From an export nobody opens to three conversations worth having.

Step 01: it reads the notes, and that is the whole trick

Every CRM export has a notes column and almost nothing uses it. It is where “wants to be in the Champlain district before the school year” and “pre-approved to 415, husband is the holdout” ended up, two years ago, in your own handwriting.

That column is the difference between a text somebody answers and a text somebody deletes. “Just checking in, still looking?” is what every drip already sends. “Still after the Champlain school district?” is a question only somebody who knows them could ask.

So the import reads it, and the first draft quotes it. Not paraphrases it, quotes the specific thing, because a paraphrase of a two-year-old note is exactly where an invented detail creeps in.

Lewis works with any CRM that exports a CSV. There is no integration to wait for and nothing to connect. More on CSV import.

Step 02: the numbers that cannot be texted leave at the door

A list of four hundred is not four hundred people you may contact. Some of those rows are landlines, some are dead, some are marked do-not-contact, and some belong to people who once replied STOP.

Lewis drops those at import rather than filtering them later, which sounds like the same thing and is not. A number that never entered the process cannot be texted by a later bug, a re-run, or somebody clicking the wrong button at 7am. The opt-out list is checked again at the moment of sending anyway, because that one is a legal obligation rather than one agent’s filing. See the opt-out policy.

Step 03: the draft has already been refused once, if it needed to be

Before a draft reaches your queue it has been through the outbound rails. There are three verdicts and they are not three severities of the same thing:

Allow goes to your queue. Hold goes to your queue with the reason attached, and hold is the normal verdict for a good draft, because any message that names a day or a figure is a commitment and every commitment is yours to make. Block never reaches the queue at all.

That last one is the important distinction. A blocked message is not “held for review”. Fair-housing language and property facts Lewis cannot source are refused outright, because an agent skimming approvals before the school run will wave through “42 Oak is 1,850 sq ft” without knowing whether it is true. There is no button that sends one by mistake, which is a stronger promise than any amount of care. How the guardrails work.

Step 04: your yes, and nothing that resembles one

More than one draft waiting plus a bare “yes” gets you a numbered list, not a guess. Sending the wrong message under somebody’s real-estate licence is the one failure this product cannot afford, so the ambiguity is handed back rather than resolved.

The reverse holds too: only the engine may say a message went out. If the phrase you used could not be read as consent, Lewis re-asks. It does not send and then narrate the send, which on your screen would be indistinguishable from the real thing.

And you are never stuck choosing between Lewis’s words and no words. Tell it to write it yourself and the next thing you type is the message, sent verbatim. The one rail still running on it is the fair-housing check, because a fair-housing line does not become sendable because a human typed it. More on approvals.

Step 05: it hears the answer to the question it asked

Asked for a budget, “2k” is a budget. So is “2 thousand dollars”, and so is a message that is nothing but an amount. That sounds obvious and it is the thing most systems get wrong: they want the word “budget” next to the number, so the ladder dies on its last rung while the person on the other end types “i just gave it to you??”.

A bare figure only counts as an answer on the turn the figure was asked for. Off that turn a number is a number. That gate is the whole safety argument for reading it loosely in the first place.

It also hears the half a form cannot hold. “More modern”, “I don’t like the interior”, “too dark”. Those never become a filter and they are never quoted back at somebody as if they were a fact about a home. They reorder what is already in range, and nothing else. What Lewis cannot place, it asks about, as an ordinary message.

Step 06: the handover, and when it happens

Two replies from the lead, and two of budget / timeline / area confirmed by the lead, not inferred, not assumed from a note. Those are defaults and they are a dial rather than a constant.

A lead who asks outright (“can you show me Saturday?”) is never gated by any of that. That is a deterministic rule, not a judgement call, because somebody asking to see a house is the single clearest signal in this business and a threshold that could swallow it would be indefensible.