How Keiki helped Arc book a qualified YC call 30 minutes after onboarding

For Arc, finding the right lead was never as simple as searching for "design." The team needed to find founders who were actively asking for design help, work out whether the founder and company were a strong fit, and reach out with enough context to make the message personal.

That process meant constantly monitoring X. Arc searched different keywords, scrolled founder posts, checked its network, researched each company, and made a judgment about qualification before writing an outreach message. Most of the posts were noise. The valuable ones were rare and time-sensitive.

Timing was the real constraint. A high-intent post can attract a crowd within minutes, and finding it a few hours later can mean the opportunity is already gone. Staying early required someone on the team to keep interrupting their day to search, scroll, and evaluate posts, with no guarantee that the next pass would surface a qualified lead.

The same fragmentation slowed down the work around growth. Creating Google Forms meant another setup flow, while turning product work in Figma into polished screenshots for X meant exporting, framing, and formatting assets by hand. Each task was manageable, but together they kept pulling the team away from design and client work.

Arc built the agent with Keiki, Orchid's business platform. It continuously searches X for founders who are actively looking for design help, filters irrelevant posts, evaluates the person and company against Arc's ideal customer profile, and gathers the context the team needs to decide whether to reach out. Learn more about Keiki.

The agent lives inside Arc's team Slack. When it finds a strong opportunity, it sends the lead there directly. The alert arrives where the team already coordinates, so nobody has to remember to check another dashboard or open another prospecting tool. Anyone can review the evidence and act while the original post is still fresh.

The workflow covers the three questions Arc used to answer manually: who is asking for design help, whether the opportunity is qualified, and what context will make a fast outreach message relevant and personal. The first useful version was live within a day, and Arc began receiving relevant opportunities almost immediately.

Keiki also handles adjacent growth work from the same Slack conversation. The agent created Google Forms for the team and can turn selected Figma frames into product screenshots ready to post on X. In one confirmed run, Arc Agent delivered frame 1:9 on a warm neutral canvas with consistent breathing room and a subtle shadow, preserving the complete design without cropping it.

Shortly after onboarding, Keiki found a post from a YC founder looking for design help and sent the opportunity directly to Arc's team Slack with the relevant context. Arc reached out while the post was fresh and booked a call with the qualified company within about 30 minutes.

That first result changed the value from theoretical to obvious. The agent was not only saving 3–4 hours of manual prospecting every week; it was shortening the distance between buying intent and a conversation. Arc could spend its time responding to the opportunities that mattered instead of searching for them.

Slack became more than the place where leads arrived. It became a working surface for the rest of Arc's growth loop: discover an opportunity, create the form needed to capture information, and turn product work from Figma into polished content for X without rebuilding each asset manually.

The pipeline potential is meaningful, but it should not be confused with booked revenue. At Arc's published pricing, a partnership prospect represents $10,000 per month, or $120,000 annualized if retained for a full year, while a one-time project starts at $15,000. Orchid gives Arc more chances to start those conversations without assigning someone to monitor X all day.