Why Lark says it's a scanner.
Lark, Ludic's scanner, says "I'm a scanner, not a person" in the first line of every email. The rules it follows, and why a bot should never pretend.
Every email Lark sends starts the same way: "I'm Lark. I'm a scanner, not a person."
People who do cold email for a living tell me this is a mistake. The whole industry runs on the opposite instinct: make the automated email look hand-typed. "I noticed your site." "I was looking at your homepage." "Quick question." Software writes those lines, and the software is careful never to say so.
I built Lark to do the boring part of finding businesses whose websites have measurable problems. I'm not going to let it start the conversation with a lie.
What Lark actually does
Lark reads public business websites early in the morning. It writes down what it measures: the WordPress version, mobile speed, plugin ages, whether a plugin has a published vulnerability, how long the contact page takes to load on a phone, how many pages the site has. Every number is stored with the time it was measured and the page it came from.
When a site has two or more real problems and the business fits, Lark drafts a short email with the three strongest numbers, the price, and two ways to reply. Then it stops. I read every draft and approve it by hand before anything sends, for at least the first four weeks.
The rules, written before it sent anything
These are in Lark's brief, and it can't change them.
- 01It says what it is.First line, every first email. It signs as Lark. Never as me.
- 02No number without a receipt.Every claim traces to a stored measurement. If Lark didn't measure it, it can't say it.
- 03No "I noticed."Banned phrases include "I noticed," "I was looking at" and "I came across." A scanner doesn't notice. It measures.
- 04"No" means never.Reply no, stop, remove or unsubscribe, and the address and the whole domain come off the list within 15 minutes. For good.
- 05Three emails, maximum.No links in the first two. No tracking.
- 06Email only.Lark doesn't post, comment, DM or call. Not on LinkedIn, not on Reddit, nowhere.
- 07Hands off our clients and conversations.Anyone already talking to me, or emailed in the last 90 days, is off limits.
- 08Weekdays, business hours, slowly.Thirty emails per mailbox per day, at most.
Why bother
Because you'd find out anyway. An owner who gets a slick email and then discovers a bot wrote it doesn't think "clever." They think "what else did they fake?" The trust you lose there is the same trust you need when you quote $6,000.
Because it changes what the email can say. Once Lark admits it's a scanner, it doesn't have to pretend to have opinions about your business. It can just report: "WordPress 6.2, current is 7.1. 28 out of 100 on mobile speed." Numbers are easier to believe from something that doesn't pretend to have taste.
Because the numbers have to be checkable. If the email says your contact page takes 7 seconds to load on a phone, you can open it on your phone and count. That only works if every number is real, which only works if the system is built so that it can't invent one.
Because the human part should be the human. The handoff is the point. When someone replies "send it," I write back myself, from my own address: "Nathan here, the human behind Lark." The bot does the dawn shift. The person does the conversation.
What it costs me
Probably some replies. "I'm a scanner" is a strange first line, and some people will delete it on sight. That's fine. I'd rather have fewer conversations that start honestly than more that start with a trick I'll have to explain later.
It also costs me the right to tune in secret. Lark's copy, subject lines and niche list are frozen for four weeks at a time. It reports what happened; I decide what changes, and I publish when the rules change.
If Lark emailed you
You can check every number it sent. The Lark page explains how, lists where your email address came from, and has a stop form that works in 15 minutes without sending you a confirmation email, because that would be another email.
And if Lark got something wrong, reply and tell me. That's a bug, and I want to fix it.
Nathan