#169 · The Bus Stop Framework: How to CRUSH Cold Outreach
The best source is Sales Navigator (or Vain), which gets its data directly from LinkedIn; every lead source ultimately pulls from LinkedIn. Start at the source for fresh, optimized leads, even if it costs more.
Well, logically speaking, if you're searching LinkedIn for leads, you're accessing the same leads others scrape with Sales Navigator, so they aren't necessarily less saturated. You might customize outreach more than someone using AI. Beyond that, I'm experimenting with buying a big Bright Data list of about 100,000 contacts, which will be fun. You can also scrape data sources yourself—for example, if you're selling to MBA students, you could pull emails from a university directory like Stanford's, build a system to click through profiles and collect emails, and get details like their field of study. While those emails may not have high deliverability, the list is large and unsaturated. Creating your own list is the way to get truly unsaturated leads. Another approach is to email conference organizers or managers and ask for vendor lists; many smaller conferences will share them for free. You can then pitch to attendees by referencing the conference. The trade‑off is either paying for saturated, competitive lists or investing time to build your own differentiated list.
If you scrape leads with a widely used tool like Amplify, Apollo, or LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you’ll be targeting the same over‑contacted pool, making it hard to stand out. There’s no more scalable way to scrape than using those shared systems. Your options are to use those lists and excel at differentiating your outreach, or avoid outreach altogether. My best results have come from fully custom lists built from a mix of scrapers, conferences, and niche directories that few know about. Although those custom sources aren’t as scalable, I still rely on LinkedIn, Appify, and Apollo for scale, but emphasize learning how to stand out—because standing out is what makes outreach successful.
Great question — yes, absolutely. The best leads for any campaign are always 100% custom scraped, not pulled from big databases like Apollo or LinkedIn Sales Nav. Think a university directory of business admin students, a Hollywood directors listing that hasn't been updated in 15 years, or niche job sites aggregated by some hobbyist — those you can scrape via network requests and feed into Make.com or n8n. That's how you get the highest quality leads. As for doing it at scale: right now you basically have to design a custom scraper for each website — I think agentic scrapers that can navigate any site on their own will solve this within the next 3-6 months, but until then, I'd charge a per-website fee for the custom scraper build, plus an ongoing fee to maintain/manage the scraping after that.
I usually don't use Ampify to scrape Apollo these days because those leads are outdated; we're sitting at about 20-30% junk leads, which is high. If you want high-quality leads, you need to go direct to LinkedIn and ideally look for people who have posted in the last 30 to 90 days, as older data is incorrect and leads to mismatched locations and business names, making the outreach trash. It's unfortunate, but that's just how it is.