--- title: "How a three-person hiring startup built its go-to-market engine before the rush" description: "Hiring startup Vetano used Claude and Next-Gen Zaps to reach nearly 9,000 businesses before a big expo and welcome every sign-up in about 12 seconds." image: "https://images.ctfassets.net/lzny33ho1g45/5Ogly3QrY15MNYIFLpFibp/9ecbbeaff67884a7cca1a9537918ace4/vetano-chris-fairley-blog-hero-16x9.png" --- # How a three-person hiring startup built its go-to-market engine before the rush Hiring startup Vetano used Claude and Next-Gen Zaps to reach nearly 9,000 businesses before a big expo and welcome every sign-up in about 12 seconds. [Chris Fairley](https://www.linkedin.com/in/vetano) founded the hiring platform [Vetano](https://vetano.com/zapier?utm_source=zapier&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=customer-story) in early 2025. After a particularly challenging job-hunting experience, Chris found that a strong resume was no longer enough. Resumes get about seven seconds of attention, according to Ladders' eye-tracking research. With AI now screening many of them, one formatting slip ends the read. If a candidate could show their skills on video instead, Chris thought, the whole process might work differently. Vetano replaces the resume with ID-verified skill videos and ID-verified video references. Vetano is a team of three. It has started to get its first paying customers, and Chris has a plan for what happens when more arrive. ## The welcome emails that needed an afternoon Every new Vetano account gets a welcome email, and talent and companies get different ones. Chris had built the flow in [Zapier](https://zapier.com/): every sign-up lands in a [Slack](https://zapier.com/apps/slack/integrations) channel, a Zap reads each message, and it sends the right email with the right details filled in. Then the product changed, and the emails needed to change with it. Chris looked at the Zap and estimated two or three hours of careful editing. He had been burned before, too. An earlier filter mistake had sent a message to companies that weren't supposed to get it. He asked Claude to make the edits, but there was a problem: Claude couldn't touch his Zaps. Within the same hour, a message from Zapier landed in his inbox introducing Next-Gen Zaps, saying Zapier now connects to Claude, with a prompt to paste in. He pasted it. "Within a few minutes, it had both messages changed. I was able to do all this rerouting and separate my channels." The process hasn't changed since. Chris tells Claude what he wants, say a new sentence in the talent email, and Claude builds a new [Next-Gen Zap](https://help.zapier.com/hc/en-us/articles/48391476448141-Get-started-with-Next-Gen-Zaps), and the old one is switched off and kept, so the history stays. Before anything goes live, the Zap sends a test email to Chris's own inbox. He reads it and approves. The rebuilt welcome workflow does more than the old one. It skips test accounts, checks every address with [ZeroBounce](https://zapier.com/apps/zerobounce/integrations) and never welcomes anyone twice. If ZeroBounce goes down, the email still sends. It comes from a dedicated Vetano address, and during the expo it carried a P.S. about the show that removed itself afterward. Claude built and tested all of it. ## A list that arrived every Monday The welcome emails were the warm-up. The bigger job was the Small Business Expo in New York this October. Vetano was a Platinum sponsor, and before the show Chris reached out to nearly 9,000 registered businesses. The show's producers sent a new registration export every Monday, about 85 new businesses a day. Chris first planned to email them all from his own inbox. Then he learned that email providers limit how much a single address can send, and pushing past that hurts delivery for everyone on the list. So Chris set up a fleet in [Instantly](https://zapier.com/apps/instantly/integrations), 37 mailboxes on 13 domains, warmed up for three weeks. Viktor, a second AI agent that works alongside Claude, manages the fleet and the campaign, watching bounce rates daily and flagging any mailbox that crosses 3% so Chris can pause it. Each Monday, Claude compared the new export with the master list in [Google Sheets](https://zapier.com/apps/google-sheets/integrations), scored every business from T0 to T4, set aside shared role inboxes and wrote the instructions for Viktor. Chris uploaded the scrubbed list, and Viktor did more research and checked every address with ZeroBounce before sending, because too many bounces would damage the mailboxes Chris had just spent a month preparing. When an address looked like a typo, such as a misspelled Gmail domain, Viktor corrected it and sent to the right one rather than dropping it. ZeroBounce kept 2,874 dead or risky addresses off the list, and of the 19,569 emails sent between September 29 and October 14, only 73 bounced, a 0.37% bounce rate. The best-fit businesses got a personal email from Chris first. Claude drafted each one, Zapier moved the drafts into [Gmail](https://zapier.com/apps/gmail/integrations), and Chris reviewed and sent them. At the end of September, those businesses moved into the main Instantly sequences with everyone else. Every link is tagged so Chris can see which emails drive traffic to the Vetano page. Replies are where the volume turns into work. Zapier posts each reply to a Slack channel with the sender's title, industry, tier, and phone number. Claude drafts an answer in the channel and Chris sends it. Nothing goes out without Chris. When Chris marks a lead as interested in Instantly, a workflow Claude built adds them to [HubSpot](https://zapier.com/apps/hubspot/integrations) right away, and an opt-out goes onto a blocklist the same day. Zapier handles the hand-offs: the welcome workflow, Claude's drafts into Gmail and every reply into Slack. Chris could have had Claude write that glue as code, but he doesn't think it would have come close. "You can go inside of Zapier, you can see your history, what Zaps went. It's just the whole graphical side of it. It would take tons to try to replicate." ## Why now Asked what the expo outreach would have looked like without automation, Chris couldn't put a number on it. "I can't even think about the time aspect. Humanly, I don't even know what I would have to do to keep everything on par without the automation." Vetano is small, and Chris doesn't intend to stay that way. He plans to move sending to Resend so it can handle thousands of sign-ups a day. A former AWS colleague once built a weekend project that got more than 750,000 sign-ups after one influencer mentioned it, and Chris tells his team about it often. "We got to prepare for some crazy thing, someone writing a blog or something. That's why all this automation is there." ## Show day The expo registered more than 15,000 attendees. Vetano's booth was built around one idea, hire without resumes, and it drew lines the three-person team couldn't keep up with. The emails had already done part of the work. Visitors walked up saying they'd heard from Vetano before the show. "One person came up to me and said, out of all the companies here at the expo, you were the only one to send me an email before the event. She felt that it was personal to her. That's what we wanted." Anyone who created a business or talent account at the booth had the welcome email before they walked away. The welcome Zaps ran 71 times that day, for 40 new businesses and 31 candidates, with zero errors. Each sign-up was checked against earlier welcomes, validated and welcomed in about 12 seconds, with copy written for the show. "It was not only the sign-ups. It was the relationships, because people saw that you took time. They don't know what all went into it." Next is a four-day thank-you campaign to the attendee list, which ZeroBounce has already cut from 15,456 addresses to about 10,000. For Chris, the personal touch is still the point. "In the world of AI, I think more and more people are appreciating personal attention." _Chris Fairley is the founder and CEO of _[**_Vetano_**](https://vetano.com/zapier?utm_source=zapier&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=customer-story)_, an ID-verified hiring platform based in Rye Brook, New York. Connect with _[**_Chris on LinkedIn_**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/vetano)_._ Learn more about [Next-Gen Zaps](https://help.zapier.com/hc/en-us/articles/48391476448141-Get-started-with-Next-Gen-Zaps).