The one task nobody wants to do — Chovy's Blog
The one task nobody wants to do
2026-08-16, by Anthony “chovy” Ettinger.
How this was written: drafted with an AI assistant from a Reddit thread I<br>took part in and my own notes on the product, then edited by me. Disclosure up front: OutreachGraph<br>is mine, so treat this as a builder talking about his own thing.
The thread
Someone posted a<br>question in r/smallbusinessowner this morning: what is the ONE task you wish you could stop<br>doing? They were a remote virtual assistant — admin, bookkeeping, customer service, data<br>entry, research — making the honest observation that most small businesses do not need a<br>full-time assistant, they need two or three things off the plate.
I answered: outreach and lead generation.
Their reply was the part worth keeping. Finding the right prospects is one problem; consistently<br>researching leads, reaching out, and following up is where the time actually disappears. That is<br>exactly it. Nobody quits because they cannot find a list. They quit somewhere around week three of<br>maintaining one.
So I said the quiet part: yes, I do all of it myself, and I am bad at it. Which is precisely why<br>I have been building a tool for it.
Why outreach is the task that gets handed off
Every unloved recurring task shares a shape. It is high-frequency, low-status, and it does not<br>fail loudly — skip a week of outreach and nothing breaks today. It breaks in ninety days, and<br>by then you have lost the thread on why.
Outreach has an extra problem on top: the boring half and the hard half are tangled together. The<br>boring half is sending, tracking, and following up. The hard half is knowing who and<br>why now. Most tooling automates the boring half, which is how we all ended up with inboxes<br>full of “I came across your profile and was impressed by your work.” The sending was<br>never the bottleneck. The reason was.
What I am actually building
OutreachGraph starts from one line: you do not<br>need more contacts, you need a reason to talk. Apollo will find someone's email address.<br>That is a solved and commoditised problem. The unsolved one is finding the thing they said forty<br>minutes ago in public that makes an email worth sending at all.
The pieces that follow from that:
Evidence or nothing. Every claim on a prospect card traces back to something<br>that person actually published. No stored evidence, no claim — if a draft cannot point at a<br>source, it is not shown to you, and you write the message yourself. Identities are linked from<br>what someone published about themselves, never from a name match. Two weak observations get you<br>0.75 confidence, not certainty.
Signals decay. A question asked three hours ago is worth something. The same<br>question from March is a landmine. Scoring treats recency as a first-class input rather than<br>pretending a scraped fact is true forever.
The thing is allowed to tell you no. The policy engine is arithmetic, not<br>judgement — there is no model in that loop. An unknown network is a deny by default.<br>LinkedIn automation is not “discouraged” in a settings page, it is unreachable. If<br>someone asked not to be contacted, that survives deleting the record. And the check runs again at<br>the moment you hit approve, not at the moment the card was created, because the world moves in<br>between. Approving a blocked action gets you a 409 policy_denied, which is the<br>feature.
A human approves everything. The output is a queue of cards — here is<br>the person, here is the reason, here is a draft, here are the sources. Approve, edit, or skip.<br>There is no autopilot, and there is not going to be one.
It currently starts from a GitHub handle and aims at developer and technical buyers first, because<br>that is the richest public signal there is. It is free while in beta, no card. Plenty is not built:<br>the campaign wizard, adapters beyond GitHub, inbound conversation ingestion, billing. I would rather<br>say that than imply otherwise.
The bit I got wrong first
I mentioned in the thread that I had already tried AI cold calling. It was a horrible failure. Out<br>of roughly a hundred calls, exactly one person stayed on the line and talked to it.
That is a useful number to have paid for. It says the market's tolerance for being handled by a<br>machine is close to zero at the point of contact, and it says nothing at all about whether machines<br>are useful in outreach. They are — just earlier in the pipeline, where the work is reading<br>everything and deciding what is worth a human's attention. The failure was not the AI. It was<br>pointing the AI at the one step that a person specifically wants a person for.
Tool finds it, human works it
The VA who started the thread landed on the framing better than my landing page does: maybe the<br>tool finds the opportunity, and someone makes sure those opportunities actually get worked.
That is the vision, and it is deliberately less ambitious than the pitch decks in this category.<br>OutreachGraph is not trying to...