“With Needle running our outreach from Claude, founders started asking us for a call.”
Maxi Stachelbeck
Account Executive at Coup
23%
Of connected founders and CFOs replied
3
Prospects asked for a call about their grant
46%
Of hiring candidates replied
1 day
From connecting Claude to the first live campaign
3 days
From the second seat joining to the first interview
The problem
Coup helps German startups and scale-ups claim the Forschungszulage, Germany’s R&D tax allowance. Companies can get up to 42% of their R&D staff costs back, and Coup is only paid when the claim succeeds. For a long time the founders did the selling, and Coup’s own job post says it plainly: “Our sales was founder-led for a long time. That’s changing now.” Coup needed outbound that didn’t depend on founder time, with notes specific enough for founders and CFOs to actually read. At the same time, the team was hiring.
What they did with Needle
Maxi Stachelbeck, Coup’s Account Executive, runs outbound almost entirely from Claude over Needle’s MCP. He picks a sector, like deep tech, semiconductors, biotech or AI scale-ups, and Claude finds the companies and the people, mostly CEOs, founders and CFOs, and reads their recent LinkedIn posts. Every connection request carries a note about the person’s own post, talk or funding round. When someone accepts, Needle sends the pitch and two follow-ups on weekdays during working hours, and withdraws requests that stay pending for three weeks. Maxi approves every draft before it goes out. He went from connecting Claude to a live campaign in about a day. Therese Bohn joined the workspace later, added 441 existing customers to a do-not-contact list so nobody pitches a current client, and used the same setup to hire an R&D consultant.
The result
In the first four weeks, Coup reached 226 founders and finance leaders. 19% accepted, and 23% of those replied. Three asked for a call about their grant, one of them two minutes after the first message. Hiring moved even faster: 26 of 57 candidates replied (46%), 18 wanted to hear more, and the first interview was booked three days after Therese joined. The founders no longer have to be the ones starting every conversation.
