You built a SaaS product. It solves a real problem. But nobody knows it exists. You have read every cold email guide on the internet, and all of them assume you have a sales development team, three warmed-up domains, and a subscription to Outreach or Instantly.

You have a Gmail account and about 90 minutes a week to figure out outreach. The advice written for teams with 5,000-person prospect lists and A/B testing budgets does not help you.

This post gives you a cold email framework built specifically for the founder-led sales motion. No team. No expensive tools. Just a repeatable system for getting replies and starting conversations when you are the only person sending emails.

Why founder-led cold email works when team outreach fails

There is a structural advantage baked into every cold email you send as a founder. It has nothing to do with copywriting skill and everything to do with who the sender is.

When a prospect receives an email from the CEO of a company, the dynamic shifts. Your title signals commitment, authority, and a genuine interest in their problem. You are not a quota-carrying rep reading a script. You are the person who built the solution, and you are emailing them directly because you believe it can help them.

Mailshake founder Sujan Patel puts it bluntly: nobody can sell your product better than you right now. Data from Mailshake shows founder-led outreach consistently achieves 8 to 15 percent reply rates compared to the 2 to 5 percent typical for SDR-led campaigns. The gap is not about email copy. It is about credibility.

There is a second advantage most founders miss: every cold conversation doubles as product research. When a prospect says they love a feature but need one more thing, that is product intelligence you cannot get from analytics or surveys. When they say they already use a tool for this, that is competitive intel. Founders who outsource outreach too early cut off the most valuable feedback channel in the business.

Define your target before you write a single email

The fastest way to waste 90 minutes of outreach is to email the wrong people. Before you write anything, define your ideal customer profile in one sentence. Not a persona document. Not a segment analysis. One sentence:

[Title] at [company type] who struggles with [specific problem] and currently solves it with [current workaround].

If your ICP is any SaaS founder with 50 to 500 employees, you have not gone deep enough. Try Series A developer tools founders whose engineering leads have publicly complained about CI/CD pipeline reliability. The sharper your focus, the more relevant your outreach becomes. A focused list of 50 prospects with the right problem will outperform a generic list of 500 every time.

You can find these prospects using LinkedIn Sales Navigator (filter by title, company size, and industry), Reddit communities where your buyers complain about the problem, or your existing network. Warm introductions convert at 30 to 50 percent. Cold outreach converts at 2 to 5 percent. Start with the people you already know or who are one introduction away.

The 4-email cold outreach framework

This is the sequence. It takes about 15 minutes to set up per prospect and runs over 14 days. Every email has a specific job. None of them are longer than 120 words.

Email 1 (Day 1): The insight opener

Lead with a specific observation about their business or industry. Do not lead with your product. The goal of email one is to demonstrate that you understand their world well enough to be worth a reply.

Hi [Name], I noticed [Company] just raised your Series A and you are hiring for your first sales role. Most founders at this stage tell me the jump from founder-led to team-led sales is the hardest part. I have been researching how solo founders build repeatable outbound without a sales team. Would you be open to a 15-minute call to swap notes?

Key elements: personal observation, no product pitch, low-commitment ask. The insight proves you did your homework. The closing question is easy to say yes to because it asks for a conversation, not a sale.

Email 2 (Day 4): The value add

Share something useful with no strings attached. This could be a relevant benchmark, an article, or a data point from conversations you have had with similar companies. The rule: if your follow-up is just checking in with no new information, it is noise. If it shares something useful, it builds trust.

Hi [Name], I came across this benchmark on founder-led sales cycles that made me think of our conversation. Companies your size typically close founder-led deals in 18 to 24 days with a 40 percent win rate. Thought it might be a useful reference point as you build out your process.

This email works because you remembered the first conversation, found something relevant, and gave it away for free. You are not asking for anything. You are being helpful. That builds the kind of goodwill that later becomes a sale.

Email 3 (Day 8): The direct ask

Be straightforward. Acknowledge they are busy. Restate the core problem you solve in one sentence. Offer two specific time slots for a call.

Hi [Name], I know you are swamped. Putting this back on your radar because I think [Product] solves [specific problem] for [company type] better than the manual process most teams are using. I have Tuesday at 2pm or Thursday at 10am open if a 15-minute call makes sense. No worries if not.

The specific time slots reduce friction. The prospect does not need to think about when. They just pick one or say no. The no worries if not removes pressure and paradoxically increases reply rates.

Email 4 (Day 14): The breakup

Let them know you will not follow up again unless they are interested. This counterintuitively generates some of the highest reply rates in the sequence because it removes all pressure.

Hi [Name], I will leave you alone after this. If [problem] ever becomes a priority, I would love to show you how [Product] handles it. I published some research on [related topic] that might be useful. Here if you ever want to chat.

Data from UnifyGTM shows that 58 percent of all cold email replies come from the first email. But most positive replies that lead to deals come from touches two through four. Quitting after one email is not outreach. It is hoping.

Timing and volume: how much outreach should a solo founder actually do

The biggest mistake solo founders make is going too broad. They try to email 500 people in week one, burn out, and quit. The playbook that works: send 15 to 20 personalized emails per day, four days a week. That gives you 60 to 80 prospects reached per week and about 300 to 400 per month.

Block 60 to 90 minutes each morning for outreach. Do it before you open Slack, before you check your own inbox, before the day eats your willpower. Treat this block the way you treat your most important product work because for an early-stage startup, outbound is product work.

Here is what the math looks like. At 80 emails per week with a 5 percent reply rate, you get four conversations per week. At a 40 percent qualified rate, that is about six qualified opportunities per month. At a 30 percent close rate, you are closing two new customers per month from cold email alone. For a solo founder selling a $50 to $200 per month SaaS, two new customers per month from a 90-minute daily habit is a meaningful growth engine.

Space your emails three to five days apart. Sending all four emails in four consecutive days feels aggressive. A two-week window with widening gaps between touches feels patient and professional. The prospect experiences it as this founder is thoughtfully following up rather than this person is blasting my inbox.

Deliverability: the step most founder guides skip

You can write the most compelling cold email in the world. If it lands in spam, it does not matter. Here is the minimum deliverability setup for a solo founder:

First, use a secondary domain. Never send cold outreach from your primary company domain. If your main site is company.com, buy company-mail.com or trycompany.com and set up a single inbox there. If your primary domain gets blacklisted, your transactional emails, password resets, and customer communications still work.

Second, warm up slowly. Your first week, send 5 emails per day maximum. Your second week, send 10. Your third week, send 15. Google and Microsoft watch for sudden spikes in outbound volume from new domains. A gradual ramp signals legitimate behavior.

Third, keep it plain. No images, no tracking pixels, no HTML-heavy templates. Plain text emails land in the primary inbox more reliably than designed templates. This is counterintuitive because every email tool pushes you toward branded templates. For cold outreach, plain text wins.

The deliverability sections below cover domain setup, SPF records, DKIM, and the warmup process in detail.

Why deliverability is the thing nobody talks about

According to Validity's 2025 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, roughly one in six legitimate emails never reaches the inbox. That means even if everything else is right, 16 percent of your cold outreach evaporates before a prospect ever sees it.

For solo founders, the numbers are worse. Most use a single domain, skip authentication, and start sending from day one. Google's spam filters flag that behavior in hours. And once your domain reputation tanks, it takes weeks to recover.

The average cold email reply rate in 2026 sits at 3.43 percent, according to Instantly's benchmark report based on billions of emails. The top 10 percent of campaigns hit 10.7 percent or higher. The gap is not better subject lines. It is reaching the right person at the right moment with an email that actually lands.

Set up a separate sending domain (this is non-negotiable)

Never send cold email from your primary business domain. If your company is acme.com, a complaint spike or blacklist hit on cold campaigns would affect every email your company sends: transactional emails, support replies, everything.

Register a variant domain. Simple patterns work: get-acme.com, try-acme.com, or acme-hq.com. Avoid hyphens and numbers if you can. Older domains (12-plus months) get more trust from spam filters than freshly registered ones, so if you have a parked domain sitting around, use it.

As a solo founder, you only need one or two sending domains. Most of the advice about needing 14 domains to send 1,000 emails per day is written for agencies running campaigns at scale. For 60 to 80 emails per day, one domain with 2 inboxes is plenty.

Layer LinkedIn on top of your email sequence

Email alone works better than most founders think. Email plus LinkedIn works dramatically better than either channel alone. When a prospect sees your name in their inbox and their LinkedIn feed within the same week, you move from stranger to familiar face faster than any copywriting trick can achieve.

The lightweight multi-channel playbook:

Day 1: Send connection request on LinkedIn with a brief personalized note referencing the same insight from your email. Send email one.

Day 4: If they accepted, engage with one of their posts. Comment something substantive, not great post. Send email two.

Day 8: Send a LinkedIn message if they are active on the platform. Keep it distinct from email three. Do not just copy and paste. Send email three.

Day 14: Send email four. No LinkedIn follow-up. The breakup email should be the last word.

This approach adds about five minutes per prospect but significantly increases the odds that your name registers as familiar when they see your third or fourth email. Familiarity is the currency of cold outreach.

Five cold email mistakes solo founders make (and how to fix them)

Mistake 1: Leading with features instead of problems. Prospects do not care about your tech stack in a cold email. They care about the pain you eliminate. Frame every message around their problem, not your solution. If your email could be sent to any company in any industry, it is too generic. Rewrite it so it could only apply to the specific person you are emailing.

Mistake 2: Over-personalizing every email. Spending 30 minutes researching a single prospect is not scalable. Aim for three to five minutes per prospect. Find one specific hook: a recent LinkedIn post, a company announcement, a job listing that signals the pain you solve. One relevant detail is enough to make a cold email feel warm.

Mistake 3: Discounting too quickly. When a prospect replies it is too expensive, most founders immediately offer a discount. The right response: help me understand compared to what? The objection is rarely about the absolute number. It is about perceived value relative to their current alternative. If their current alternative is a manual process costing them 10 hours a week, a $100 per month tool is cheap.

Mistake 4: Not asking for the sale. After a great discovery call, many founders end with let me know if you are interested instead of based on what you have told me, I think the Pro plan solves your problem. Shall I send over a proposal? You have to ask. The prospect is not going to volunteer to buy from you.

Mistake 5: Not tracking anything. If you are not logging who you emailed, when you followed up, and what happened, you cannot improve. Even a simple spreadsheet with columns for name, company, email sent date, reply status, and outcome is enough. Without data, you are guessing whether your emails are working or whether you just need to send more of them.

The solo founder's minimum cold email stack

You do not need a complex sales engagement platform to run effective founder-led outreach. Here is what you actually need:

A secondary domain with one inbox. Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, roughly $6 to $12 per month. Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records (your domain registrar has documentation for this). This is the infrastructure that keeps your emails out of spam.

A simple tracking system. A Google Sheet works fine for your first 100 prospects. Columns: name, company, email, LinkedIn URL, research notes, email one date, email two date, email three date, email four date, reply status, outcome, notes. When you outgrow the spreadsheet, a tool like HubSpot's free CRM gives you a proper pipeline without the cost.

An email finding and verification tool. Hunter.io or Apollo.io are the standard options. Both let you find email addresses based on name and company domain. Verify every address before sending. A bounce rate above 3 percent will damage your sender reputation within weeks.

A calendar scheduling tool. Calendly or a similar free tool eliminates the back-and-forth of booking meetings. Drop your scheduling link in the direct ask email and let them pick a time. This single change removes the most common failure point in the conversion process.

Set up this entire stack in under 60 minutes. If configuration takes longer, you have over-engineered it. The goal is to start sending, not to build the perfect system. You will iterate on the stack as you learn what works.

What happens after they reply: the discovery call

You got a reply. Someone is willing to talk. Now the real work begins. The goal of the first call is not to sell. It is to understand whether this person has the problem you solve and whether your solution is the right fit. You should talk less than 30 percent of the time.

Open with a single question: what is the biggest challenge you are facing with [problem area] right now? Let them talk. The answer tells you whether they actually have the problem and how painful it is.

Three more questions that close deals: how are you solving it today? This reveals what you are really competing against. Usually it is not a competitor. It is spreadsheets, manual processes, or nothing. What does that cost you in time, money, or missed opportunities? Help them quantify the pain. If they cannot, the problem is not painful enough to pay for. What would need to be true for you to try something new? This surfaces objections before you pitch: price, integration, team buy-in, timeline.

After these four questions, you know whether to pitch or politely disqualify. Both are good outcomes. Wasting time on bad-fit prospects is the most common founder sales mistake.

What changed in cold email for 2026: three shifts that matter

Gmail and Yahoo now enforce the bulk sender rules announced in 2024: one-click unsubscribe, a visible sender name, and spam rates under 0.3 percent for anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day. A solo founder sending 80 emails a week is well under that threshold, but the rules changed what a professional sender looks like. If you use a secondary domain, warm up slowly, and keep emails plain text, you are already ahead of most small teams.

The second shift is AI-assisted personalization. Tools that research a prospect and draft a first line are now good enough that the bar for a generic email is lower than ever. That sounds like it makes founder-led outreach easier. In practice it raises the bar for real personalization: prospects can spot a template written by a large language model from the first sentence. The insight opener in this framework still wins because it is grounded in something specific and verifiable about the prospect's business.

The third shift is the return of the reply. Google's own guidance now rewards emails that start real conversations, and the flood of AI-generated outreach has pushed buyers toward people who sound human. That is the structural advantage of founder-led sales. For the full five-email version of the sequence mechanics, read our guide on cold email sequences for solo founders, and once the replies start coming in, how to get your first 10 paying customers covers what to do with them.

One practical update to the sequence for 2026: in email three, swap the two offered time slots for your Calendly link when you have one set up. The data is clear that removing scheduling friction lifts booking rates more than any subject line change. Keep the no worries if not line. It still works.

Write an email you would want to receive

The best cold emails do not look like cold emails. They look like something a thoughtful person would actually write.

Rule one: the subject line should be boring. If it sounds like marketing, they will delete it. "Question about [specific thing they posted]" beats "10x your revenue with AI" every time.

Rule two: the first line proves you did your homework. Reference something real. A post they wrote. A launch they did. A problem they mentioned. Skip the "I came across your profile" filler.

Rule three: you are making an observation, not a pitch. "I noticed you are doing X. We built Y that helps with exactly that. Would it be useful to see it?" Not: "We are the leading platform for Y, used by 10,000 companies." One sounds like a person. The other sounds like a press release.

Here is what a real cold email looks like:

Subject: your post about churn attribution Hey Sarah, Your LinkedIn post about churn being hard to attribute to specific features stuck with me. We have been working on the same problem: connecting feature usage data to cancellation reasons. We built a tool that does this automatically. Would a 10-minute demo be useful, or are you already solving this internally? No pressure either way. - Alex

That is it. No CTA anxiety. No fake urgency. Just a person who did their homework, made a relevant observation, and asked a genuine question.

The follow-up that does not make you cringe

Most follow-ups sound like "Just bumping this to the top of your inbox" or "Did you get my last email?" Nobody wants to receive those. Nobody wants to send them either.

The fix: every follow-up must add new value. Not a new feature list. Not a discount. Something the recipient can use whether they reply or not.

• A link to a resource that is relevant to their problem
• A data point or insight from your own customer research
• A relevant case study (short, two sentences, not a PDF)
• A question that shows you have thought more about their situation

If you cannot think of anything to add, do not follow up. A silent inbox is better than a follow-up that confirms you have nothing to say. Two follow-ups max. If they do not reply after two value-adds, they are not interested right now.

When cold email is not the right channel

Cold email works best when your product solves a specific, named problem, you can identify the person who has that problem, and the problem is urgent enough that a conversation is worth their time.

It does not work well when your product is a nice-to-have with no clear trigger, your target audience is too broad to research individually, or you are pre-revenue and still figuring out what problem you solve.

If you are in the second camp, cold email is not your channel yet. Start with communities. Post where your potential users hang out. Build in public. The emails will make more sense once you know exactly who you are helping and why.

For everyone else: cold email does not have to feel gross. It does not require templates or automation or growth hacks. It just requires you to be thoughtful, specific, and willing to hear no. That is not sales. That is being a founder.

Related: Founder-led outbound covers how to combine LinkedIn and email into a single outreach system that actually gets replies.

Related: Stop managing 10 marketing tools. Use 3. The same minimal mindset applies to your entire marketing stack.

Related: If cold email is not your channel yet, the solo founder's 90-day marketing playbook covers alternative distribution paths that work without an audience.

How to personalize without spending 20 minutes per prospect

Personalization for a solo founder is a time trap. You cannot spend 15 minutes researching each prospect when you are trying to send 15 emails. But you also cannot send "I saw your LinkedIn profile" to everyone.

The 90-second rule: spend 90 seconds per prospect on research before email 1. Open their LinkedIn. Find one specific detail: a recent post, a job change, a company milestone, or a shared connection. Use that detail in the opening sentence of email 1. That is the only email that needs heavy personalization.

Emails 2 through 4 can reference the same context more lightly. Email 5 needs no personalization at all. If you front-load the personal work into the first touchpoint, the rest of the sequence runs on the credibility you already built.

Do not use AI to fake personalization. Prospects can tell when a bot scraped their LinkedIn bio and generated a sentence with their college and hobby inserted. It reads as uncanny. A single real observation they recognize beats five AI-generated facts they do not.

What to do when nobody replies

If you send 20 emails and get zero replies, do not send more. More volume does not fix bad targeting. It compounds the problem by burning your sender reputation on people who were never going to respond.

Audit three things in order. First: your list quality. Are you emailing the right people? A founder of a 2-person startup does not need enterprise procurement software. Second: your deliverability. Check MXToolbox or Google Postmaster Tools to see if your domain is blacklisted or your spam rate is high. Third: your opening email. If email 1 gets no replies, the rest of the sequence is irrelevant.

A good sanity check: send your opening email to three founder friends and ask them to tell you honestly whether they would reply or delete. Most cold email problems are visible to a fresh set of eyes within 10 seconds.

If your reply rate drops below 2%, pause all sending for a week. Let your domain reputation cool down. Then restart slowly with a cleaned list and a rewritten email 1. Reputation damage is temporary if you stop early. It becomes permanent if you keep blasting through the complaints.

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: the three letters that keep you out of spam

Email authentication is the first thing inbox providers check before deciding where your message goes. If these three records are missing or misconfigured, your email starts with a penalty before the content is even scanned.

SPF tells receiving servers which mail servers can send from your domain. DKIM adds a cryptographic signature that proves the email was not tampered with in transit. DMARC tells inbox providers what to do when an email fails SPF or DKIM checks: monitor, quarantine, or reject.

If you use Google Workspace, these are mostly one-click setups. For a custom sending provider, you'll need to add DNS records. Tools like MXToolbox let you verify all three are configured correctly in 30 seconds. Do this before you send a single cold email.

The warm-up timeline nobody wants to wait for

Email warm-up is the process of gradually increasing sending volume on a new mailbox to build sender reputation. Skipping this step is the single most common reason solo founder cold email campaigns fail.

Here is the schedule that protects your domain:

Week 1: 5 emails per day. Automated warm-up exchanges only. Warm-up tools simulate real inbox engagement to build your sender reputation with positive signals like opens and replies.

Week 2: 5 to 10 emails per day. Continue warm-up exchanges. Send a few manual emails to real contacts to build genuine engagement.

Week 3: 10 to 20 emails per day. Begin low-volume cold outreach alongside continued warm-up.

Week 4 and beyond: 20 to 25 per day maximum per inbox. Keep warm-up running indefinitely, even during active campaigns.

Yes, three weeks of waiting hurts when you want to start booking meetings tomorrow. But the alternative is burning a domain and spending four weeks recovering from spam purgatory. You can buy pre-warmed inboxes from providers like Litemail for about $4.99 per inbox to skip the waiting period entirely.

Signs your deliverability is tanking

The problem with deliverability problems is that they're invisible. You don't get a notification that says 'your emails went to spam.' You just get silence. Here is what to watch:

Reply rate drops suddenly without changing your copy or list. If you were at 5 percent and suddenly you're at 1 percent with the same messaging, your emails are likely not reaching inboxes.

Bounce rate climbs above 2 percent. Even a single spike in bounces can tank your sender reputation and route future emails straight to spam.

Google Postmaster Tools shows reputation dropping. Set this up on day one. It's free, and it's the only way to see what Google actually thinks of your domain. If your reputation drops from High to Medium or Low, stop sending immediately and audit.

Spam complaint rate approaches 0.3 percent. Google requires bulk senders to keep spam complaint rates below 0.3 percent. That's 3 complaints per 1,000 emails. Hitting that threshold triggers enforcement actions that can block your domain from reaching Gmail inboxes entirely.

If you see any of these, stop sending. Run your domain through MXToolbox to check for blacklist hits. Verify your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are still correctly configured. Check your list for bad addresses. Resume only after the issues are fixed and you've confirmed your reputation is recovering.

Cold email deliverability isn't exciting. It's DNS records and warm-up schedules and Google Postmaster dashboards. But it's the difference between 'cold email is dead' and 'cold email is how I got my first 50 customers.' Pay the boring tax. It's cheaper than buying ads that don't work either.

If you're still figuring out your cold email copy, start with a sequence framework that works for one person. And if deliverability is already broken and you're considering a different tool, check whether a Brevo alternative might solve your spam folder problem.

If you are ready to automate more of your marketing beyond cold outreach, ad-vertly builds tools for marketing agents, so your agent can handle the work even without a team. See how it works at ad-vertly.ai.

The 2026 metrics dashboard for cold email

Reply rate is the only number that matters early, and the 2026 baseline is lower than the old guides claim. Instantly's benchmark puts the industry average around 3.4 percent, with top campaigns above 10 percent. If you are under 2 percent after 200 targeted emails, audit the list before you rewrite the copy.

Track four numbers per week: emails sent, replies, meetings booked, and opportunities created. Write them in a spreadsheet on Friday. After four weeks you will see which of the three levers, list, copy, or timing, is dragging the funnel.

Meeting booked rate is the signal most founders ignore. A high reply rate with zero meetings means your ask is weak or your ICP is off. If replies come in but calls never happen, tighten the direct ask email before you scale volume.

Positive reply rate is a better metric than raw reply rate. A reply that says not interested is not a conversation. Count replies that move the conversation forward, and you will know when the sequence is actually working.

When to add a fifth email

The four-email sequence is the default for good reasons: it respects the prospect's inbox and your time. But two cases justify a fifth touch. First, high-value accounts where the deal size makes persistence worth it. Second, campaigns where your reply rate climbs between emails three and four, a sign the audience needs more touches.

If you add a fifth email, make it a soft landing. No new pitch. A case study, a benchmark, or an invitation to a resource. The goal is to stay visible without adding pressure. If email five does not lift reply rate by a meaningful amount, cut it and go back to four.

The opposite mistake is adding touches out of panic. More emails do not fix a bad list. If the first email gets no replies, no sequence length saves it. Audit the offer and the targeting first, then adjust the sequence.

A 60-minute weekly cold email routine

Solo founders fail at cold email through inconsistency, not through bad copy. A fixed weekly routine fixes both. Block 60 minutes on Monday morning and 30 minutes on Thursday, and treat them like revenue appointments.

Monday, 60 minutes: research 20 new prospects, write the first emails for the week, and review the previous week's replies. Ninety seconds of research per prospect is enough. The 4-email sequence does the follow-up work for you.

Thursday, 30 minutes: send follow-ups for emails that are due, check reply rate, and add negatives to your list. This is also when you move any replies into your CRM or spreadsheet and book the discovery calls.

The weekly review answers three questions: did reply rate hold, did meetings book, and is the list getting sharper? If all three are flat after a month, change one variable at a time, not everything at once.

This routine overlaps with the broader founder-led motion. If LinkedIn is part of your outreach, our founder-led outbound guide shows how to layer both channels without doubling your time.

And when the calls start converting, the next bottleneck is onboarding. Our first 100 customers playbook covers what to do with the demand you create.

Why the stack stayed small in 2026

The temptation in 2026 is to buy the full cold email suite: multi-domain infrastructure, inbox rotation, AI personalization layers. For a founder sending 60 to 80 emails a week, that stack is overhead. The minimum stack in this guide still covers deliverability, tracking, and scheduling under $60 a month.

The tools that earned their place in 2026: a secondary domain with one inbox, a spreadsheet or light CRM, an email finder, and a calendar link. Everything else is nice to have until you hire. Our Smartlead vs Instantly comparison shows what the paid tools actually add at founder volume.

The one tool worth paying for early is a verification service. A bounce rate above 3 percent damages the domain you spent weeks warming up. Verify every address before it enters the sequence, and check your Google Postmaster reputation monthly.

Final word for 2026: the founder-led edge did not weaken. Buyers are more skeptical of AI-generated outreach, which makes a human founder who references something real stand out more, not less. The framework in this guide is built for exactly that.