22 free Claude Code skills for cold email
The sanitized version of the system that runs every client account at the agency, packaged as Claude Code skills. Clone the repo, bring your own API keys, point Claude Code at it, and go from zero to a running campaign.
Start here
Two ways into the repo, depending on how you like to work. /cold-email-kickoff asks a few questions and routes you straight to the right skills; the starter kit is the full manual if you'd rather learn every piece step by step. Both live in the same clone: the full repo on GitHub. Everything else below is the reference library both of them draw from.
Cold Email Kickoff
The guided start-here orchestrator: four questions asked one at a time, then it runs the right skills in order and hands off to the exact next step.
Cold Email Starter Kit
The full end-to-end cold email manual: infrastructure, offer strategy, copywriting, sequencing, list building, and launch, on the exact stack Joel runs at his agency.
Strategy & Offers
4 skillsBefore you send anything: who you're targeting and what you're actually offering.
ICP Builder
A one-time conversational intake that scrapes your website, interviews you question by question, and writes profile.yaml, the single file every other skill in the system reads.
Offer Framing
The single highest-leverage skill in the system: decides what your cold email actually offers before a word of copy gets written, because copy cannot fix a bad offer.
Offer Testing Roadmap
Turns one offer into a week-by-week roadmap of distinct angles to test, with a hard kill bar of 2,000 sends and zero interested replies.
Lead Magnet Builder
Builds a genuinely pay-worthy free asset and packages it as 'we just built X for COMPANY', the past-tense framing that outperforms every other cold email opener.
Copywriting
3 skillsTurning the offer into emails people actually reply to.
Cold Email Copywriting
Two base cold email frameworks, Offer First and Built For You, plus poke and hook opener layers and the hard bans that keep copy out of spam.
Sequence Architecture
Joel's 4-step cold sequence: a first touch, a same-thread nudge at +3 days, a fresh thread with a new offer angle at +30 days, then a final nudge.
Spintax Depth
Rules for spinning finished cold email copy so a thousand sends of one variant don't look identical, what to spin, what to protect, and when to deepen it.
List Building
4 skillsFinding and preparing the people you'll actually email.
AI Ark List Builder
Build a cold email lead list with AI Ark: precise targeting, a free preview, a mandatory back-page quality check, then a confirmed export before credits get spent.
AI Ark API
Pure API reference for AI Ark's lead database: the three filter shapes, the 401 trap on company keywords, export polling, and the traps that quietly return wrong results.
Email Verification
Runs Kitt verification on lists you bring from elsewhere, and draws the hard line on the one mistake that costs money for nothing: re-verifying an already-verified AI Ark export.
List Hygiene
The mandatory final pass every lead list gets before it touches a sending tool: dedup, exclusion lists, and an automatic MX check that drops Mimecast and Barracuda domains.
Infrastructure
2 skillsThe domains and inboxes everything else depends on.
Domain & Inbox Setup
Takes you from zero to warmed, connected sending infrastructure: generate domains, buy them, route through Zapmail, provision inboxes, and sit through the 2 to 3 week warmup no one should skip.
Deliverability Triage
Diagnoses a bounce spike by ESP and SMTP code before touching anything, because re-verifying the list fixes exactly one of five possible causes.
Sending (EmailBison)
4 skillsGetting copy and leads live, correctly, every time.
EmailBison API
The EmailBison API reference built from getting it wrong first: auth failures that look like success, pagination that silently truncates at 15, and one PATCH that can flip live campaign settings.
EmailBison Campaign Launch
Assembles a complete EmailBison campaign end to end, copy, leads, senders, schedule, then deliberately stops at draft so nothing can go live without the QA gate.
Pre-Launch QA
A numbered gate that checks copy, settings, leads, senders, schedule and sequence structure before any campaign launches or resumes, PASS or FAIL, one line of evidence each.
Sender Scaling
The volume discipline for cold email senders: 1 a day until engagement proves the campaign, then 3, with further growth always coming from more senders, never higher limits.
Reply Handling
3 skillsWhat happens the moment someone writes back.
Reply Classification
A strict six-bucket system for sorting cold email replies and calculating the one number, interested-reply rate, that actually tells you if a campaign is working.
Reply Drafting
Rules and worked examples for the reply that turns an interested prospect into a booked meeting, fast, generous with the promised asset, and never gatekept behind a call.
Reply Follow-Ups
An eight-touch follow-up system for interested prospects who went quiet, each send a fresh angle with a named case study and a number, never a content-free bump.
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