Getting started

Setup is short on purpose. There is no contact database to build, no warmup pool to buy and no sequence library to import. The work is describing who you sell to accurately enough that the engine can argue about specific companies — everything after that is review.

Before you begin#

Have these three things to hand. None of them takes longer than a few minutes to find.

• A sending domain you are willing to send from. Ideally not your primary corporate domain — a close variant used for outbound only. You will need DNS access to it.
• A mailbox on that domain with an app password available. SMTP with an app password is the only supported connection method; see Connecting a mailbox.
• Something that describes your buyer. Your own site, a pitch deck, a case study, a list of ten closed-won accounts. Any of these is better than filling in a form about industries and headcount.

1. Describe who you sell to#

Open Enrich in the console and give it material rather than filters. Paste a URL, upload a deck or a PDF, or drop in a short written description. The ICP builder reads it and proposes a profile: what these companies look like, what problem they have, what evidence would indicate they have it right now.

Read the proposal carefully and correct it. The two most valuable corrections are almost always the same two:

• The trigger. Not “companies in logistics” but “logistics companies that just opened a second warehouse”. The first is a category; the second is a moment.
• The exclusions. Who looks like a fit on paper and is not. Competitors, agencies who resell, companies below the size where your pricing works, regions you cannot support.

The ICP is not a saved search. It is the standard the qualification argument is held to, so vagueness here shows up later as low-confidence verdicts. See ICP for what the engine extracts and how it keeps the profile honest.

2. Connect a mailbox#

In Settings → Sending identity, add a mailbox. You will need the host, the port, the username and an app password generated by your provider.

Method

SMTP + app password

Port

587 (STARTTLS) or 465 (implicit TLS)

Google OAuth

not supported

Microsoft OAuth

not supported

The full per-provider walkthrough, including where each provider hides app-password generation and what to do when it is disabled by policy, is on Connecting a mailbox.

Once saved, the mailbox sends itself a verification message and then enters warmup. It is not eligible for campaign traffic until warmup finishes.

3. Review the first shortlist#

With an ICP saved, Nexus starts qualifying. The first shortlist usually appears within a few hours; the exact time depends on how many candidate accounts your ICP admits and how much evidence has to be gathered per account.

What arrives is not a list of companies. It is a list of decisions. Each row carries a verdict, a confidence figure, the evidence the verdict rests on, and the argument the engine had with itself before committing.

1. 1

   Open a decision, not the list

   The list view is for triage. The decision view is where you can actually tell whether the reasoning is right, because it shows the challenge that was raised against the proposal and what changed as a result.

2. 2

   Check the evidence, not the score

   A score is a summary of the evidence. If the evidence is wrong, the score is a confident wrong answer. Click through two or three citations and confirm the source says what the claim says it says.

3. 3

   Reject with a reason

   Rejecting an account with a written reason is the single highest-value action in the first week. The reason feeds back into the ICP as a constraint, so the same mistake is argued down next time rather than repeated.

4. Approve a campaign#

Qualified accounts flow into a campaign. Nexus drafts the sequence and the messages, but nothing leaves the system until a human approves it — on a new workspace, approval is required for every message.

Read the first ten drafts end to end. You are checking three things: that the claim about the company is drawn from the evidence rather than invented, that the ask is proportionate to the evidence, and that it sounds like your company rather than like software.

Once you trust the output, raise the autonomy threshold in Settings → Arvyn Intelligence. Above the threshold the engine sends without asking; below it, the message waits for you. See confidence thresholds and autonomy.

5. Read the replies#

Replies land in the console and, if you have connected one, your CRM. Every reply is classified — interested, not now, wrong person, not interested, out of office, bounce — and the classification is what closes the loop.

A “wrong person” reply is not a failure; it is a correction to the contact model. A “not now, ask in Q3” is not a loss; it is a buying window with a date on it. Both are worth more than a raw reply count.

{
  "id": "REP-8841",
  "account_id": "ACC-19022",
  "classification": "not_now",
  "revisit_at": "2026-10-01",
  "confidence": 91,
  "campaign_id": "CMP-204",
  "received_at": "2026-08-14T09:12:44Z"
}

What happens on day two#

Nothing you need to do. The system re-qualifies continuously, because evidence expires: a hiring signal from four months ago is not the same claim it was when it was three days old. Accounts move between tiers as their evidence strengthens or ages out.

Checklist#

You are set up correctly when all of these are true.

• SPF, DKIM and DMARC resolve for the sending domain.
• At least one mailbox shows a completed verification and an active warmup.
• An ICP exists that names a trigger, not only a category, and lists exclusions.
• You have opened at least three decisions and read the deliberation, not just the score.
• You have rejected at least one account with a written reason.
• A campaign exists, is approved, and its send window matches the buyer’s timezone.

From there the useful reading is the buying window and deliverability. Everything else can wait until you need it.

The console is at console.arvyn.io.