We Suck at Outreach.

Another day, another app — that, so it would seem, is the modern way. We'd rather not add to the pile. (Given the quality and provenance of some of what's coming out at the moment, you could be forgiven for replacing that last word with another.) And yet here we are: we've made a new app. It's called Fly Away Paul.

How do we start this one? Not like that, probably. Let's try the honest way in: we suck at outreach. And that's an understatement.

It's quite an awful thing, telling people what you've done and that you're good at something. For a certain type of person it's a real ask. And in all honesty it's a little dispiriting to watch everyone else in the world be so apparently good at it — the social posts, the LinkedIn — our reticence matched, everywhere you look, by everyone else's resolve to promote themselves as loudly and as far and wide as possible. It's a hard time to be introspective, especially if you'd also like to win business.

We've been lucky. Referrals have always come: a client likes the work, someone in their industry respects them, and work arrives from that — as it continues to. But recently we felt the need to address the Achilles heel. You'll know the days, perhaps, when you take stock of the things you're not good at and face the choice: resign yourself, or improve — because improving could have a measurable effect on the business.

Our conclusion was a contradiction we could live with. We'll probably never be naturally good at promoting ourselves. But we could build our perfect version of outreach: personable, a winning blend of tech with a person in the middle, thoughtful, craft-focused, and respectful — to the user, and to whoever the outreach lands on.

The name

Fly Away Paul is from the nursery rhyme — two little dickie birds sitting on a wall. My wife and I have two little girls, and we're reading to them all the time, so these things live in the mind. We were lucky enough to secure the URL — lucky, or maybe nobody else wanted it. But I like the phrase, and as David Hockney said recently of his portrait work: it only matters if I like it.

Research, then outreach

What we built is twofold: a research tool and an outreach tool. The research half looks at a market the way you'd want it looked at. Could you get found? What do you actually want to get into? How complex is it — is it a bun fight? Good solid market research, done by a frontier AI model and verified against another, every claim checked before it reaches you. A correction, though, because it reads too simple written down like that: as with so many things in the app, we engineered the prompt behind this to extreme degrees. Guardrails, ideas, intuition, taste, the right level of persistence — and the good grace to call it when there's nothing left to run. Communicating a complex thing that does an apparently simple thing is a perennial problem — precisely because it is complex. So, to cut to the chase: sending an AI out blind is bananas. As is hoping for a bare prompt to steer it.

From there you can find the brands and businesses inside that space — or any space you care to name. And it's here the app gets quietly interesting: it uses some proven psychology, and no small amount of front-end design, to elicit from you why you're contacting these people at all. The design plays along — checkboxes that draw out more than a blank text field ever would. You tell it more than you realise, and it finds better matches because of it.

That becomes the outreach part. You get a pitch list — and, more usefully, a sense of who to slow down for. The contacts worth a personal, thoughtful email, you can deep-dive: further research, a real angle, before you write a word. The rest — not lesser, just not deep-dive material — can run as a campaign: sent as a batch, drafts written by the system, checked by you before anything goes anywhere.

The SEO room

There's an SEO element too — linked to the research, but also a standalone area where you can dig into whether there's a chance of you winning, and where the entry might be. You can track your links as they build, and see your LLM visibility as a first-class experience rather than an afterthought. It's built on about fifteen years of doing this work. And we didn't want a dashboard — dashboards are horrible. We wanted a system that speaks to you in natural language, that doesn't dump five hundred phrases you "need" to rank for, but is thoughtful about what it hands you.

Then we used it

After making it — which took quite a while — we used it ourselves. It was kind of miraculous. It started finding brands we'd never thought of, and we contacted them. SEO research felt, of all things, enjoyable. Topics came up worth writing about; the system drafted, we edited and published, marked the piece complete, and watched it track the result — a beautiful loop, closed. We'd been so deep in the making that it took really using it to see what we'd made: something way more than the sum of its parts.

And if you're still with us, one more delight. It's connected to a print API — so for the high-value contacts you'd love to get in front of, you can send a printed note, straight from the app. Handwritten (well, a handwritten font), with your signature, your logo, your details, posted to wherever in the world they are. There are more of these little thoughtfulnesses than we could sensibly list.

So: if, like us, you struggle with outreach; if you want a real handle on a market; if you want an SEO system that works for you rather than flooding you into a feeling of failure — one built by people who've done the work for a long time, don't shout about it, and take care of every single detail (and when they miss one, they get onto it, because they care) — then Fly Away Paul might be for you. And if you'd like a bit of hand-holding along the way, give us a shout.

We'll probably never be naturally good at promoting ourselves. So we built our perfect version of it.