Email automation for private equity sourcing: how an associate at a $100B+ AUM private equity fund runs outbound with Waterfall.

Mass outbound starts the same way every time. A handful of add-on candidates for an existing portfolio company, or dozens of interesting companies the associate wants to meet at an upcoming conference. A CSV pulled together over a few days, a template the associate has been quietly tweaking for months. Two windows, side by side, and hours set aside.

Waterfall is an email automation platform for private equity sourcing that turns one template plus a list of companies into personalized outbound drafts. From Waterfall, the associate pushes a draft into Outlook: a new message opens with the To line, Cc, Subject line, and message body populated exactly as reviewed in Waterfall, including formatting and paragraph breaks — nothing retyped. The associate brought their own templates and their own CSVs, and we walked through the configuration together. The hours that used to disappear into outbound went away.

For a senior associate on the investment team, outbound has two core initial use cases. The first is add-on outreach: an existing portfolio company has a clear thesis for bolt-ons, and the associate has identified a set of potential add-ons to reach out to. The second is conference outreach: there's an event coming up, the associate has a list of interesting companies they'd like to meet with, and the goal is to schedule meetings with as many of them as possible during that week.

Both share the same shape, but they aren't the same email. Add-on outreach references the platform company and calls out something specific about the space the recipient operates in, so the email reads like the associate did their homework on that company in particular. Conference outreach references the specific event and the meeting request — and, in the same way, calls out something specific to the recipient's space, so it doesn't read like a blast to everyone attending. So the associate keeps a separate template for each — and reuses each template across every add-on thesis or conference week. New outreach shapes come up, new templates get added.

Before Waterfall, the workflow looked like this. A spreadsheet with four columns: company name, executive name, recipient email, and website. A draft template kept in a Notes file. The company's site open in another tab. For each row, copy the template, swap names, skim the site, write one specific sentence that proves the associate had done their homework, paste, send. Then the next row.

Forty rows wasn't a single afternoon. It was the kind of work that got picked up and put down across a few sessions — a chunk after dinner, more on the weekend, the last batch the morning of. Most of the time wasn't writing. It was the small, repetitive context switching between the spreadsheet, the template, and the company's site.

Associates and firms should own their voice. Waterfall is not a tool that drafts emails from scratch on your behalf. We don't think a ChatGPT or a Claude should be writing outbound to founders and operators in your name, in a register your firm didn't choose.

Instead, Waterfall takes templates your team has written — in your firm's own voice, style, and house manner — and scales them. The template is authored in a rich text editor inside Waterfall, with formatting, paragraph structure, and tone preserved. Templates are reusable across companies, across campaigns, and across the firm: one associate's add-on template can be picked up by the next associate running a different thesis without rewriting it.

From that single template, Waterfall can scale to dozens or even hundreds of personalized drafts. The fields inside the template that change per recipient get filled and enriched from two kinds of sources: data files you provide — a CSV or Excel sheet the associate already maintains, with columns like company name, executive name, and recipient email — and AI-enriched variables that pull from each recipient company's website or the broader web. The wording around those fields is still yours. We fill the blanks; we don't write the email.

Waterfall automates outbound by pulling personalization from three places at once: typed values, the associate's CSV, and the recipient company's website. The associate writes one template per use case, declares the variables it needs, and tells Waterfall where each variable comes from.

On the configuration screen, the associate marked the variables they wanted in the body of the email. The fields already in the spreadsheet — executive first name, company name, recipient email — became CSV columns. The fields that used to mean opening a browser tab and reading the company's site became AI-derived, personalizing each email with dynamic information fetched from the recipient's website. Fields that stay constant for a given campaign — the platform company being sourced for in the add-on template, or the conference name in the conference template — became hardcoded.

Same three-source model, two different templates. The associate runs whichever one matches the campaign at hand.

Add-on outreach and conference outreach were just the first two templates. Now, any time the associate needs to send effectively the same email to many people — with a few fields personalized per recipient — they reach for Waterfall and create a template for it. Existing templates come off the shelf for the next add-on thesis or conference week; new templates get spun up when a new outreach shape shows up.

The metric the associate cares about isn't time saved per email. It's the number of outreach campaigns they can actually run in a quarter, without giving up their evenings.