kara-cold-outbound

kara-cold-outbound is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills. It costs 97 tokens per session (2,589 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for writing LinkedIn cold outreach, including connection requests, direct messages, and follow-ups. It focuses on personalization, starting conversations, and waiting to pitch until there is engagement.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to draft, rewrite, or review LinkedIn connection notes, icebreakers, direct-message sequences, follow-ups, and replies to objections.
Why use it?
It helps avoid outreach that feels mass-produced or too sales-focused. The goal is to increase the chance that a recipient replies rather than immediately asking for a meeting.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to draft, rewrite, or review LinkedIn connection notes, icebreakers, direct-message sequences, follow-ups, and replies to objections.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/kara-cold-outbound
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills --skill kara-cold-outbound
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for kara-cold-outbound

README.md
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Your own site
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Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/kara-cold-outbound"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills/kara-cold-outbound.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,589 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00097 $0.02589
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.01295
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00518
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00259

Measured 12d ago against content hash 1885a114ec63, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

kara-cold-outbound scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

kara-cold-outbound/SKILL.md · 110 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 110 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Kara Cold Outbound

Write and fix LinkedIn cold outbound that gets replies. Core doctrine comes from Kara McMaster (https://www.karamcmaster.com/) and her own description of her playbook; gaps (exact message-by-message structure, timing, objection handling) are filled from Kellen Casebeer / GTM Cafe teachings and high-engagement practitioner sources. Every rule below is tagged with its origin: [Kara] = from Kara directly, [Casebeer] = GTM Cafe / Kellen Casebeer, [Research] = consensus across practitioner videos/threads. When Kara and research conflict, Kara wins.

The Five Laws

  1. Optimize for the reply, not the call. [Kara] This is where everyone goes wrong. The first touches exist to start a conversation. The ask for time comes only after engagement.
  2. Don't be a dick. Personalize. Show effort. Bring personality. [Kara] Her entire messaging framework in one line. A message that could be sent unchanged to 1,000 people is not personalized [Research].
  3. Never pitch in the connection request. [Kara][Casebeer][Research - strongest consensus] The request's only job is acceptance. Any pitch smell kills it.
  4. Signals are for targeting, not for messaging. [Casebeer] Commodity triggers (hiring, funding, job change) tell you WHO to message; the message itself should talk about the underlying problem, not congratulate them on the trigger. Kara goes further and calls most signal-based copy marketing BS [Kara].
  5. No trust, no offer. [Kara] Track what they open and watch. If they haven't engaged with anything, don't make an offer. If someone shows up to a call asking "who are you?", end it.

The Sequence

Step 0: Connection request - no note [Kara]

Send blank. Kara's rule, and it matches Casebeer's default ("a connection request is not a pitch... treat acceptance as access, not conversion") and Reddit A/B data (26% blank vs 13% with a salesy note).

Exception [Casebeer][Research]: a note is fine ONLY if it is genuinely non-salesy and segment-specific (mutual group, mutual connections, shared space). Test blank vs note per audience; never pitch in the note either way. If you can't write a note that couldn't go to 1,000 other people, go blank.

Read the full file on GitHub · 110 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 110 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A 1885a114ec63

Subscribe to this mod's changes

kara-cold-outbound is a skill published in the GitHub repository jpeslar1/john-peslar-ai-skills (6 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 2,589 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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