AVC: 91 MQLs in two months selling eclipse glasses to city councils and businesses.

Context

AVC (Astronomía Visión Certificada) designs, produces and ships certified, customized eclipse glasses. Founder Nuño Ibáñez started the project almost by chance as a side venture, then saw the opportunity: the August 12, 2026 eclipse would bring a surge in demand, while few people were paying attention. The project needed to reach thousands of municipalities before summer, but no ready-made database of municipal decision-makers existed.

Challenge

AVC’s strongest buyer was a city council organizing activities for local residents. The team needed to find the right contact in each municipality, build a reliable sending infrastructure and launch campaigns in time for the eclipse. The opportunity also extended to corporate gifting, with a separate B2B audience.

AVC had a deadline: the August 12, 2026 eclipse

Nuño Ibáñez saw a time-sensitive opportunity: everyone would need eclipse glasses, but awareness was still low. AVC needed to reach thousands of city councils before summer. There was no ready-to-use database of municipal decision-makers, so the team had to build one while preparing the outbound system.

Reverrr built the municipal database and sending infrastructure

1. 01

   Map: a database that didn’t exist

   Municipalities were segmented by population, with verified mayoral contacts. In Clay, one prompt found each organization’s website and another extracted its contact email. For the B2B line, we built a list of 1,919 companies with 51 to 5,000 employees, targeting Marketing and HR.

2. 02

   Track: tiers and an opportunity signal

   Municipalities were tiered by size, with an additional opportunity signal: the “Pueblos con Vida” grant from the Community of Madrid.

3. 03

   Run: dedicated sending infrastructure and 11 campaigns

   We set up inboxes in Zapmail, verified addresses with MillionVerifier and sent only to valid emails. Each account sent 20 emails per day, in plain text, across 11 Instantly campaigns. The bounce rate stayed at 0.59%.

The shift that unlocked it

For towns with fewer than 500 residents, contacting the mayor directly instead of a generic department made the difference. That campaign achieved a 7.83% reply rate, 6.5 times the project-wide average.

When the “Pueblos con Vida” grant became available, we launched a campaign to 179 city councils within days. Not every segment performed equally: a campaign to educational institutions sent 1,707 emails without a human reply, partly because schools close at the end of June. However, one school later called after receiving the emails and purchased 600 pairs of glasses.

Results

Across two months of campaigns, AVC generated 91 MQLs from 16,486 emails. The project-wide reply rate was 1.19%; targeted campaigns performed better, including 7.83% for the small-municipality mayor segment, 3.44% for that tier in aggregate and 3.22% for the Madrid grant campaign.

Orders cited during follow-up included the German School of Zaragoza: 600 pairs, which Nuño attributed to the emails.

Here’s how it works today, operated by AVC:

• Each municipality segment has its own campaign and message.
• External signals, such as a grant, can trigger a new campaign within days.
• AVC kept the domains, lists, Clay templates and operating guide, including continuous warm-up, reserve accounts and a monthly inbox-placement test.

What this means for you

If you sell to the public sector or to a niche without an existing database, you can build the list and identify the right decision-maker before the opportunity window closes. This case study brings together the plays “Outbound to the public sector” and “Build the TAM that databases don’t have.”

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