Getting Started

PineLead finds fresh prospects every day, researches each one, judges whether it fits what you sell, and drafts a personal first email. You review every draft and send it from your own mailbox. This guide takes you from a new account to your first sent email.

How it works#

Sourcing. New companies are found every day and added to a shared catalog: name, website, tagline and the people behind it. Each company is stored once, matched by its website.
Research. The agent reads a company's public website, using web search, and notes any published contact address, a contact form, a blog and social profiles.
Qualify. Each researched company is judged against the criteria you wrote in plain English, and gets a score with the reasoning behind it. A company that fits and has a way to reach it becomes a lead.
Draft. The agent writes a first email to the lead in your voice. By default nothing is sent automatically — the draft waits until you approve it. Switch on Auto-approve drafts on the Limits page and each first email is sent as soon as it is written, within your daily sending limit.

Create an account#

Sign up at app.pinelead.com. New accounts start with 100 free credits, enough to take about six companies from research to a draft. See Credits below for what each step costs.

Create a project#

Leads, drafts and the agent's settings all live inside a project. Create your first one from the project selector in the dashboard. Use one project for each thing you sell: every project has its own pitch, its own qualification criteria and its own daily limit.

Connect a mailbox#

Open Configure → Mailbox and press Connect Google. You sign in with Google and grant PineLead access to send from that mailbox and to read replies to the threads it sent.

Every email you send from the dashboard goes out through your connected mailbox, so it arrives as a normal email from you and replies land in your own inbox. Sending from the dashboard without a connected mailbox is refused.
If you connect more than one mailbox, press Send from this on the one new emails should use.
Disconnecting a mailbox keeps the emails already sent in your leads' history.

Verify a sending domain#

You only need this for the Email API. The API is for your product's own transactional email — sign-up confirmations, receipts, notifications — and it is delivered through our infrastructure rather than your mailbox. Outreach to leads always goes from your connected mailbox.

Open Configure → Domains, press Add domain and enter a domain you own, for example acme.com.
Publish the records it shows at your DNS provider: a TXT record that proves you control the domain, and DKIM records (CNAME) that sign your mail. A DMARC TXT record is also listed. It is not required to verify, but receivers treat domains without one more harshly.
Press Verify. Once the domain shows as verified, any address on it can be used as the from address of an API send. Keep the records published; removing them stops delivery.

DNS changes can take a while to propagate. If a domain stays pending, see Domain not verifying.

Set up the agent#

Open Configure → Limits. The settings are split across tabs; press Save after changing any of them.

Analysis

What makes a good prospect for this project? Your qualification criteria, in plain English. They are handed to the agent as written. Be specific about what disqualifies a company — that is what keeps it from drafting emails to people who will never reply. Without criteria, nothing is judged.
Analyse prospects automatically turns on research and qualification.
Prospects per day is the daily ceiling. It applies to each stage separately: this many researched, this many judged and this many drafted per day.

Drafting

What are you offering them? One or two sentences about what you sell. Without it nothing is drafted — the alternative would be an email that invents a product.
Draft emails automatically turns on drafting for qualified leads.

Voice

Sign off as — the name the email is signed with. Use a person's name rather than your product's.
How these emails should read — your style rules. They override the defaults wherever the two disagree.
Your own emails — paste up to three emails you have actually sent, subject line included. They are matched for rhythm and tone, never copied.

Usage and Activity

Usage shows today's count for each stage; the counts reset at midnight UTC. Run now takes the next pieces of work straight away — research first, then judging, then drafting — within the same daily limits. To take one specific company all the way through, use the ⚡ button on its row in Prospects. Activity lists every decision the agent made and its reasoning, kept for 90 days.

Review and send#

Drafts wait under Agent Drafts. Nothing there has been sent. Edit the subject or the message if you want to, then send it — or discard it. You can also press Prepare an outreach on that page to have drafts written now instead of waiting for the schedule.

A sent email goes out from your connected mailbox and the lead moves from New to Contacted. You can also add leads by hand, or import them from a CSV file, on the Leads page.

Replies#

Replies to emails sent from your connected mailbox are synced back onto the lead's thread, and the lead moves to Replied. From there you move it along yourself: New, Contacted, Replied, Interested or Not interested. A recipient that hard-bounces or marks an email as spam is added to your suppression list and is not emailed again.

Credits#

The AI steps are paid for with credits. One credit is $0.01.

Research: 10 credits
Qualify: 2 credits
Draft: 3 credits

Taking one company all the way to a draft costs about 15 credits, or $0.15. A step that fails is refunded, and research that has already been done for a company is reused at no charge. New accounts get 100 free credits.

Buy more under Settings → Billing: a pack of 1,000, 5,000 or 10,000 credits, any amount from 500 to 100,000, or a monthly plan in blocks of 1,000 credits ($10 a month per block). Credits never expire, and a monthly plan costs the same per credit as a pack. Payments are handled by Stripe. Full details are on the pricing page.