# Reach Out Labs > Reach Out Labs is an independent digital studio in Zürich. We design, build and run web applications, publishing platforms, data and marketing infrastructure for publishers and brands, built on Pulse, our central data platform. Reach Out Labs GmbH is based at Sihlquai 131, c/o Impact Hub Zürich, CH-8005 Zürich, Switzerland, and works with clients internationally. Contact: hello@reachoutlabs.ch, +41 44 442 02 86. Website language: English. ## Services - Digital products: web applications, publishing platforms, headless CMS and automation, from a first release to platforms serving millions of readers. - Strategy and consultancy: product strategy, technology reviews, publishing strategy and fractional technical product management. - Infrastructure: cloud architecture, scalability and managed operations on public cloud, private infrastructure or a mix of both. ## Pulse, the central data platform ReachOut Pulse is the central data platform we build and run for our clients: first-party web analytics, contacts and segments, email campaigns, automations, assets and content in one organisation-scoped place. People use it in the Studio, systems use it through a REST API, and AI agents use it through an MCP server, with people approving the calls that matter. ## Pages - [Home](https://reachoutlabs.ch/): services, selected work and contact form. - [Work](https://reachoutlabs.ch/work): index of 8 case studies. - [Sustainable marketing](https://reachoutlabs.ch/sustainable-marketing): the studio's approach: purpose before promotion, relevance earns attention, trust is part of the product, build for the long term. ## Case studies - [il manifesto](https://reachoutlabs.ch/work/ilmanifesto) (Publishing, ilmanifesto.it): A custom publishing platform for an audience of 380k users: Pulse CMS, a Next.js web application, subscriptions, ReachOut campaigns and personalised discovery with MeMa AI. - [Nvalue](https://reachoutlabs.ch/work/nvalue) (Environmental markets, engage.nvalue.com): A custom CRM based on ReachOut empowers a team of 50+ users with local AI and deterministic search, following a migration of 100k+ items from Salesforce. - [The Portager](https://reachoutlabs.ch/work/theportager) (Local news, theportager.com): A new publishing platform, a membership migration with no interruption for readers, and newsletters run from Pulse. - [il manifesto global](https://reachoutlabs.ch/work/ilmanifesto-global) (Publishing, global.ilmanifesto.it): The English-language edition of il manifesto runs its articles, newsletter and subscribers on the same data platform as the Italian daily. - [Tuttoimmobili](https://reachoutlabs.ch/work/tuttoimmobili) (Real estate, tuttoimmobili.ch): A multilingual property website fed by Pulse, with enquiries from Swiss portals answered automatically. - [320px](https://reachoutlabs.ch/work/320px) (Email product, 320px.com): A new email product, from first commit to production in under a week: private mailboxes, source-linked summaries and questions answered from your own mail, with a classification flow that keeps rules and inference in their place. - [Plastifil](https://reachoutlabs.ch/work/plastifil) (Manufacturing, plastifil.ch): Business, marketing and audience analysis for a Swiss wire-products manufacturer, with a go-to-market proposal and a proof of concept for AI-assisted sales enquiries. - [AlpeanGlow](https://reachoutlabs.ch/work/alpeanglow) (Editorial publishing, alpeanglow.com): A researched Friday briefing on stays, property and local life in Graubünden: AI-assisted research, an editorial team in charge, and a platform built to personalise what each reader receives. ## Case study details ### il manifesto Title: A publishing platform, built around the newsroom. Sector: Publishing. Period: Ongoing. Website: https://ilmanifesto.it il manifesto is an Italian daily newspaper owned by its journalists’ cooperative. Its digital publication reaches an audience of 380k users and receives 10 million pageviews per month. Reach Out Labs built il manifesto’s custom headless CMS, Pulse, and its Next.js web application. From the WordPress migration and real-time syncing to the ongoing management of subscriptions, campaigns and product development, the partnership connects the newsroom’s work with the needs of its readers. What was done: - Custom headless CMS: We built Pulse with custom features tailored to il manifesto’s publishing needs, including the migration from WordPress and real-time syncing to keep content up to date. - Next.js web application: We developed the Next.js-based web application that brings the publication’s journalism to its readers, connected to Pulse. - Subscriptions and user management: We maintain the subscription and user management system, supporting the ongoing relationship between the publication and its readers. - Marketing and communication: We run marketing and communication campaigns through ReachOut, helping il manifesto stay in touch with its audience and support its subscription business. - Personalisation and discovery: More than 100 million raw analytics events have been ingested into ReachOut to support ongoing personalisation of the reader experience. The integrated MeMa AI platform serves recommendations and content search, helping readers discover relevant journalism. - Infrastructure and scalability: We manage the platform’s infrastructure and scalability to support the publication’s audience and ongoing growth. - Analysis and product consultancy: We provide ongoing analysis and product consultancy, translating audience insights and the publisher’s needs into decisions about the digital experience. Pulse: Pulse is the custom headless CMS we built for il manifesto. Its tailored features support the publisher’s editorial work, while the WordPress migration and real-time syncing connect its publishing workflows. Alongside Pulse, ReachOut powers marketing and communication campaigns and supports the ongoing personalisation of the reader experience. AI: MeMa is the custom AI platform integrated into il manifesto’s digital experience. It serves content recommendations and content search, helping readers explore the publication’s journalism and find stories relevant to them. Outcomes: - 380k users in the audience - 10M pageviews per month - >100M raw analytics events ingested to date Evidence: Audience and usage figures supplied by Reach Out Labs, October 2026. Analytics events are cumulative and support ongoing personalisation. ### Nvalue Title: A CRM built around how the desk works. Sector: Environmental markets. Period: 2025 to today. Website: https://engage.nvalue.com Nvalue has been active in environmental markets since 2008, offering liquidity, risk management and strategic solutions for the energy transition: carbon and EU ETS, CBAM, guarantees of origin, biomethane and biofuels. It has offices in Lucerne, Amsterdam, Milan, Varna and New York. We built a custom CRM based on ReachOut for Nvalue, migrating more than 100,000 items from Salesforce. The platform empowers a team of more than 50 users to combine AI-assisted research with deterministic search in their daily work. Alongside the CRM and connected workflows, we provide marketing planning and execution, data management and migration consultancy, and business strategy support. What was done: - A CRM built for the team: A custom-made CRM based on ReachOut brings customer relationships, sales activity and campaign work together around the way Nvalue’s team operates. - Salesforce migration: We moved more than 100,000 items from Salesforce into the custom CRM, bringing the team’s existing information into its new working environment. - Local AI and deterministic search: The platform combines local AI with deterministic search, giving the team AI-assisted ways to explore information alongside searches based on explicit criteria. - Marketing planning and campaign execution: We plan and execute marketing campaigns, from landing pages on the multilingual Engage website to mass email campaigns through ReachOut, connecting Nvalue’s market topics and offers with the right audiences. - Live events and webinar marketing: We plan and deliver marketing for Nvalue’s live events and webinars, connecting event communications with the wider marketing programme. - Data management and migration consultancy: We advise on data management and migration, helping Nvalue organise its information and plan how it moves between systems to support the team’s work. - Business strategy: We provide business strategy consultancy, connecting Nvalue’s commercial priorities with its marketing, data and digital product decisions. - Connected workflows: Email and trading-system integrations bring relevant information into the CRM, helping the team keep customer relationships and daily activity connected. Pulse: ReachOut Pulse provides the foundation for Nvalue’s custom CRM and content hub. It connects customer relationships, sales activity, campaign content and communications in one working environment tailored to the team. AI: Local AI is integrated into the CRM to support the team’s research and discovery. More than 50 users can combine AI-assisted exploration with deterministic search based on explicit criteria, bringing both approaches into their everyday work. Outcomes: - 50+ users empowered by the custom CRM - 100k+ items migrated from Salesforce Evidence: Team size and migration figures supplied by Reach Out Labs, October 2026. ### The Portager Title: A local newsroom, on its own platform. Sector: Local news. Period: 2025 to today. Website: https://theportager.com The Portager is an independent, reader-supported local news publication covering Portage County, Ohio. It publishes daily online, sends free and paid newsletters and offers membership plans. Since January 2025 we have built and run The Portager’s platform: the website, member accounts and paywall, newsletters, analytics and the migration of its membership business from Memberful to Stripe. What was done: - Publishing platform: Astro, server-rendered on Cloudflare Workers, with React components, a PostgreSQL database and built-in authentication. Articles, authors, ads and sponsors are managed in Pulse. Upgraded to Astro 7 and Node 24 in 2026 with production errors remediated. - Membership migration: Native accounts with magic-link and password sign-in, Stripe Checkout, customer portal and signed webhooks. A fail-closed entitlement resolver handles paid, complimentary, dependent, temporary and manual memberships, and a 30-day paywall protects recent articles. The release went from canary to open with an approved per-member ledger. - Newsletters in Pulse: A newsletter editor with free and paid versions, authenticated preferences, a public archive that respects entitlements, draft previews and a deduplicated import of the previous mailing list. - Security and observability: Input hardening, bounded request bodies and structured logs with redaction and request IDs. The dependency audit went from 60 advisories to zero. - Business intelligence: Metabase dashboards for email performance and business metrics, drawing on first-party pageviews, identified readers and custom events such as paywall hits and newsletter sign-ups. Pulse: Pulse is the operational source of truth: articles, authors, ads, users, subscriptions, newsletter editions, email templates and the event flows that keep Stripe, the website and the newsroom in step. The website reads and writes operational data only through Pulse. AI: Pulse’s daily Insights, which use a language model to explain unusual traffic and engagement patterns, were validated on an anonymised sample of The Portager’s analytics before release. An MCP connector gives agents read access to the publication’s Pulse data for assisted operations. Outcomes: - 1,065 members moved to Stripe without interruption - 1,076 subscriptions migrated with verified schedules - 60 → 0 open security advisories after hardening - 23.8% unique open rate on the latest large newsletter - 8.7% unique click rate on the same send - > 60 s → 1 s dashboard queries after repair Evidence: Figures from the migration close-out of 28 August 2026 and the analytics validation snapshot of September 2026. ### il manifesto global Title: One newsroom, two editions. Sector: Publishing. Period: Ongoing. Website: https://global.ilmanifesto.it il manifesto global is the English-language edition of il manifesto: selected articles translated into English and published as a website and an email newsletter for an international readership, with a monthly subscription. Rather than a separate stack, the global edition shares the Italian edition’s Pulse instance. Articles, newsletter issues, tags, topics, images and the subscriber base are managed as their own collections, and the site is tracked alongside ilmanifesto.it so both editions appear in the same analytics. What was done: - Content and newsletter collections: Global articles, newsletter issues and their relations, tags, topics and images live in dedicated Pulse collections, separate from the Italian edition’s data but in the same instance. - Subscriber base: Global subscribers are a distinct audience in Pulse, so newsletters and campaigns reach the right readers in the right language. - Shared tracking and analytics: The ReachOut tracker on global.ilmanifesto.it reports into the same warehouse and Metabase dashboards, so the team compares both editions with the same definitions. - Verified migration: The edition moved to the rebuilt ReachOut backend together with the Italian site in October 2026, with live events from the global domain checked before acceptance. Pulse: The same Pulse instance serves both editions: one place for readers, content and campaigns, with the global edition’s collections kept apart from the Italian ones. AI: The global edition shares the Metabase MCP server and Pulse MCP access described in the il manifesto case study, so the same agent tooling answers questions about either edition. Outcomes: - 2 editions on one data platform - 6 dedicated content collections - 1 shared analytics warehouse - Oct 2026 migration verified with live events Evidence: Collection inventory from the Metabase inventory and release records, October 2026. ### Tuttoimmobili Title: Every listing, every enquiry, in one system. Sector: Real estate. Period: 2023 to today. Website: https://tuttoimmobili.ch Tuttoimmobili is a real-estate agency in Ticino, active in sales and rentals in the Lugano region and beyond. Hello, its property microsite, presents the latest listings in Italian and English and takes viewing requests. We rebuilt tuttoimmobili.ch as an Astro application in Italian, English and German, consolidated Hello into the same deployment and connected the agency’s lead flow, so that enquiries from property portals land in Pulse and are answered without manual work. What was done: - Website rebuild: Listings and search by city and district, property pages with gallery and floor plan, developments, news, company and services pages, and a newsletter with double opt-in. Content, listings and even interface translations come from Pulse. - Hello consolidated: The Hello microsite runs from the same container with host-based routing, its own Italian and English pages and an enquiry form with budget options and a viewing-date picker. Personalised greetings were deliberately removed to avoid exposing personal data. - Portal lead intake: A Cloudflare Email Worker receives enquiry emails from Swiss portals such as Homegate, Flatfox and NewHome, extracts the requester and the property reference, classifies the request with AI, creates or updates the lead in Pulse, confirms to the requester and notifies the agency. - Infrastructure and security: One Docker container on a managed server with automatic TLS, secrets in a vault, encrypted state for rate limiting and deduplication, nightly backups, an isolated preview environment and server-side form handling with least-privilege service users. Pulse: Pulse is CMS, CRM and analytics in one: listings, developments, blog posts and translations; recipients, interests and portal leads; page and event tracking from both sites; triggered emails for every enquiry; and the property brochure PDF rendered on demand. AI: AI does two jobs for Tuttoimmobili. It writes engaging property descriptions in Italian, English, German and French from the listing data, so every property goes online in four languages without waiting for translation. And it classifies the enquiries that the email worker ingests from real-estate portals, so each request reaches the right agent with its type and intent already identified. Beyond that, the 2026 migration and the ongoing audits of the lead intake are run with coding agents that read Pulse through its MCP server to reconcile what was received, stored and sent. Outcomes: - 3 languages on the main site - 2 sites served from one container - 108 automated tests plus 26 live route checks - 0 known vulnerabilities at commissioning - 120 tests on the portal email worker - 14 days of nightly backups retained Evidence: Figures from the commissioning report of 6 October 2026 and the lead-intake audits of October 2026. ### 320px Title: An inbox that explains itself. Sector: Email product. Period: September 2026 to today. Website: https://320px.com 320px is an email product from the Reach Out Labs studio. People claim a username, receive mail at their own 320px.com address and see it organised into Activities, Projects, Work and Newsletters, with summaries that link back to the original messages and an Ask function that answers questions from them. Workspaces can add custom domains and invite members. The brief was to build the whole product, not a prototype: mail transport, storage, the reading interface, the AI layer and the operations around it, with the originals always available next to any generated text. The hardest design question was where to let a model decide and where not to. What was done: - Product and interface: A server-rendered web application with a dedicated design system, live workspace updates and public help and retention pages written in plain language. - Mail infrastructure: A customised Postal fork receives, forwards and sends mail. Originals are stored byte for byte with a checksum, external forwarding is optional, and custom domains are proven by DNS before use. - The classification flow: Every message passes through the same sequence. First, deterministic steps that always behave the same way: the original is stored and checksummed, the message is embedded, and candidates for related mail are retrieved by exact similarity within the same mailbox only, never across users. Second, inferential steps where a model is allowed to judge: which of the four areas the message belongs to, and whether a candidate really is related. Third, deterministic steps again: a relationship is kept only when it clears fixed similarity thresholds, no more than twelve candidates are ever considered, and a fingerprint prevents a summary from being regenerated when nothing has changed. - Why the balance matters: Rules are predictable but blind to meaning; models understand meaning but can be confidently wrong. Letting rules set the boundaries and models work inside them gives users summaries that are useful without being invented. A model can propose, but thresholds, scope and provenance are decided by code. - Operations: Encrypted off-server backups, a monthly isolated full-service recovery drill, an independent uptime monitor with its own alerting, an off-server deletion ledger and export and deletion flows for users. Pulse: Pulse and 320px share the same mail infrastructure: the Postal fork that delivers 320px mail is the one Pulse uses for its sending domains, and Pulse issues its default per-organisation sending addresses under 320px.com. AI: Three models do the inferential work and nothing else. One classifies each incoming message into an area. One confirms whether two messages are genuinely related, after deterministic retrieval has already narrowed the candidates behind a strict similarity gate, and writes source-linked summaries and versioned area reports. One answers Ask questions from up to eight authorised sources, and every quote in an answer is checked verbatim against the source before it is shown. The guardrails are deterministic: models receive no tools and cannot send mail, an AI failure never rejects incoming mail, a leased job queue retries with bounded attempts, and a user’s correction overrides any automatic retry for good. Outcomes: - 6 days from first commit to the full-scope release - 150+ automated tests across application, auth, operations and monitor - 0.85 minimum similarity before two messages are even considered related - 12 candidates at most per message, fixed in code - 1.8 s to answer a question from the mailbox in live tests - < 2 min for a full isolated service recovery drill Evidence: Figures from the classification design notes and the scope-completion and finalisation reports of 29 September to 1 October 2026. ### Plastifil Title: From the order book to a go-to-market plan. Sector: Manufacturing. Period: 2025 to today. Website: https://plastifil.ch Plastifil is a family-owned Swiss manufacturer in Mendrisio, founded in 1934. It makes steel-wire products and components such as fryer baskets, oven grills and coffee-machine racks for the hospitality and food-equipment industries, with more than 180 staff and the whole production process in house. Plastifil asked us to look at the business from the outside: how it sells, who it sells to, how it presents itself and where the next growth should come from. The engagement was consultancy first, with a small technical proof of concept to show how new business enquiries could be handled with AI inside the company’s own perimeter. What was done: - Business analysis: A review of Plastifil’s offering, product families and sales process, from first enquiry to delivered component, to understand where value is created and where opportunities are lost. - Marketing strategy: An assessment of the current positioning, channels and materials in four languages, with recommendations on messaging, trade-fair presence and the role of the website in generating qualified contacts. - Audience analysis: A picture of the current customer base and website visitors by segment, sector and country, drawing on first-party analytics and the company’s own records, to separate existing accounts from new prospects. - Go-to-market proposal: A proposed route to new segments and markets: priorities, sequencing, the materials to produce and the measures to track, so the sales team can act on it quarter by quarter. - Proof of concept: AI-assisted sales automation: A working prototype that receives incoming enquiries, classifies them by type and relevance, and uses a private AI system to retrieve past projects and offering documents. It then prepares the artifacts the sales team needs to evaluate a new request: a summary, comparable past work and a draft of the response. Pulse: Pulse holds Plastifil’s contacts and website analytics for plastifil.ch, so the audience analysis and the go-to-market proposal rest on first-party data rather than estimates. AI: The proof of concept runs on a private AI system: documents, past projects and enquiries stay inside Plastifil’s own perimeter. Enquiries are classified automatically, relevant past projects and offers are retrieved by meaning rather than keyword, and the system prepares evaluation artifacts for a person to review. Nothing is sent to a customer without that review. Outcomes: - Shared picture of the business: Management and sales now work from one analysis of offering, audience and channels. - A plan the sales team can act on: The go-to-market proposal sets priorities, sequencing and measures for the coming quarters. - A tested path to AI-assisted sales: The proof of concept shows enquiries being received, classified and prepared for evaluation with internal documents, without data leaving the company. Evidence: Deliverables from the 2025 and 2026 consultancy engagement. Figures from the analysis are confidential to Plastifil and are not published here. ### AlpeanGlow Title: A weekly briefing for people who choose places. Sector: Editorial publishing. Period: August 2026 to today. Website: https://alpeanglow.com AlpeanGlow is a weekly editorial briefing about distinctive stays, property and local life in Graubünden, Switzerland. Every Friday it brings together what is new and worth knowing across ten destinations, from Arosa and Flims to St. Moritz, Pontresina and Scuol: openings, houses and apartments for sale or rent, places to stay for a season, and the week ahead. The idea is a publication that does the looking for a reader who has limited time and high standards: someone from abroad considering a longer stay or a property in the region. AlpeanGlow curates rather than sells. It takes no booking commission, points readers directly to owners and agents, and is funded by sponsorship placements that sit inside the editorial structure. We designed the editorial system, the research workflow and the reader platform behind it. What was done: - The audience: International readers who return to the Alps and are weighing a longer stay or a purchase. The briefing assumes they know the region and want judgement, not listings: what has changed, what is worth a detour, what to do about it this week. - A fixed editorial structure: Each issue has seven sections, from the editorial and New and Unmissable to Luxury Lodging, Workation Gems, Cabins in Nature, The Week Ahead and the Sources and Reading Notes. Readers learn where to look, and sponsors know exactly where their placement sits. - Targeting by destination: Content, listings and sponsorship placements are organised by destination, so a reader interested in the Engadin and one interested in Flims and Laax see the places that matter to them first, and a partner can be present only where it is relevant. - Personalisation for registered readers: Readers register with the publication and tell it which destinations and kinds of stay interest them. The platform is built to assemble future issues around those preferences, so the Friday briefing becomes a personal one rather than a single edition for everyone. Today every reader receives the same issue; personalised issues and automated Friday delivery are the next step. - AI-assisted research, editor-led: Each week an issue scan researches every destination: new openings, listings, events and local news, with the source of each finding recorded. The editorial team reviews the scan, decides what makes the issue, writes and edits the pieces in its own voice, and publishes. Nothing goes out without a person choosing it. - Sources you can check: Every issue carries a per-destination research register and exact citations. Images are imported with their provenance and licence recorded. A style guide and a tone-of-voice companion keep the writing consistent from issue to issue. Pulse: Pulse is the publication’s home: the editorial structure, articles, destinations, listings, sponsorship placements and issues live there, as do reader accounts, their preferences and first-party analytics. Editors work in Pulse and what they publish is live within seconds. AI: AI does the legwork, not the judgement. The weekly Grisons issue scan runs as a managed prompt in Pulse and gives the editor a researched, cited starting point for every destination. Hero images are gathered with provenance and licence metadata through a Pulse MCP server. The editorial team decides what is published and writes the issue. Personalised issues assembled from reader preferences are built into the platform and will be switched on when the team is ready. Outcomes: - 6 weekly issues published since September 2026 - 10 destinations covered across Graubünden - 7 sections in every issue, in the same order - 32 source citations in a single issue - 0 booking commission: readers deal with owners directly - Friday every week, to every registered reader Evidence: Figures from the issue records of September and October 2026. ## Contact Email hello@reachoutlabs.ch or use the contact form at https://reachoutlabs.ch/#talktous. Replies come from a person, usually within two working days.