Teardown No. 73 · Outbound

168 Drafts: How Nishant Modi runs link-building outreach for Careerkit from Claude Code

Nishant Modi runs link-building outreach for his product Careerkit from Claude Code. Claude Code pulls the backlinks of 11 competitors, a rule script vets each site, and another script reads contact pages for email addresses. The email is an SEO agency partner's template, filled in by a script and placed as drafts in his Gmail, and he presses send himself. Replies go into a ledger and are answered from a price table, and a link checker confirms each link before anyone is told it is live. He reports 220 emails sent, 35 replies and 8 live links, every one of them a swap.

Nishant Modi · heynmodiVerified Oct 31, 2026Markdown copy

The problem

The week before this post, his backlink outreach “stood at 12 emails and 0 links.” He describes outreach as “40 tiny boring jobs wearing a trench coat.” Those jobs are finding sites, checking them, finding emails, writing, sending, following up, answering, tracking and then checking that the link actually went up. His answer was “So I didn’t do it. I built it.” He built it in Claude Code “with a human (me) only where a human actually matters.”

The blueprint (as he describes it)

  1. Start from sites that already link to competitors. His logic: “a site that already linked to a resume builder will link to another one.” He gave Claude Code an Ahrefs connection and 11 competitors: Canva, Enhancv, FlowCV, Kickresume, Novoresume, Resume.com, Resume Genius, Resume.io, Rezi, Teal and Zety. The filter is Domain Rating 10 to 40, English, dofollow, inside the article with no footers, and one link per domain from sites with 200+ organic visits a month. Ahrefs returns at most 100 rows per call, so big pulls go to small helper agents (Haiku, low effort) whose only job is writing the CSV word for word. The 955 raw rows merged into 502 sites. For Switzerland he pointed it at 8 .ch competitors and got 189 more.

  2. Vet with a script, not a model. The vetting is plain rules in a script. It checks whether the site sells links (by scanning for seller pages), whether it gets under 1,000 visits a month, whether a traffic spike looks bought, and whether top pages are toxic or off-topic. Claude Code pulls the facts into a file. “The script makes the call.” He writes: “No model decides who’s “worth it”.” When the first 31 replies came in, he back-tested the rules on them. They passed the 5 sites he kept talking to and failed 21, including all 17 sellers he had turned down. The vet now runs before anything is drafted, and sites that fail never get a follow-up.

  3. Find emails for free first. The script reads each site’s contact, about, write-for-us and Impressum pages. Only after that does it offer Mindcase, a paid email finder, and only with a cost estimate first and his yes. The rule in the skill is “no paid call without an estimate and a yes.”

  4. Use a fixed template and create drafts only. The email is Prafull’s template, word for word. A script fills in the name and company, with “No AI rewriting”. The heart of it is one question: “Are you currently accepting guest posts or link exchanges?” On Oct 19 Claude Code put 168 drafts in his Gmail, and he sent them himself. In his Claude Code settings, Gmail’s send, reply and forward always ask first. “The agent can draft all day. Only I hit send.”

  5. Log every reply and answer from a table. Each reply goes into one file with what they said, the price, a verdict (accept, counter, decline or wait) and the next step. The answer comes from a table:

    • Quoted a price and passed the vet: he counters with a free article and one link.
    • Quoted a price and failed the vet: a polite no.
    • Offered a swap: yes, and he gives back one natural link from a relevant blog post. “Never the homepage, a footer or a badge.”

    The rule is to answer every reply the same day, and the agent only ever writes drafts.

  6. Run a Monday routine. Every Monday at 08:30 a routine emails him what is pending: drafts left, emails sent, replies and follow-ups due. He answers with one sentence and it does the rest. “I never type a command.”

  7. Check the link exists before saying so. A script opens every partner page and checks for the right page and the right anchor, with no nofollow, sponsored or ugc tag, and that the page is not noindex. Anything that fails flips to “missing”. He added it after Oct 24, when a reply went out saying his side of the Corp to Corp swap was live. It was not, and it went live on Oct 26. The skill now has a rule: “never draft a claim before the checker passes, in the same session.”

Stated results

  • 220 emails sent: 175 first emails and 45 follow-ups.
  • 35 replies, which he calls a 20% reply rate (35 divided by 175 first emails).
  • “Half of them, 18, wanted money.” 7 bounced.
  • Quotes ranged from $25 to “$2,500/post”. He paid none of them. Two sellers, Corp to Corp ($150) and Learn Architecture ($160 a post), ended up as free swaps.
  • 8 links to Careerkit are live: 5 from Learn Architecture (one company, five architecture sites), 2 from SearchOpal and 1 from Corp to Corp. Every one is a trade, and he links back to them from his blog. Two more partners have agreed and are not live yet.
  • Careerkit is listed as “DR 19 → 24” alongside the 8 new links.
  • Traffic, ranking or signup results: None stated.

Caveats

  • Hello Builder is his own newsletter, and he builds and sells products, including Careerkit, where he says “You only pay for the steps that cost me money”. The post is promotion for his own work as well as a build log.
  • The email template is not AI-written. It came from Prafull at Outsmartt, “an SEO agency I partner with.” The post does not describe the terms of that partnership.
  • Every live link is a swap. He writes that “Google’s spam policies call out excessive link exchanges” and that his rule is one natural link from a relevant post, never site-wide.
  • He says the pool of sites that already link to competitors “is mostly sellers and swappers.”
  • All figures are self-reported. The 20% reply rate uses first emails as the denominator. The post lists the DR change next to the new links but does not separately state that the outreach caused it.
  • Ahrefs and Mindcase are named. The post does not say whether either is a partner.
  • Handles: X @heynmodi (verified 2026-10-31: linked from the Hello Builder newsletter footer). LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/follow-nishant-modi (verified 2026-10-31: linked from the newsletter footer). The other social links in the footer are placeholders and are not tagged.

FAQ

Does AI write the outreach emails?

No. The email is Prafull’s template word for word, and a script fills in the name and company with “No AI rewriting”.

Does the agent send emails on its own?

No. Claude Code creates drafts in his Gmail, and his settings make Gmail’s send, reply and forward always ask first. He sends the emails himself.

How does he decide which sites to contact?

A script with plain rules decides, not a model. It checks for seller pages, a traffic floor of 1,000 visits a month, bought-looking spikes and toxic or off-topic top pages. Sites that fail never get a follow-up.

He says he paid none of the quotes he received. All 8 live links are swaps.

Sources

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