Most owners don't have a lead problem. They have a follow-up problem. Rahel shows how Outbound HQ runs your outreach and your social posts, without you doing it all by hand.
GROWTH PILLAR: AI & Automation
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Corporate escapees / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A practical look at one tool that handles lead drip campaigns, social posts across six platforms, and a unified inbox — with a human still in the loop.
Most business owners don't have a lead problem. They have a follow-up problem.
In this East Trade Winds session, Rahel Gunaratne walks the room through Outbound HQ; an AI co-pilot built for owners who tried to grow a brand, ran out of time, and stopped.
Rahel shows the live setup. Add a team. Connect your domain and email. Drop in your leads. Build a drip campaign that sends five emails over thirty days. When a prospect books a call, they come off the list automatically.
Then he flips to social media. Outbound HQ posts to TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. It looks at your past content and writes new posts that sound like you. Nothing goes out without a human approval.
Rahel grew a TikTok account to eight thousand followers using this exact workflow.
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Rahel (00:05)
Outbound HQ is one of those startups. It's basically an automation tool for managing leads and social media. So
both managing leads and also braindumping content and then coming up with social media content. So that's what Outbound HQ is designed for managing leads and social media. and how many of
of you have brands that you want to grow and at some point have made an attempt at posting on Instagram or TikTok or LinkedIn and then been like, this is it's too much effort, takes too much time and then just eventually stopped
that's exactly what outbound HQ is designed to help with. ⁓ 'cause I ran into the same issue is that I want to grow a brand, but each of those takes time, it takes effort. and so this is where Albound HQ comes in and it can basically help you grow your brand. It lets you follow up with each lead to post on social media, to keep an eye on all those channels and figure out the right content strategy and across all various different
platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and then also does email and SMS car marketing as well. So yeah, that's essentially the problem and it's basically your co-pilot when creating content. so it can manage your outreach with leads, sending email campaigns and monitoring for replies and even do specific triggers if a call is booked.
⁓ then it also covers your social media so it can make posts for you and create additional funnels for you and your business. and it does this by looking at your previous content and deciding and figuring out what your content was beforehand. So the new content that it's making is basically your content. And it's geared pure purely for people who used to schedule content but then stopped because it just takes too much time, like myself and ⁓ the people who raised their hands.
And for people who have leads that they haven't reached to in a while, a lot of the time people don't have a lead problem, they have a follow up problem. and so out on HQ is also geared for that as well. So let me quickly walk you through a quick demo of how to set up your team and how to get started. and essentially this is the landing page, out on HQ.ca, and why don't we go ahead and create a team?
so I'm just gonna click add team and this is gonna create a new team for me. and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to create a team for Web Indexer, which is another one of my startups. and I'm gonna give it a nice little icon. And I'm gonna have it collect information about my business, and this is just to make it easier for the AI to understand.
What your business is, what you're about, what your type of content is. and so here it's collected some information about my business. Webindexer is an AI search engine designed to provide instant customer support, automate customer experiences, and capture leads. Perfect, okay. We've got some brand information. So I'll just click save and continue, and now I've got my team set up. So we come to the dashboard, and you'll notice here on the left we have a few different tabs.
so I'm gonna click on the leads tab. And the idea with the leads tab is if you work with any sort of CRM, it works very much the same way. You've got your leads, you've got your companies that those leads are a part of, and the deals that are currently in the pipeline. And we also have a lead intake where basically ⁓ if you have a website form or some kind of ads that are collecting leads, it can direct them directly to one of the lead groups.
so I'm gonna go ahead and create a new group and and I'm gonna call it website leads. And I'm going to add myself as a lead. So I've added myself as a lead, and now I need to contact myself. I need to make sure that whenever I get added to this, I get put on a campaign of
five or ten emails that get sent out once a week. and then if I book a call or if I respond to the email, something needs to happen. ⁓ so I'm gonna go ahead and click run campaign and what that's gonna do is it's gonna create a campaign for this specific lead group. And I'm just gonna call it the welcome campaign. and actually I forgot to do this part before, but I actually
You have to also connect your ⁓ integrations. so what this means is if we go to the team tab and the integrations, we have to connect our domain and email to decide ⁓ what email you want to send from. so we can do this by coming to the integrations tab, coming to email, and you can either verify a domain or you can just add your own email here and verify it so that you can send from it.
And I'm gonna continue the rest of the demo from this testing one instead of that new team that we had created. So let's go back to people because we've we have a verified domain, we have a verified email address that we can send from. ⁓ so we'll go back to people and let's go back to to website leads. And I'm gonna create a new campaign. I'm gonna call this the welcome campaign. And we've got email selected as our channel. We also have SMS as well.
And I want to send from this email address that I've connected before. ⁓ I'll choose these leads, this lead group to send to. and let's make it a drip campaign. So that means whenever a new lead comes into this group, they are automatically put on this drip campaign and they'll be sent out emails on a regular schedule. and I have a generate content with AI feature as well. So the idea with Albound HQ is
We want to make it easy to create content, but for the human to be sort of the final say. So anytime there's any sort of AI generated content, it never does it automatically. It never creates something and then sends something. There always is a human in the loop. So you have to approve something whenever it gets created. So nothing is ever sent automatically. And so I'll just say ⁓ for the generate content with AI, ⁓ what should the messages contain?
so I'll just say introduce our services and encourage a calendarly booking meeting at this URL.
Rahel (05:48)
Okay.
Rahel (05:48)
And
let me just grab my calendarly over here. ⁓ and then I'll say send five emails over the next twenty days. I will say thirty days.
Rahel (05:58)
Space Steven.
Rahel (05:59)
Awesome. So now I've just I'm basically making a campaign with those instructions. the AI, what it does it uses my business information that was collected before. And whenever we also generate new content, it also remembers any sort of design decisions. So sometimes there'll be a design assistant that pops up here that asks you some additional questions. And if there are ⁓ things that need to be answered, it'll ask you those questions and when you answer them.
That gets put into that gets saved as context. So that the next time it asks you that question, it's already saved. So it sort of bills your preferences as you use the app. So now we are in our campaign page over here. And so we see our campaign details, our lead list that we've selected. We can always change this if we like. We can choose which email we want people to reply to. We can add our email signature.
we can have click tracking as well. And let's turn this into a drip campaign. And here below we see the emails that were created. ⁓ and so this one, this testing site actually used Fluent Future, which is another one of my language learning apps. So the content was centered around that. perfect. So let me go ahead and also add a trigger because what I want to do is I want my I
I don't want people who book a meeting to continue to receive emails. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add ⁓ a trigger called called booked. And this means that when someone goes through this link to book a call with me, ⁓ they will be removed from the campaign. So they won't be receiving any more emails from this campaign. so I'm gonna select call booked as a trigger, and if they book a meeting over here.
Then I want to unenroll them from this campaign. So they're going to stop receiving stop receiving the emails from me. Then we come down to email. I'm gonna quickly read this over. Yep, that looks that looks okay, but I wanna maybe make it more casual so I can ask the AI to to make it more casual. ⁓ and so what it's gonna do is it's gonna ⁓ okay, we ran into an error here. Normally this works, but
course during the demo we have an issue. that's okay. I guess the AI is telling me that it's fine. So I'm gonna go ahead and click approve. and that means this email is now approved. I'm gonna go ahead and approve the rest of the others as well. And that's it. So now I'm gonna click activate drip and that means whenever there is a lead coming into this group they will be put on this campaign and they're gonna receive
one email on day zero so immediately they're gonna receive the second email on day seven then day fourteen and it's gonna ask them hey like we've got this information would you like to book a meeting ⁓ and when they book a meeting they stop receiving email so that's what we've set up here. the next thing I want to go into is the social media aspect and there's a few different features I want to explore here.
so first things first is the integrations part. and so we support well Instagram and Facebook, we have TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Twitter. and I've been automating content with TikTok, with my language learning app, all using AI and it managed to grow to eight thousand followers. so that's a
That was a case study in itself. But I'll just quickly walk you through the process of how I create that. So I've gone ahead and connected these accounts, but it's very simple to do so. You just click the connect button, and if you're signed into that platform, it'll sign you in and connect it. So then we go to our calendar and I'm gonna create a new campaign here. And I'm gonna click the social media campaign.
And let's just do TikTok because we want to see some images. and we're gonna call this language learning for beginners. so the reason why is because I'm doing a startup for language learning. I want to create some content around language learning. so what do you want to post about?
so this is where you can sort of brain dump and say, let's create English learning content for Spanish speakers.
And let's create two posts. And we can upload our logo and assets if we like those to be included in the post as well. And then we've got to select some TikTok presets. And that is good. And so now we can ask some questions. What is the tone of the English learning content? Let's make it fun and engaging. Usually they're around intermediate to beginner. We'll select we'll s we'll select beginner.
What specific areas of English learning should the content focus on? Let's do let's do all three. Okay, so now the AI design assistant is ready. It's made some decisions. we're gonna generate two posts. and what this is doing is it's going to the back end and using AI to make some carousels posts using the content that ⁓ that we put in. And it uses our ⁓ business information as well as content that we
⁓ put in before. And each post takes about thirty seconds to forty seconds to generate. so in the meantime I will switch to ⁓ the actual team that that creates this content
So this is the type of content that's that gets created.
And so the idea is you can very easily create your own media. And if you come to this automation tab, we also give you access to an email agent where basically now you don't have to come to the to the dashboard at all.
you can handle all this through your email. so you can send your email agent a message such as, hey, I wanna create this content. you can brain dump all your content ideas, and then it'll create the campaign for you. and then we also have an automation and I use this automation frequently ⁓ where I've got TikTok weekly posts set up. so basically it sends me it creates the posts on a weekly basis and then sends me an email every Sunday.
Says, hey, I made these posts for you. And then all I have to do is like it'll send me a campaign much like this one. And then all I have to do is when I go to it, we see a review button. and then I can just click approve or reject. And if I click reject, I you have to give the reason why, and this also trains the AI into what sort of content you want. so for example, if I reject this one and I say,
needs more pronunciation content then it's gonna remember that and start and use it for the next time it creates the content. So we went through social media, we went through leads as well. One thing I forgot to mention as well, we also have a unified inbox where all the messages come through from every single platform. So this is from email, from SMS, from Reddit DMs, from posts that you make.
and you can reply to it all at once here. ⁓ and we also have an AI reply feature, so it can decide basically how to reply on its own. but it does require you to connect a webhook right now. So I'd say it's not the most accessible thing at the moment. yeah, so that is the inbox. We also of course keep track of analytics as well. right now
This yeah, so it tells you how many emails you sent, the opens, the calls booked, so you can keep track of how good your email campaigns are doing.
Then that is yeah. One other thing is if you're using AI at the moment, a lot of the platforms such as follow up boss and go high level, they don't have the strongest MCPs for your for their AI agent to connect to. whereas we do, so you can ask your AI agents like Cloud Code or Cloud Cowork to to say, ⁓ hey, can you start a campaign with these leads or I've got this lead list, put it in.
so yeah, Ablon HQ supports AI ⁓ AI agents, basically.
So that's the idea with with the outbound HQ. ⁓ we're currently implementing the brain dump of voice notes, as well as more robust email agent. and so if you're interested in these features, I recommend you sign up so you can have bi weekly updates, ⁓ 'cause we send out a newsletter. and yeah, that covers everything from team setup, lead outreach, platform monitoring.
social campaigns, automated content, and a unified place to see and respond to everything. and yeah, if you have questions, reach out. thanks again for ⁓ for listening.