SMYS 6 | From Five Hours in Clay to Forty Minutes in a Terminal: Outbound Run by Claude Code
Why campaign creation speed, not sending capacity, is the new outbound constraint, and how Tim Scheuer ships split tests across 220 inboxes by prompting an agent instead of building tables
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The bottleneck in outbound moved. It is no longer sending capacity, and it is no longer data access. It is the three to five hours a GTM engineer spends in Clay setting up a single campaign: building the table, configuring the waterfall, writing the AI prompt columns, wiring the export, loading the sequencer. At that cost per campaign, you ship one or two tests a week. The winning angle exists somewhere in the space of messages you never had time to test.
In episode six of Show Me Your Stack, Tim Scheuer walks through how he collapsed that setup time to forty minutes. Tim is the co-founder of Oxygen, a CLI and MCP for go-to-market that lets Claude Code orchestrate the entire GTM stack. The campaign he demos was scraped, enriched, personalized, and launched by prompting an agent in natural language. Three to four exchanges back and forth. No table building. The result from the first 180 emails: eight positive sales opportunities in one of the most over-targeted prospect pools in B2B.
Tim ran a GTM engineering service company before building Oxygen, so the comparison is not theoretical. He has done this work the manual way, at billable rates, inside Clay. His current stack is Oxygen, Claude Code, Instantly, and Zapmail. The interesting part is not the tool list. It is what becomes economically possible when campaign creation stops being the expensive step.
The Target Problem: 1,900 Founders Everyone Else Is Also Emailing
Oxygen sells to technical, fast-growing SaaS companies. The densest pool of those is the Y Combinator directory, which makes it a goldmine and a minefield at the same time. Every outbound vendor, agency, and tool company is emailing YC founders. The accounts are high value and the inboxes are saturated. Reaching them is not the hard part. Differentiating in the inbox is.
Tim’s first move was to tell Claude Code to scrape the YC directory. It returned more than 1,900 SaaS founders from recent batches, with names, LinkedIn profiles, and batch data. That is the raw list. On its own it is worth nothing, because everyone targeting YC has the same list. The campaign’s edge had to come from what happened to the list next.