Preview the batch, then scale

The first list any tool hands you is a guess. Research a bad guess and you spend a month reading filings on companies you'd never sell to. So Stage 1 shows you the list before it spends a minute on research.

What you see

Right after Stage 1 reads your website and turns on your plays, it suggests up to 25 accounts that fit your ideal customer. Then it stops and asks you.

The screen is called Preview the batch, then scale. It opens on the first ten. Each row shows the company, the industry, the headcount and the domain when Stage 1 has them. Every row starts checked.

Look over those ten. Uncheck anything that isn't a fit. A company too small to fund your kind of work, a sector you don't serve, an account where a rival just won the program. When the ten look right, tap Looks right and the rest of the list opens.

Add the ones you already know

You have accounts in your head that no model will suggest. The partner you met at a dinner last spring. The company your best delivery lead keeps talking about.

Type them in. Company names or websites, separated by commas, or paste a column from a spreadsheet, one per line. They land at the top of the list, tagged Yours. If you'd rather bring a file, import a CSV from the same screen.

Nothing is researched until you say so

The button at the bottom reads Check filings and news, with the count of accounts you kept. Press it and Stage 1 runs your plays against that list. 10-Qs, earnings releases, 8-Ks and headlines from the last month.

The accounts you unchecked are dropped. The ones you kept are watched from then on. You don't sit on a progress screen. The Board opens and fills as signals land.

If you imported your own accounts before this step, Stage 1 skips the preview. Your list is already your call.

How the list is picked

The suggestions come from your Brain. Stage 1 matches the industries, size and region of your ideal customer, and it leans toward companies large enough to file with the SEC, so there's a public record to read. It never suggests your own firm or the competitors named in your Brain.

That's why the preview matters. The list is only as good as what the Brain learned from your site. Inside the Brain covers how it reads you.

Why ten first

Ten is enough to tell whether the guess is close. If eight of the ten are right, scan the rest and run it. If half are wrong, the problem is upstream. The Brain has the wrong idea of who you sell to, and you fix that before you scale anything.

For a services firm selling $50K to $500K engagements, the list is the strategy. A seller working 40 right accounts beats one working 400 loose ones, and how many accounts one seller can really work makes the math plain. Every hour of research and every message after this point inherits the quality of the list.

Where it shows up

It's the step right after sign-up, between finding accounts and checking filings and news. The whole first run takes about two minutes, and your first Board in two minutes walks through the rest.

The preview is the cheapest place to be wrong. Fix the list here and everything downstream gets sharper.