How I worked with Venus, Artizen's AI Co-Founder, to build a new DreamStarter feature
Arun Philips
The short version first, then the part that is actually useful: a step by step guide any Artizen creator can follow to run the Send Love Letters quest without sending 300 people the same letter.
The quest, in one paragraph
Artizen's Send Love Letters quest pays in Boost Points, and the rule is refreshingly concrete: email a fan personally, CC venus@artizen.fund, and that is 1,000 Boost Points. The card caps at 300,000, which quietly sets the whole plan, because 300,000 divided by 1,000 is 300 people. The CC is the mechanism, so a BCC earns nothing, and credit counts once per unique recipient. Volume is bounded by design, which means the only variable left is whether the letter is any good. Check the live card before relying on any of this; ours read 10,000 of 300,000 with three days to run.
What we did about it
Everything starts with a Dream. A Dream is your project on DreamStarter, it is free to create, and it holds the context: what you are building, who it is for, your pitch. Nothing downstream works without it. Then I imported my LinkedIn connections, all 11,248 of them, using the Import from LinkedIn feature. The AI scored every one against the Dream and shortlisted the ones actually relevant to it. That solves the question that stops most people dead on this quest, which is not "how do I write a good email" but "who do I even email?" You do not have to decide from memory. You get a ranked list.
From there I selected the people I wanted to reach, hit Brief Venus, and DreamStarter generated an email carrying exactly the context she needs for each one, and deliberately not their email addresses. That was Venus's own rule: "Please leave their email addresses out of what you send me; drafts come to you, and you handle delivery." I sent it, she replied with a personalized letter per person. And as of this week, with my mailbox connected, her drafts pull themselves straight into the Sequence section of my CRM, one approval click each away from going out.
The guide
1. Create your Dream on DreamStarter.xyz
Free, and it comes first. Your Dream is the project everything else is scored against, so fill in what you are building and who it is for before importing anybody. A thin Dream produces a thin shortlist.
2. Get your people in
Export your LinkedIn connections and import the CSV. LinkedIn does not let apps read your connections, so DreamStarter walks you through LinkedIn's own export. It takes about ten minutes, most of which is waiting for their email.
step 01 export instructions
3. Choose how much of your network actually lands
Strict, Balanced or Broad. Every connection is scored against your project first, and only the ones at or above the bar are added to your CRM. Turn on enrichment and the ones with a company get a deeper pass that looks for an email and refines the score.
step 02 import settings
Mine found 11,248 connections and skipped 421 that had no LinkedIn URL. Most rows will not include an email, which is normal: LinkedIn only exports addresses your connections chose to share.
step 02b import result
step 03 leads imported
4. Fill in the missing emails
This is the step nobody warns you about. LinkedIn only exports the addresses your connections chose to share, so most rows arrive without one, and a lead with no email cannot be enrolled or written to at all. Enrichment finds some of them for you, but not all. For the rest, click the email cell in the table and type it in.
Do this only for the 25 you actually intend to write to. Chasing addresses for people you are not going to email is the fastest way to spend an evening on this and send nothing.
5. Pick a batch, not a list
25 is the working number. It is what a drafting partner turns around same-day, and it is small enough that you can say something true about each person.
6. Add the context only you have
Per person: how you know each other, any prior support, and the tone. The tone is pre-filled with a guess that is deliberately conservative, because over-familiar copy to a near-stranger reads far worse than a warm note that was slightly too formal. Correct it.
This step is the whole thing. Everything else is plumbing.
step 05 brief venus
The one screen that needs you. Everything above the box is derived; the sentence in it is yours. "What Venus receives" shows exactly what goes out, and no email addresses are in it.
7. Set your sending identity
Connect your mailbox and put venus@artizen.fund in CC, not BCC. If you want her drafts filed back automatically, also set Accept drafts from to the same address. Blank means off.
step 06 sending identity
CC earns the quest credit. "Accept drafts from" is what lets Venus's replies file themselves, and blank means off.
8. Brief Venus
DreamStarter builds the briefing and opens it in a compose window. Send it. No email addresses leave your account.
9. Iterate on the language
Venus replies with one thread per person. Work the wording until it sounds like you. Spend your time here.
10. Review, then send
Approve each letter. Read them, because they are going to people who know you.
step 09 drafts panel
A letter Venus wrote, filed automatically against the right person. The code in the subject line is what made the match exact rather than a guess at the name.
11. Send one first
Before the batch of 25, run a single person end to end and confirm it behaves. This is the advice I would most want to have been given, and the one step I skipped.
Two things worth stealing
Paste from the HTML, not the plain text. A plain textarea reads the plain-text flavour of your clipboard, which throws away every hyperlink before anything else runs. Ten of my letters went out with a call to action nobody could click. If you are pasting drafts anywhere, check the links survived.
Make the software refuse rather than guess. Filing a returned draft against the wrong person does not raise an error. It sends the letter written for one friend to a different friend, over your own signature. So when a match is ambiguous, ours files nothing and waits for a human. Most of the tests we wrote for it are tests that it declines.
The first live reply filed itself correctly, matched on the code rather than the name, with Venus's covering note stripped and only the letter kept. It arrived as a draft, which is the only way it can arrive: approval is still the sole route to a send.
DreamStarter is at dreamstarter.xyz. The Send Love Letters quest lives on your Artizen project's Grow card.