About
Outbound sales, learned the hard way
I'm Dave Clayton, the founder of Remontoire. I'm a software engineer who learned outbound sales by doing it, one message and one call at a time.
I've been building software for more than 25 years, for companies in financial services, energy and education. Today I also run Red Sky Forge, an independent AI engineering practice in the Netherlands, where I build AI agents and document intelligence systems for fintech clients in Europe and the US.
Like a lot of engineers, I once believed a good product would sell itself. Startups taught me otherwise: customers come from conversations, and someone has to start them.
Writing every message myself
At a startup I founded on my own, there was no sales team: there was me. I researched every prospect, found the right person to contact and wrote every outreach message by hand. It was slow, and it taught me what works. The emails that got replies were short, specific and clearly written by someone who had done their homework. The generic ones disappeared without a trace.
On the phone and in the inbox
At another startup, outbound is part of my week: I make calls and send messages to prospects alongside the rest of the team. Talking to buyers directly keeps me close to what they respond to: relevance, honesty and a real person on the other end.
Looking for a repeatable way
Both taught me the same thing. Good outbound works, but doing it well by hand doesn't scale, and the tools that promise scale mostly produce noise. I wanted something in between: the research and drafting done for me, and the judgment left with me.
What I learned
Four lessons from the front line
Research is the work
A genuine reason to get in touch now beats any clever subject line.
Your own voice wins
Prospects can tell a template from a person within a sentence.
Someone has to read it
One wrong guess about a company costs more than the time it takes to check.
Rhythm beats bursts
A steady pace of good conversations builds a pipeline; occasional blasts don't.
Why I built Remontoire
Finding companies, researching them and writing a solid first draft is exactly the kind of work AI does well. Judgment and relationships are not. So Remontoire splits the job.
AI agents find companies that match your ideal customer, research each one and draft a first email in your own voice. Then you stay in the loop: you read every message, fix anything that's off and send it from your own business address. Every email that leaves is one you'd be happy to put your name to.
The result is outbound that's repeatable and still personal: AI for the legwork, a human for the touch that makes people reply. No slop.
Why “Remontoire”?
In fine clocks, a remontoire is a small mechanism that stores energy and releases it in steady, even pulses, so the clock keeps accurate time however much power is left in the mainspring. That's what I want for your sales: a dependable rhythm of good conversations, rather than a burst of noise followed by silence.
See it with your own customers
Tell Remontoire who you sell to and get 50 researched prospects, each with a drafted email, in a few minutes.