [Name] — founder here, not selling anything. I'm researching how operators at your scale keep work orders from slipping between "dispatched" and "actually done." Sounds trivial, looks brutal at 28k units. Trying to learn how the best teams handle it — open to 15 min? I'll trade what I'm finding across other operators.
LinkedIn note: Founder researching how operators at your scale keep maintenance follow-up tight (dispatch → verified done). Not selling — learning from the best teams. Worth a quick 15 min?
Angle B · The cost question sharp, riskier — leads with the value hypothesis; tests whether the $ framing lands
Subj: what does a dropped work order cost Prometheus? Hi [Name] — quick one. When a maintenance ticket slips the cracks, where does it actually hurt — turns, damage, reviews? I'm a founder mapping the real cost of follow-up failures across large operators and would value 15 min of your view. Not a pitch.
Angle C · "How do you already solve this?" war-story bait — assume competence, invite them to brag; pulls the dropped-WO stories discovery needs
Subj: how does Prometheus keep follow-up tight? Hi [Name] — at 28k units, getting every work order followed-up to "verified done" has to be hard. I'm a founder studying how the best operators pull it off. Could I borrow 15 min to hear how your team does it? Happy to share patterns I'm seeing elsewhere.

07 Outreach motion

How the touches actually go out.

08 Discovery vs sales

Are we validating pain, or selling a solution?

Discovery. Every call is to learn whether the pain is real and budgeted at this scale — not to pitch a product we can't yet deliver. This follows directly from the Goal.

09 Measurement

Goal is learning and n is small — so weight absolute counts + qualitative signal over noisy rates. Batch 1 = ~10–15 execs across ~8–10 operators.

MetricBatch-1 targetWhy
Reply rate≥ 25–30%Founder research ask, hand-personalized — should crush the 1–5% cold norm
LinkedIn connect accept≥ 40%Founder profile, warm-ish ask
Discovery calls booked3–5The real near-term KPI
$-loss war stories≥ 2The crux: real, specific dollar losses from dropped WOs — or a confident "they all get caught" → H1 confirmed

Rates are noisy at n≈10 — treat them as directional. The war-story count is the signal that actually moves H1.

10 Insights / log

Running record of what we decided and learned.

Local edits (statuses, new insights) live in your browser. Hit Copy as JSON and paste it back to Claude to persist into the source + re-deploy.