recipient-research

recipient-research is a skill for Claude Code from kalyvask/winning-writing. It costs 107 tokens per session (1,134 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research workflow for building a background file on someone before writing a cold email. Cold outreach means contacting a person who has not asked to hear from you, and the workflow gathers public work history, writing, interviews, talks, and relevant personal details.

In plain words
What is it for?
Researching founders, investors, executives, or other outreach targets before drafting a personalized email.
Why use it?
It replaces generic emails with messages based on the recipient's actual work and interests. That gives the writer useful context before making a request.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the winning-writing plugin — 32 skills shipped together

Good fit Researching founders, investors, executives, or other outreach targets before drafting a personalized email.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/recipient-research
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 kalyvask/winning-writing --skill recipient-research
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kalyvask/winning-writing

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install winning-writing, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 32 skills.

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 recipient-research

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/recipient-research/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/recipient-research)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/recipient-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/recipient-research/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for recipient-research

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/recipient-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kalyvask/winning-writing/recipient-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 107 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,134 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00107 $0.01134
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00567
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00227
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00113

Measured 10d ago against content hash 798532d9433d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

recipient-research 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 10d 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.

skills/recipient-research/SKILL.md · 116 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 116 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Recipient research

Source: points/cold-email-rules.md (rule 1 — know something about the person and exploit it).

Why this exists

Konrad's first rule of cold outreach: research is non-negotiable. People drop personal details in 20-minute podcast interviews. Recent blog posts. Portfolio company pages. Conference talks. The specificity is what separates a real email from a template.

You have 15 seconds when the recipient opens your email. Three concrete personal details earn those 15 seconds. A LinkedIn summary doesn't.

What to find

For every cold-email target, build a dossier with these sections:

1. Public role and trajectory

  • Current title and company
  • Last 2–3 roles and how long they stayed (signals: founder vs. operator, builder vs. acquirer)
  • The pivot points — what made them leave each role, what made them join the next
  • Anything they've publicly said about why they're at the current job

2. Public writing and speaking

  • Substack, Medium, personal blog, company blog
  • Podcasts they've appeared on (especially long-form — 60+ minutes)
  • Conference talks on YouTube
  • Twitter/X — pinned tweets, recent threads
  • LinkedIn posts (ignore the corporate ones; surface the personal ones)
  • Books they've recommended or written

3. Distinctive personal details

This is the gold. Pull anything that is:

  • A specific anecdote they've told publicly (the year, the place, the name)
  • An unusual hobby (Ironman, jiu-jitsu, beekeeping, jazz piano)
  • A geographic origin or move (immigrated from X, grew up in Y)
  • A formative experience (military service, an early failure, a mentor)
  • A strong opinion (especially one that's contrarian or unexpected)
  • A specific number they've cited about their work

4. Their current focus / what they're hunting for

  • If a VC: their portfolio, their public thesis, what they've said they want to fund
  • If a CEO: hiring posts, their company's strategic moves, recent product launches
  • If a hiring manager: open roles on their team, public posts about culture or hiring bar
  • If a journalist: their last 5 stories, what they're sourcing for next

Read the full file on GitHub · 116 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. 10d ago First seen · 116 lines · 107 tokens per session scan A 798532d9433d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

recipient-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository kalyvask/winning-writing (13 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 107 tokens to every session and 1,134 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 2026-08-30.

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