Oction Growth Sprint

Who runs what

Two operators, two clearly separated jobs. MJ creates demand: thought-leadership content, on-camera video, relationships, and closed calls, and she owns the outreach machine. Brandon supplies the technical authority and proof: live product demos, deep technical content, and the demo depth on calls. Nothing overlaps, and the handoff between them is scripted.

Cross-engagement rules (both platforms)

LinkedIn's pod crackdown detects reciprocal engagement timing, and the penalty is a 40-80% reach loss for 60-90 days. To stay clean:

• Comment on at most half of each other's posts, never within the first few minutes. Wait 1-3 hours.
• Comments are substantive, 15+ words. No fixed ritual, no predictable pattern.
• Reposts of each other stay rare.
• Never join external engagement pods, on any platform.

LinkedIn plan

LinkedIn is a new channel for us, so it gets the fullest treatment: profile rebuilds first, a strict warm-up to protect the accounts, hard volume limits, a manual DM machine on the 590-lead list, and a content cadence built around what the 2026 algorithm actually rewards.

2.1  Profile rebuilds (days 1-2, before any outreach)

Creator Mode was retired in March 2024 and profile hashtags are gone. The headline is now the primary keyword signal, and it travels with every comment and every invite, so it gets written first.

• MJ, headline draft (face, COO): "Private AI for law firms, clinics and engineering firms. Your data never leaves your building | COO, Oction Labs | On-premise AI, organizational memory, pipeline automation"
• Brandon, headline draft (technical, CEO): "I build on-premise AI systems for regulated firms | CEO and technical founder, Oction Labs | private LLMs, agent mesh, organizational memory"

Both profiles get: a 1584x396 banner with a one-line value prop and soft CTA; an About section in problem-solution-proof order with the first three lines working before the fold; a Featured section limited to three items (best teardown carousel, booking link, octionlabs.com); experience entries written as outcomes; a custom URL; a headshot with the face at 60% of the frame; skills loaded with ICP search terms (private AI, on-premise AI, legal tech, healthcare compliance); and each founder mentioning the other in their About. MJ, the face, adds the 30-second profile video intro.

Settings: full public profile viewing on for both; Open Profile on for whoever carries the Sales Navigator seat.

2.2  Dormant-account warm-up (non-negotiable)

Warning protocol: forced logouts, CAPTCHA prompts, or restriction banners mean cut volume 20-30% and hold for 3-5 days.

Compressed July window: days 1-4 are views and comments only; days 5-11, invites at 10-15/day on MJ's account only (she owns outreach); Brandon stays technical-content-only throughout.

Hard limits, 2026 safe figures

Everything is manual for the first 90 days. No automation tools on either account.

2.3  The DM machine on the 590 leads

MJ runs this from day 5 (week 2 of the account warm-up). Every step is manual and logged in Apollo. The per-target sequence:

• DAY 0Comment on their most recent post, if they have one.
• DAY 1Connection request. Blank for volume tiers: blank invites hit 55-68% acceptance in one 80,000-invite dataset, and generic notes signal automation. For the top-50 targets, a genuinely contextual 120-180 character note: notes lift post-accept reply rates by roughly 72% per a 20-million-invite study by Belkins.
• DAY 1In parallel: email #1 goes out through the outreach system (Section 5).
• ON ACCEPTSame-day thanks and context message. No pitch: pitching on accept is the top spam-report trigger, and it also turns the message into a CASL CEM.
• DAY 3-4Value DM: one specific observation about their firm, the compliance checklist asset, and a soft question.
• DAY 7Direct, low-pressure call offer (email #2 or DM).
• DAY 10-14Polite park/breakup message.

Multichannel LinkedIn-plus-email cadences report 15-25% reply rates (estimate). CASL note: promotional DMs to Canadians are CEMs. First messages stay relational, Oction is identified plainly, any negative signal stops the sequence, and the consent basis is logged per contact.

2.4  Content cadence (about 45 minutes/day each)

Maximum 3-5 posts per week per account, spaced 18-24 hours apart: two posts in one day costs roughly a 40% reach penalty. Post Tue-Thu, 8-11 AM audience-local; MJ posts around 7:30-8:00 AM PT to catch Toronto late morning.

Format league table, 2026 engagement benchmarks (estimates)

External links in the post body cost roughly a 60% reach penalty. Links go in the first comment or in Featured.

Friday review, 15 minutes together: acceptance rate, reply rate, impressions, booked calls. Acceptance under 40% means cutting invite volume 30% the following week.

2.5  Sales Navigator verdict

One seat only, on MJ, starting with the 30-day free trial of Advanced timed to the sprint. Advanced allows CSV upload of the 590 as an account list; filter to Owner, Partner, Principal, CIO, COO, and Practice Manager roles in BC, Calgary, and Toronto at 20-500 headcount. If kept after the trial: Core runs USD $89.99-119.99/mo and Advanced USD $149.99-159.99/mo. Decide on day 30 based on reply-rate data. Brandon stays on the free tier.

Division of labor between tools: Sales Navigator gives the who (a live org graph); Apollo gives the how (emails and sequencing). No third-party scraper extensions: they violate the terms of service and risk restriction, and manual work plus Apollo is enough at 590 accounts.

2.6  Company page

A credibility asset only, about 30 minutes a week from MJ. Pages reach roughly 1.6% of followers and get about 5% of feed allocation versus about 65% for personal profiles; identical content posted from a personal profile earns around 5x the engagement. Keep the page complete and consistent (it is the due-diligence check buyers run before calls), post one light update a week, and link both founders' experience entries so the logos render. Make the Labs versus Agency distinction explicit so the CAD $25k buyer is never confused about who they are hiring.

2.7  Honest expectations (estimates)

X plan

MJ is the primary face account and carries the brand voice. Brandon runs the technical account for demo proof, and the brand handle exists only to hold the name.

@OctionLabs brand handle: register it to hold the name, pin one demo, and otherwise leave it dormant. There is no third daily operator.

Cross-engagement: the same anti-pod rules as LinkedIn apply. Brandon quote-tweets or replies to MJ at most 1-2 times a week, always with added technical substance.

Reddit plan

All standing Reddit ground rules remain in force: aged accounts, plain disclosure of who we are, a 90/10 value-to-promotion ratio, a sidebar-rules check before posting in any subreddit, and the routine shadowban check. The revision is the ownership split.

Client outreach system

Email outreach runs on two tracks because physics does not negotiate: a compliant new-domain cold system cannot be live before July 15. Domains need about two weeks of age plus 3-4 weeks of warm-up, so the first safe sends from dedicated domains land roughly August 3-10. Anyone promising sooner is selling a burned domain.

5.1  Track A: revenue now

From brandon@ and mj@ octionagency.com, which are aged, warmed, real accounts: 10-15 highly personalized sends per day each, 20-30/day total, sent manually from Gmail or lightly assisted. At this volume, with true 1:1 personalization, each email is indistinguishable from normal business correspondence, which, done right, it is.

The stakes per send: at 30 sends a day, one spam-button click is roughly a 3% daily complaint rate against Google's 0.3% official kill line. Hence the rules:

1. Verified addresses only. The whole list goes through MillionVerifier first (about USD $2-5 for all 590); send only to "valid" results.
2. Plain text. No HTML, no images, no attachments. Hunter's data shows HTML cold campaigns bounce roughly 650% more.
3. Zero links in email #1, including calendar links. Ask "worth a 15-minute call?" and send the link after a reply.
4. No open pixel, no link tracking. Naked sends. Measure replies instead: 2%+ is healthy.
5. Unique opener per lead (see 5.4). No two emails share a content fingerprint.
6. Subject: 1-4 words, sentence case, lead-specific. "intake process at [firm]", "[city] clinic question". Never a fake Re: or Fwd:, which is a CASL s.6(2) violation carrying penalties up to CAD $10M.
7. CASL footer in every send: full name, Oction Agency, physical mailing address, and the line "If this isn't relevant, reply 'no thanks' and you won't hear from me again." Opt-outs are honored instantly on a shared suppression list that covers all domains and brands, forever.
8. Log the consent basis per lead: the URL where the address was conspicuously published, plus the capture date. The CASL burden of proof sits with the sender; retain records for about 3 years.

The phone amplifier

We hold phone numbers for 99% of the 590. Live voice calls sit outside CASL's CEM rules; CRTC telemarketing and DNCL rules apply instead, and B2B exemptions exist, but DNCL registration gets verified before call volume scales. Email-then-call within 24 hours is the highest-converting local-B2B pattern (estimate). MJ dials 10-20 a day from the emailed subset.

Expected output and circuit breakers

By July 15 (estimates): 150-250 first touches at a 2-5% reply rate, so 5-12 real conversations. For CAD $25k-ticket deals, three good meetings beat three thousand sends.

5.2  Track B: the dedicated-domain machine for August scale

Domain strategy (2026 consensus): separate lookalike domains beat subdomains. A blacklisted subdomain creates ambiguity for the root domain; a blacklisted separate domain touches nothing. Cold email never comes from octionagency.com, ever.

• Domains: oction.agency (already owned, aged since registration, zone active in our Cloudflare, our best asset; check its MXToolbox and Spamhaus history first), plus purchase octionhq.com and tryoction.com on Cloudflare Registrar at about USD $10/yr each. Avoid spam-tier TLDs like .xyz, .top, and .site. All roots 301-redirect to octionagency.com; never host duplicate content on them.
• Mailboxes: a separate Google Workspace tenant per outreach domain. The main octionagency.com tenant never attaches to any cold platform or warm-up pool: late-2025 Google suspensions specifically cited cold-platform connections. Two mailboxes per domain with real names, photos, and signatures (brandon@octionhq.com, mj@tryoction.com, and so on). Three domains times two mailboxes gives six mailboxes and a mature capacity of 90-150 sends/day; we run at 50-70% of it.

DNS per outreach domain

Warm-up and volume ramp

Minimum 3-4 weeks before real cold volume, and our ICP (law, clinics, engineering) is Microsoft-365-heavy, so lean longer. Week 1 is manual human use: real threads between our own accounts, newsletter signups, the Gmail web UI. After that, pool warm-up runs through the sending platform on the outreach tenants only. Google banned API warm-up in 2023 and SMTP/IMAP pools violate Workspace policy; the industry norm is accepting that risk on disposable tenants only, where the loss if one is suspended is about CAD $30.

Cap: 30-50 cold sends/day per domain. Never more than 2x week-over-week growth. Randomized 5-15 minute gaps, business hours in the recipient's time zone, weekdays only.

Sending platform

• Instantly, USD $37/mo Growth: the pick. Unlimited mailboxes, warm-up pool, inbox rotation, and a unified inbox for two people running six mailboxes.
• Smartlead (USD $94/mo): only if we later run campaigns for clients.
• lemlist: skip. Per-seat pricing and the weakest placement in the 2026 three-way test.
• Apollo native sending: warm follow-up sequences only, never primary cold (shared infrastructure reputation).
• Resend: never for cold. Its acceptable-use policy prohibits unsolicited email and suspends at 0.08% complaints. Resend stays transactional-only.

August cutover: when the outreach domains hit steady state (roughly August 3-10), all cold sending moves to them and octionagency.com goes back to being untouchable.

5.3  Email-finding waterfall (this week, feeds both tracks)

1. The lead's own website first (90% have one). A named partner or owner address conspicuously published is both the best deliverability bet and the cleanest CASL implied-consent basis (s.10(9)(b): published, no no-CEM disclaimer on the page, message relevant to their role). Screenshot or log the URL and date for every address.
2. Hunter.io Domain Search and Email Finder. Strongest on SMB and local domains: an estimated 14-18% more verified emails than Apollo on SMB.
3. Apollo enrichment for the remainder. It is weakest exactly on local firms, so expect patchy coverage.
4. Pattern-guess only if the guess verifies clean.

info@ versus personal: personal addresses win on reply rate, but many local firms only publish info@. Use it, and write to the role: "whoever handles new client intake."

Verification: 100% of addresses go through MillionVerifier (USD $0.0037/email). Skip catch-alls during the sprint, since local domains are disproportionately catch-all; later, send only to high-score catch-alls, under 20% of any day's volume, from outreach domains only.

5.4  The unique-email pipeline

Every email is unique. The hybrid pattern used by 2026's top senders is an AI-unique opener plus structural variation, and ours runs entirely on our own private stack:

1. Scrape each lead's homepage, about, and services pages plus Google reviews. The master lead list already carries websites and Google Maps links.
2. Generate a 1-2 sentence opener referencing something real and specific: a named practice area, a review theme, a recent post. If the scrape yields nothing usable, fall back to a true city-and-vertical-specific line. Never a fabricated compliment.
3. Assemble the body from 2-3 distinct skeletons (different paragraph order) rotated across mailboxes, with 2-4 natural variants per slot: greeting, transition, CTA, sign-off. No thesaurus spintax; robotic synonym-swapping reads worse than no variation at all.
4. Keep it short: 50-120 words, 1-2 short paragraphs, CASL footer.
5. Human batch review before sending: MJ approves each day's 20-30 in one 15-minute pass. Nothing auto-sends in Track A.

5.5  Monitoring (weekly, MJ, about 20 minutes)

• Google Postmaster Tools v2 on every sending domain from day 1, for the compliance and spam-rate dashboards. Data will be sparse at our volume, so an empty dashboard is not a clean bill of health.
• MXToolbox blacklist scan weekly. Spamhaus DBL is the listing that matters.
• Reply-rate trend per campaign. 2%+ is healthy; a slide is the earliest spam-placement warning.
• Bounce rate per mailbox against the kill thresholds in 5.1.
• DMARC aggregate reports. Unknown senders mean spoofing or configuration drift.
• 6-10 personal seed accounts (Gmail, Outlook.com, M365, Yahoo) included in batches, with folder placement checked by hand. GlockApps (USD $59/mo) is optional later.

5.6  Budget (Tracks A and B, monthly, estimates)

One reply that becomes one website deal covers a year of the entire stack.

Weekly cadence calendar

The rhythm of a normal sprint week once warm-up gates have cleared. Posting days follow the 2026 LinkedIn windows (Tue-Thu, 8-11 AM audience-local), and every post gets the golden hour treatment.

LinkedIn content budget: about 45 minutes a day per person, 3-5 posts per account per week maximum, spaced 18-24 hours.

Setup checklist and decisions

Everything below is sequenced so that Track A revenue work starts on day 3 while the Track B machine ages in the background toward its August cutover.

• LinkedIn profile rebuilds for MJ and Brandon; warm-up starts (views and comments only)
• X accounts live: MJ on Premium+ as the face, Brandon on Premium for the technical demo account; register @OctionLabs to hold the name
• Reddit account audit (ages and karma) for both operators
• MillionVerifier pass on the full 590-lead list
• Email-finding waterfall begins: website scrape plus Hunter
• Purchase octionhq.com and tryoction.com (pending approval, about USD $20)
• oction.agency blacklist history check on MXToolbox

• Outreach Workspace tenants created; DNS records configured per the Section 5 table
• Google Postmaster Tools registrations for every sending domain
• Suppression list and consent log live
• First unique-email batch generated for MJ's review

• Track A sending begins: 10-15/day each, plus phone follow-ups within 24 hours
• Sales Navigator Advanced trial starts on MJ's account; upload the 590 as an account list

• MJ's LinkedIn invites begin at 10-15/day
• First Friday-style metrics check

• Content cadences per Sections 2-4
• Outreach-domain warm-up runs to the August 3-10 cutover

Decisions needed

1. Approve the domain purchases (octionhq.com and tryoction.com, about USD $20 total), the outreach Workspace seats (about CAD $50/mo), and Instantly (USD $37/mo).
2. Approve the Sales Navigator Advanced 30-day trial on MJ's account (free, card on file).
3. Confirm MJ's physical mailing address line for the CASL footer.
4. Confirm the Reddit account ages for both operators: this is the gating fact for the r/forhire schedule.
5. DNCL and telemarketing compliance check before phone volume scales. A quick confirmation with counsel is recommended; B2B exemptions are expected to apply.