“We actually managed to land a ton of meetings just because of Needle.”
Alberto Greene
Growth at KugelAudio
48%
Of messaged candidates replied
7
Candidates agreed to an intro call
74%
Accepted a connection request with no note
3 days
From setup to the first booked call
3,000
Candidate profiles researched by Claude Code
The problem
KugelAudio builds its own voice AI models for European languages and sells them to large companies. With a team of about five, the same few people do all the outbound. They reach the companies they want as customers, like the ones they meet at trade fairs. And they had to hire their first salesperson: native German, early in their career, hungry, and based in Berlin. Both jobs mean reaching busy people who are not waiting for a message. Their old LinkedIn tool sent one template to many people, and that did not work for either.
“What we use Needle for is all our outbound.”
What they did with Needle
Now everything at KugelAudio that has a LinkedIn touchpoint goes through Needle, and the team runs it from Claude Code over Needle’s MCP. The setup is the same for selling and hiring. Claude Code researches each person and writes a first message that only fits them. Needle runs the steps: a connection request, the personal message once they accept, then follow-ups, and it stops as soon as someone replies. For the hire, co-founder Viktor Presber has Claude Code read about 300 candidate profiles on a busy day. It builds one campaign per candidate, with a first message that names that person’s real track record, like how far over quota they finished, plus the job page and a 15-minute booking link. After a recent trade fair, the team used the same setup to follow up with the people they had met.
“What I think is so great about Needle is definitely the MCP… better than everything we’ve tested so far.”
The result
On the hiring side, 48% of the candidates who got a message replied within two weeks, and 74% accepted a connection request that had no note. Seven candidates agreed to an intro call, and the first was booked three days after Viktor set up Needle. Most of the “no” replies were warm, and Viktor turned several of them into referral asks. On the sales side, the trade fair follow-ups landed what Alberto calls “a ton of meetings just because of Needle.” One setup now covers both.
