New York City, USA
$10K Retained Search in 14 Days + 22.7% Candidate Reply Rate
How a New York design staffing firm landed a $10K deal within 2 weeks of campaign launch.
The Challenge
Loup Staffing was running entirely on referrals with no outbound engine at all.
On the BD side:
- 100% referral-based acquisition - No outbound engine whatsoever
- Pipeline was unpredictable - Good months happened by luck, not design
- No way to scale - Jonny couldn't clone his personal network
On the candidate side:
- Fighting over the same LinkedIn profiles as everyone else - Every recruiter in NYC was messaging the same designers
- Manual sourcing was slow - Hours spent researching and writing personalized InMails
- Low response rates - Generic outreach to massive lists wasn't working
The risk was clear: one slow referral month and revenue drops to zero. No control over either side of the desk.
What We Built
We built two complementary systems:
System 1: Signal-Based BD Outreach
- Company identification - Found companies with active hiring needs in the design space
- Hiring signal monitoring - Tracked job postings, headcount growth, design team expansion
- Personalized outreach - Positioned Loup as the specialist who understands design hiring
- Speed-optimized - Campaign designed for fast results to prove the concept
System 2: AI Candidate Marketing Engine
- Ideal Candidate Profile (ICP) - UI/UX designers only, working at funded SaaS companies, at least ONE unicorn on their resume, specific universities
- Deep research & qualification - 80% of time spent building a surgical list, 20% on messaging
- Minimal but precise outreach - Sent to personal emails with just 2 AI-filled placeholders. No fancy subject lines. No 10-step sequences.
The key insight: When you nail the targeting, the message rarely matters. Most recruiters do it backwards - massive list of "anyone with the title" + hours of "personalized" intros. We flipped it.
Results
BD: Meetings booked
BD: Interested replies
BD: Revenue generated
BD: Time to first deal
Before & After
Pipeline
Referral-only
Reply Rate
N/A
Meetings
1-2/month
What Loup Staffing Says
“The $10K deal in week 2 paid for the entire engagement. Now we have a system that keeps delivering month after month.”
Jonny Cutter
Founder at Loup Staffing
Why This Matters
Loup Staffing demonstrates the flywheel effect:
- Great candidates open doors - A unicorn UX designer in your pipeline opens doors to clients you couldn't reach with generic cold outreach.
- Client intros from talent - In-demand talent becomes your ticket into accounts that didn't know they need this person yet.
- Dual-system approach - Running BD and candidate marketing simultaneously creates a virtuous cycle that neither system could achieve alone.