Frank Astor
For two years, Google Alerts piled up in an Outlook folder: 700 emails holding thousands of links to events that nobody ever went through. In one day they became a scored list of 606 relevant organisers, 395 of them with an email address you can write to directly.
The Starting Point
Frank Astor is a keynote speaker and business coach. He and his wife produce his talks as a full stage show, with a robot, music and a script of their own. The market for live keynotes has collapsed, so he is looking for ways to reach event organisers before they plan their next event.
His biggest unused asset sat in an Outlook folder. For two years Frank had been collecting Google Alerts for terms like company event, AI conference and digitalisation. 700 emails, each holding three to seven links to events. Behind every one of those items sits a potential client, but reaching them would mean opening each link, telling the actual organiser apart from the magazine reporting on it, and pulling contact details out of the imprint. Nobody ever did that work.
What We Built
Frank exported the 700 emails from Outlook and sent them over. A day later there was a prototype with its own login: the platform reads the alerts, follows the links, identifies the organiser behind each item and collects the website, the email address and, where findable, the named contact. Magazines, aggregators and universities drop out automatically, because they are not going to book a paid speaker.
The scoring logic came out of Frank's own website: does the topic fit, is it a recurring series, is the organiser in the size bracket that pays a speaker fee. That produces a score and a grade from A to D. Out of 700 alert emails, 606 organisers in grades A and B remained, 395 of them with an email address.
„By hand, that would have taken us two weeks.“
Frank Astor, keynote speaker and business coach
The Prototype in Detail
Organisers, not news items
The tool follows every link in an alert email and works out who actually runs the event. Magazines that only report on it are filtered out.
Grades from A to D
Every organiser gets a score built from topic fit, recurring format and relevance. Frank can see at a glance who to contact first.
Contact details on the record
Website, email and, where findable, the named contact sit right on the record. No more digging through imprint pages.
Event calendar
A calendar view shows when each event takes place, colour-coded by booked and enquired.
Prepared outreach
Each organiser can be put on a sequence of three messages, scheduled for day 0, day 7 and day 21.
Keyword analysis
The prototype shows which Google Alert terms produced the most valuable organisers and which mostly produced noise.
The Result
1 day
from first call to working demo
2 weeks
of manual work saved
700
alert emails from two years processed
606
qualified organisers
395
of them with an email address
„I am having two completely opposite experiences right now. An agency sold me a marketing package for a fortune and delivers nothing at all. And you are the exact opposite.“
Frank Astor
Keynote speaker and business coach