#151 · AI Automation is HORRIFICALLY commoditized...

youtube ↗Cold Email

How should I set up cold email to reach venture‑backed startups?

You can build a venture‑backed startup list in two ways. First, monitor press releases and announcements—many have RSS feeds. Use AI to filter for new funding announcements, extract the company name, then look up the LinkedIn URL and website to find employee emails or add them to a LinkedIn outreach sequence. Second, use a paid database like Crunchbase: for about $199 a month you can scrape up to 5,000 rows of funded companies, which gives you a ready‑made list of prospects with websites and LinkedIn profiles to pull contact data from.

cold emailventure backedpress releasescrunchbase

Related answers

youtube ↗Cold Email

What tips do you have for using cold email and voice outreach to attract investors for a startup, especially when you earn a commission on the investments you bring in?

The creator outlines a straightforward investor outreach process: first build a list of target investors in the relevant niche (e.g., ad tech). For each investor, use a tool like Perplexity or an OpenAI web search to find their last 10 investments and a brief summary of who they are. Use that information to personalize a cold email—reference a recent investment, explain why it was strategic, note that you’re now working with a company that fits their thesis, and offer to share a pitch deck or more details. He also suggests pulling the investor list into LinkedIn to find mutual connections and request intros, but notes that this takes longer. Because investors see many deals daily, he prefers a one‑shot approach: send the personalized email, collect the positive responses, remove those leads, and then optionally follow up with a more nuanced connection request on the remaining prospects.

cold emailinvestor outreachpersonalizationperplexity
youtube ↗Cold Email

What setup do I need to start cold email outreach with a $120 budget?

Use a done-for-you mailbox provider; I recommend Zapmail (with affiliate code Nyx for 10% off). Get 9-12 mailboxes at about $3.50 each per month; with the discount that's roughly $33 total. Buy domains—one domain per three mailboxes—so about 3-4 domains at ~$10 each, adding ~$35. Set up Instantly: the $37 plan works if you're bottlenecked, bringing the total to about $105, leaving $15 for Make.com (or n8n) for personalization. You can also scrape leads for free using Apollo or Apify, then personalize them for a few dollars per thousand. Overall you can start with around $70.

cold emailsetupbudgettools
youtube ↗Cold Email

How can I do cold outreach with little money? I'm starting an agency and can't afford cold email tools; I'm using cold calling instead. Can you suggest low-cost tools or a quick guide?

You don't need money to do cold outreach; everyone has a free mailbox (email). You just need to figure out the email address and be willing to trade some time for potential money. As a beginner with time but little money, you can manually write and send cold emails—each taking 3–4 minutes, allowing 10–20 per day, which is less than an eighth of a typical workday. Tools aren't required; they only speed up a process that's already potentially profitable. You can also send cold DMs via Loom video on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

cold emaillow budgetmanual outreach
youtube ↗Cold Email

Is it okay to use pre-warmed-up emails with different domains, and where should I mostly send my emails or do my outreach?

I keep seeing these videos where people send thousands of emails per day. They do so using a simple tool called Instantly or Smartlead. Essentially these are sending tools that allow you to very quickly procure a bunch of mailboxes and then distribute like a thousand emails across 20 mailboxes — so 50 a day. Super valuable. That's what they do. And then they'll usually send them to leads that they scrape off LinkedIn Sales Navigator. That is the number one source right now. You can scrape LinkedIn through like 20 different ways, which is why it's such a clusterfuck — there are so many platforms.

cold emailinstantlysmartleadsales navigator