I Asked OpenClaw to Do Cold Email Outreach For 24 Hours

This morning at 11.30 a.m. I woke up to this message from Open Claw. SDR outreach. Complete and verified. 30 out of 30 leads sent. All daily leads have been contacted with high-depth hooks. Bounce recovery successfully re-delivered emails via alternative direct addresses. I've researched the dominant February 2026 marketing trends and am drafting two case study focused posts based on these trends to be delivered to you at 8am Eastern time for manual posting. Next steps, hourly Gmail response monitoring and LinkedIn post delivery. I didn't write any of these emails. I didn't research those trends. I didn't even know that two of my outreach emails bounced. OpenClaw detected the bounce, found alternative addresses, and re-sent them automatically. This isn't AI assistance. This is an AI that's actually running my marketing operation while I sleep. 24 hours ago, I configured OpenClaw to be my marketing director. I gave it research tools, business context, email access, lead scraping, and complete autonomy. And then I walked away. I'm about to show you exactly what it did, how it handled problems I didn't even know existed, and the real results after 24 hours of zero human intervention. Let's lock in. OpenFlaw has been taking the AI world by storm, thanks to its autonomous capability and incredible memory. So I thought, What if AI could run my entire marketing operation autonomously? And that's what I built. OpenClaw as a marketing director, not an assistant, but a director. It researches, generates content, scrapes leads, sends outreach, and posts on LinkedIn, all on autopilot. I'm going to walk through exactly how I set this up. The research tools. the business context, the integrations, the image generation, the lead scraping, and the automation schedule. This took about an hour to configure, and now it runs indefinitely. Let's get this marketing director up and running from the very start. Grab the installation code from OpenFlow.ai, come into your terminal, and paste it in. I'm installing this on a virtual machine, which is running on my Mac. You can install this any way that you want. The only important thing is that wherever you install it has to be running 24-7 in order for this agent to work. And I'm showing it to you from the very start because there are a few settings that we want to configure from the onset that will make our marketing director agent work the way we want it to. When asked to choose a model and auth provider, choose Open Router. This way we can use a single API key and get access to multiple models for the various tasks that we want our marketing director to do. Drop in your OpenRouter API key. I'm going to delete this key as soon as this recording is done. Let's hit enter. And for the default model, I'm going to choose Gemini 3 Flash. I found that Gemini 3 Flash is a really good orchestrator model and it has a good balance between being cost effective and still very intelligent at the same time. So let's choose Gemini 3 Flash. We're also going to set up Telegram. So drop in your Telegram bot token. Hit yes for configuring skills. choose npm and you want to enable the mc porter and nano banana pro skills now i've already enabled mc porter on this machine earlier so it's already there and that's why you can't see it in this list but you if you're if you're doing this fresh you should be able to see it so hit space bar when you hit when you see mc porter and scroll down and hit space bar when you see nano banana pro enter to continue remember to install clawed hub as well that will also be there in that skill list ignore the first two options But you do want to set a Gemini API key for Nano Banana Pro, and this will help us generate images for posting on LinkedIn. So hit enter and head over to AISudio.Google.com, grab an API key and paste it in. I'm going to say no for Notion, but if you have Notion set up, you can integrate it here. and have OpenClaw access your Notion databases for any business information that you already have. But for now, I'm just going to hit no. No for OpenAI. No again. No again. Then start the hatching process. Hit enter. Proceed with the niceties. Give it a vibe and a basic idea of who it's supposed to be. And now we can actually go ahead and continue this conversation in Telegram. Let's come to Telegram. Open up the bot that we had connected. This is the one that I had used. Let's hit hi. It's going to ask us to connect our Telegram bot. So just go ahead and copy this. Press control C to exit. Paste in that command. Paste in the code. Hit enter. And it's going to pair your Telegram account with OpenClaw. And now you can go ahead and continue the conversation here. Excellent. Now that we have our basic setup done, it's time to equip our marketing director with the tools that it's going to need. The most important tool that a marketing director needs is research. competitors, friends, what's working, what's not, what are people actually talking about? So we are going to give our marketing director, OpenClaw, two research tools, Brave Search for web data and a Grok powered subagent for Twitter analysis. Let's go ahead and set up the Brave Search integration first. In the OpenClaw documentation, you'll see that the easiest way to add your Brave Search API key is through the configuration. Let's go ahead and copy this command. Come back into the terminal, paste that in, continue, enable web search with a yes, and paste in your API key. So we can go to the Brave Search API, and I'll leave a link to this in the dashboard. It's free for a thousand credits per month, so it's more than enough to get started. Go over to API keys, copy the key, come back to the terminal, and paste it in. Enable web fetch, and we now have Brave Search set up. We can confirm this. by going back to telegram and asking it please check if you have access to brave search i have just set it up enter and we'll see that access is confirmed everything is good so that's the search api done and next up we're going to connect it to grok to be able to pull insights directly from x so i'm going to ask openclaw itself to make a sub agent that uses grok through open router to research any topic and get trending info about it from x hit enter and just by telling it to make the sub agent it went ahead and created that agent for me now that we have access to search and we have access to twitter trends it's time to actually go ahead and explain to openclaw what exactly it is that our business is about and what exactly is it that we want to achieve now openclaw can't market effectively if it doesn't understand your business so you have to give it everything what you do who you serve what problems you solve how you position yourself and your pricing structure because this is going to be the foundation for every decision that it makes so let's go ahead and send openclaw a comprehensive business brief here's the business overview complete with an ideal client profile your value proposition positioning everything else let's hit enter and openclaw is going to take all of this absorb it and really use it to understand its mission as your marketing director This is now my foundational reference. Every campaign, content idea, or piece of research I do will be aligned with these specifics. Premium positioning, business-first results, and a focus on AI agents for companies in that 5 to 50 employee bracket. Now OpenClaw has access to research, the internet, and it also knows everything there is to know about us. And this is going to be... the difference between a generic AI output and marketing that actually sounds like your brand. Because now Openclaw knows who we serve, how we position, what we charge, and why people buy from us. Now for the next step, a marketing director needs to execute and not just plan, right? So we need to give Openclaw access to email for outreach and Google Sheets for lead tracking. So we're going to do all of this through Zapier's MCP. I'm connecting Gmail and Google Sheets right now through Zapier MCP. And this is the same setup that I used in my earlier video. There's a link to that in the description. So let's create a new MCP server. Select other. Add our tools. So I'm going to select Gmail. Hit connect. Choose the account. Let's add Google Sheets as well. Now we have to connect this server. So click connect up top. Click on generate token. Hit enter. Copy this URL. And we can come back to Telegram and tell OpenClaw to set this MCP server up for us. Now we're not going to paste in the API key into the model itself. We're going to do that manually, but we're going to ask OpenClaw to make all the edits to the configuration file in order to make this work. All right, so it's gone ahead and configured the Zapier MCP server, use the placeholder token, which we need to replace in this file over here. So we can head back into the terminal. and go ahead and navigate to that file. So it'll be cd.openclaw, which is the main directory. So we can do that by typing in nano.openclaw slash openclaw.json. So having gone through the file, it's not there. You can just go ahead and tell it again. I can't see it in the file, please. double check and this is really part and parcel of OpenFlow where sometimes things don't things will not work the way that you expect it so it's just a matter of talking to OpenFlow again and talking through that issue and getting it resolved so OpenFlow says we should now be able to see that placeholder so let's go back into the terminal run the same command and we'll see that we do now have a space to enter our Zapier auth token now this file is very sensitive because it contains all of your api keys i'm just showing this in the tutorial for the demonstration obviously this whole thing is just going to be shut down as soon as this tutorial is done so we're going to grab the zapier auth token by going back into zapiermcp copying that token coming back into the terminal and pasting in our token hit ctrl o to save the file ctrl x to exit now we can come back to telegram and ask it to check So we're going to tell it that we've added the key, connect to the server, and save all the schema to your memory. So we save on context going forward. Hit enter, and let's go ahead and wait. And we get a confirmation saying that it's connected to the MCP server, verified everything, and we have integrations for Gmail, sending, drafting, finding, etc., and also Google Sheets. So far, OpenClaw knows everything about our business. It can do research from the web and it also has access to Google Sheets and Gmail to execute a full-blown marketing campaign. Now the only thing left is actually going ahead and finding leads. Now for lead gen, we're going to be using this LinkedIn profile scraper through a platform called Appify. Appify is kind of like an online store for web scraping where you can subscribe to different scrapers and reliably and safely pull data from the internet. I like to use this particular scraper because it's fairly cheap. There's going to be a link to it in the description. So go ahead and log in to Appify. And with the free account, you're going to get $5 of free credits per month, which is enough to get you started. Then we're going to go into settings, go to API and integrations and grab our personal API key. Now back in the terminal, we're going to type in cd.openclaw to come into the Openclaw directory and then type in nano.env. This is going to open a blank file and an env file is like a storeroom for any secrets that you want your application to use. So we're going to type in apify-api-key equals and paste in that key. Hit ctrl o to save the file, ctrl x to exit. And then we're going to ask OpenClaw if it can see the env file. And by the way, if you're enjoying this tutorial so far, I'd really appreciate it if you could give this video a like and subscribe to the channel. And all of the prompts that I'm using in this tutorial are going to be available through a link in the description. So go ahead and check it out. All right, it's found the key. Now, it was not really too secure because it did end up exposing it. I should have been more specific with the question just to ask it to see. just to ask it if it can see it and not to expose the key. So that one's on me. Now we're going to give it instructions to set up an Appify scraper. I've gone ahead and pasted all the relevant curl commands from the Appify documentation. I've also added the actor ID. So you can just go ahead and use this prompt as is. We are going to run this actor and then we're going to see if that run was successful. And if it was successful, we're going to pull that data from that run. and then use it in whatever workflow that we have and finally we're just letting openclaw decide whether this should be a script or a tool whatever openclaw finds easier hit enter openclaw has confirmed that that structure is now a specialized tool and it can now automatically use it to pull leads from appify awesome so this is coming together really well there's just one last step that we have to do and that's really to help us with our linkedin optimization rather than the email campaigns and that is to provide it a way to automatically generate eye-catching images that we can use with our linkedin posts we are going to ask it to make another sub-agent this time we're going to use claude sonnet 4.5 because sonnet 4.5 is one of the best agents for writing prompts this agent is meant to output detailed image generation prompts which OpenFlaw is then going to use with the Nano Banana Scale to generate highly detailed infographics and images for our LinkedIn posts. Let's hit enter. It's deployed our infographic prompter. For some reason it decided to use 3.7 Sonnet. Let's go ahead and confirm that it's using 4.5 Sonnet for prompt generation. Hit enter. Awesome, now we have everything ready in place and it's time for the final prompt which is going to kick off this marketing agent and really put it on autopilot. So we're going to tell it to update the Sol, Heartbeat and Cronjobs as needed. We're promoting it to Marketing Director, it knows who my target audience and ICP is and we're telling it to execute a B2B marketing campaign. First, on LinkedIn. It needs to stay up to date with the latest developments in AI, specifically what's relevant to my ICP. Now, obviously, because I have an AI agency, you would switch this up to whatever your business is through the Grot agent and using Web Search. And every day is to draft two engaging pieces of content to LinkedIn, using the research agent and Web Search to draft the LinkedIn image agent to create the image. And we want it to be proactive. Both post contents should be sent to me for approval two hours before the first post of the day is to go up, which is 8 a.m. EST. And we're going to ask it to create three folders, pending approval, approved and posted for it to keep track. Use a file naming system to help you understand when to post. So that's LinkedIn. Part two is email outreach. You are my SDR to find me clients for my AI consulting offer. Every day you are to reach out to 30 prospects via email, do not cold pitch, find prospects according to my ICP, use the Appify LinkedIn tools as needed, and send an icebreaker email that delivers immediate value and creates a connection. Keep track of replies by checking email every hour, create a spreadsheet using the Zapier MCP and track all prospects and email statuses in it, implement a follow-up schedule, use self-learning for the initial email scripts, and under no circumstances are you to reveal to prospects that you are an AI. Let's hit enter. Let OpenClaw ruminate over this, and it's going to set up that entire campaign for us. Alright, I have fully internalized my new role as your marketing director and SDR. Everything is set up, and it's going to start building out the prospect list and drafting our first LinkedIn pieces for tomorrow morning. I'll reach out once the first batch is ready for your sign-off. Awesome. So now everything is running on autopilot and let me go ahead and show you some examples of a campaign that have already been running on another instance. So here's a spreadsheet with yesterday's results. Over 30 leads researched, complete with found email addresses, hooks and 30 emails sent. If we hop into one of the emails, we'll see that the email is highly personalized with immediate added value. And an invitation to discuss this further. Let's open up another one. I've been following your rebranding journey and the evolution of copy hackers. I wanted to reach out with a concept I think could be compelling. Awesome. Very specific. Very targeted. Very customized. Here's a LinkedIn post. Ready with formatting and research. Ready with an image. All I had to do was just go ahead and manually post it. You could set up an automation to post it automatically as well. So all in all, work that would have taken me 12 to 16 hours to do just happened while I was asleep, hyper-targeted and hyper-researched. And if these guys don't reply to me, Openclaw is going to check that and it's going to automatically execute a gentle follow-up campaign like a real marketer would. And remember, this is only the first 24 hours. Now this is the tip of the iceberg. You could give... as many tasks to your marketing director as you want. So here are three ideas for you to try out. Idea number one, an automated newsletter. Tell your OpenFlow marketing agent to generate a newsletter and send it out to your email list every single day. Idea number two, set up a competitive intelligence dashboard every morning Open Claw can research all of your competitors, see what they're up to, see what they're doing, see what's new, see what's working, see what isn't, and give you a detailed roundup all ready for you to study and implement into your own business. And number three, as a business, you might be running workshops and webinars. You can have Open Claw execute the entire marketing campaign for your webinar, creating the lead gen page, deploying it, and executing an email campaign promoting that webinar. The best part is that Openclaw handled problems I didn't know existed, made decisions based on our business strategy, and produced output that performs almost as well if not better than my manual work. The full setup guide is in the description. Every integration, every prompt, and every configuration. All you need to do is enter your own business configuration. If you'd like to work with me to help you build systems like these in your own business, check out the link in the pinned comment.

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I gave OpenClaw complete control of my marketing operation for 24 hours. Full autonomy. No supervision. No manual intervention.

This morning, I woke up to a report I wasn't expecting.

🤖 THE EXPERIMENT:
I configured OpenClaw to handle:
- Lead generation and qualification
- Outreach email campaigns
- Content creation and scheduling

Then I walked away for 24 hours to see what would actually happen.

⚙️ THE SETUP (What I Configured):
1. Research Tools
2. Business Context
3. Integrations
4. Visual Content
5. Lead Scraping

📥 RESOURCES:
- OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai/
- All prompts and configurations: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fy1wuBCf9pU3GhQz8FdJGp-P_qFtRfT0TpVR1IFYIiM/edit?usp=sharing
- Zapier - https://mcp.zapier.com
- Brave: https://brave.com/search/api/
- Google AI Studio: https://aistudio.google.com/
- OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/