Questions
The things people actually ask.
Including the ones with awkward answers. If something you need isn’t here, ask us. A person replies.
The obvious ones
Is this another AI SDR?
No. Those sold autonomy and delivered spam, and the market spent two years cleaning up after them. OleaDesk sells control: it finds buyers and writes the outreach, and you approve every send. The friction is the feature.
How is this different from the services that do export outreach for you?
Those run outreach from their systems, in their voice, at their price, and everything learned stays with them. OleaDesk is the opposite bet: the desk is yours. Your own mailbox and domain, your own voice, writing to each buyer in that buyer’s language rather than a translation, every send approved by you, your mail on your machine. If you want it run for you, our Managed plan sets your agents up and tunes them, and even then the desk, the data and the relationships stay yours.
Who is it for?
Anyone selling food and drink to trade buyers. Exporters shipping into new countries, importers and distributors building a range in one territory, and brand owners trying to get listed. The job is the same in all three cases: find the right buyer, reach them in your own voice, and follow up properly.
Where does my mail live?
On your machine. OleaDesk is a desktop app and your inbox is stored locally. We do not host it and we have no copy. AI features send only the specific text needed for the task, and we don’t keep it.
Do I need an API key?
No. The AI is included in your plan and we manage it. You never create, paste or pay for a key.
Can it send without me?
No, and not as a setting we could turn on later. Every message waits for your approval, and the refusal is enforced at the moment of sending rather than shown as a setting. There is no autopilot to switch on.
What happens when a buyer replies?
The sequence stops instantly and the conversation is handed to you. When they ask the price, OleaDesk never answers. It hands you that too, because a price is a commercial decision and not a text-generation problem.
How the agents work
Where do the buyers come from?
An agent researches a market you define and collects companies that publish contact details for trade enquiries, from their own websites and their own contact pages. It records why it thinks each one fits, so you can disagree with its reasoning rather than take it on faith.
Can it bring back old conversations?
Yes, and it is often the fastest win. Alongside finding new buyers, an agent watches the threads already in your inbox that went quiet: the sample you sent, the enquiry from a show, the buyer who said 'not this season'. It drafts the follow-up in your voice and waits for you to approve it.
How many buyers will I get?
Up to thirty qualified buyers a week on any paid plan, which is the cap the software enforces rather than an estimate. How many are worth writing to depends on your product and market, and that is the part we will not guess at.
What results do your own agents get?
Not publishing one yet, on purpose. We measured our own agents and the figure was real, but it came from one company selling one thing into a few markets, which tells you about our week rather than about your market. Publishing it would have been marketing dressed as evidence. That is exactly why the trial is fifteen days and needs no card: you get the answer for your own product instead of ours.
Deliverability
Will this get my domain blacklisted?
The caps, the warm-up ramp and stop-on-reply exist precisely to prevent that, and they are not switches you can turn off. OleaDesk also sends inside your buyer’s own working hours rather than at 3am their time. You are still the sender, so your domain’s health is ultimately in your hands, but the product is built to protect it rather than to maximise volume.
How many emails a day does it send?
A deliberately small number: a daily cap with a warm-up ramp for new accounts. Tools that advertise a hundred thousand emails a month are selling you volume, and we think that is how domains die.
Do you track opens?
No. There is no tracking pixel, so we cannot tell you who opened a message, and we won’t display a number we can’t measure. It also means your recipients aren’t being watched on your behalf.
Practicalities
Which email accounts does it work with?
Any account you can connect over IMAP and SMTP, which covers custom-domain business mail and most providers. Some (Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud) want an app password rather than your normal one, and the app walks you through making it.
Is there a mobile app?
Not yet. OleaDesk is a Windows desktop application today. Whether a phone companion is worth building is a question we would rather ask you than answer for you, so tell us if you want one.
Does it only work for olive oil?
No. It was built inside a food export business, which is why it understands trade, but nothing in it is specific to one product. It has already drawn interest from businesses well outside food.
What does it cost to run a trade show instead?
Ahmed’s own figure is at least $15,000 per show once the stand, flights, hotel, samples, shipping and days away are counted. A year of OleaDesk on Starter is $1,080 paid monthly, or $990 paid up front. It does not replace the handshake, and it is not really meant to. What it carries is the fortnight afterwards, when the follow-up decides whether the show was worth going to.
Who answers when I need help?
The founder. There is no ticket queue and no offshore desk. You will hear back within one business day, usually much sooner, and founding members have a direct line. If that ever changes because we have grown, this answer changes the same day.
Can my team use it?
Today OleaDesk is built around one desk per person: several mailboxes, one operator. A team can run a desk each and share a sales inbox between them, and we will set that up with you. Proper team seats do not exist yet, and we would rather say so than describe a plan.