Approvals and sequences

A watch that tells you something is low-stakes — the worst case is a notification you didn’t need. An automation that emails your prospects is not: the worst case is a message you didn’t want, sent in your name. Approvals exist for exactly that gap. They let you build outreach that runs itself for the mechanical parts — the timing, the sequencing, the bookkeeping — while holding the moments that carry real consequence for your explicit sign-off.

When an automation needs to touch the same people more than once over time — an onboarding drip, a follow-up cadence, a nurture series — it uses a sequence. You enroll contacts into it, and each one moves through an ordered set of steps: send a message, wait a while, send another, perhaps pause for your approval before the last one. It is the difference between “send this once” and “walk each new person through this over the next week.”

Each contact’s progress through a sequence is independent. Someone enrolled today is on day zero while someone enrolled last week is three steps ahead; each one’s waits are timed from their own enrollment, not a shared clock. What a step produced for one contact — the intro it sent, a value it computed — is remembered for that contact and available to their later steps, even days later after a wait. The automation keeps every contact’s place without you tracking any of it.

An approval gate is a step that stops a contact’s progress and waits for you. When a contact reaches it, the automation posts a note into its home conversation — who is waiting and what for — and holds. Nothing past the gate runs until you decide. It is the safety catch on an otherwise self-driving sequence.

A sequence can be paced so it behaves like a considerate human rather than a machine that fires at 3am. You can set quiet hours — a window during which nothing is sent, with anything due in that window held until it reopens — and a daily send cap that limits how many messages go out per day, re-scheduling the overflow to the next day. Together they keep outreach civilized and reduce the chance of tripping spam filters.

You can ask the assistant for the state of a sequence and get back every contact and their stage: active and moving, parked awaiting your approval, finished, stopped, or failed. Contacts waiting on you also surface as a “waiting on you” count on the automation’s board, so approvals never get lost — see Observability.