I'm building a tool that helps draft cold emails for clients, but we find it's against LinkedIn policy to do so. Is there any way to scrape information on someone to make the personalization part of the cold email?
All forms of personalization and all forms of scraping are going to be against the terms of service of the websites that you're scraping from. That's just how it is. AI agents are really changing the scraping dynamic such that virtually every website is going to be scraped hundreds of thousands of times a day. I don't really think that sort of regulation, if you want to call it that, will ever be able to keep up. So how do you scrape stuff outside of LinkedIn? You can scrape things outside of LinkedIn, but you have to understand that LinkedIn is the whole juice — that's where all of their information is, and they put it on that platform specifically for the purposes of connecting and networking with people. That's what people don't understand: 'oh, you need to opt in.' Well, dude, you're on LinkedIn, which is literally a platform for business communication. It's like, 'add this information so people can help connect with you more,' and they do. It's user-generated — it's all UGC in a way. So that information is up for grabs, and if you can get it literally by just going to somebody's LinkedIn homepage, was it really ever that private to begin with? I don't think so. So that sounds totally fine to me.
Yes, a LinkedIn connection is viable and very viable, but it needs to be heavily personalized. The highest‑ROI way to personalize these days is a Loom video, because video has far more bandwidth than plain text—a picture is worth about a 1,000 words, while a video at 24 fps is worth roughly 24,000 words per second (even more at 30 or 60 fps). If you’re good at what you do, there’s a multiplicative relationship between the medium’s bandwidth and the value you deliver, so using video greatly boosts your conversion rate. After you’ve spent five minutes making that Loom, you should send it through email, your LinkedIn profile (the easiest path for scrapers), and any other platforms you have—Twitter/X, Instagram, etc.—because each extra channel adds another chance of being seen, which raises the expected return on your time investment. As for Instantly, if you’re trying to send emails one‑by‑one with Make, you’ll realistically manage only about 10‑15 a day before you start getting blacklisted, so a dedicated cold‑email service like Instantly is worth using. They offer cheap plans (around $37/month) and let you avoid burning your main domain. While you could split several Gmail accounts and wrestle with Make authorizations, the simpler, more scalable recommendation is to use a cold‑email service to handle your campaigns.
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.
Great question. I'm not a lawyer, so this isn't legal advice, but I've thought through the risk-reward balance. Regulations like GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and similar laws worldwide mainly target large-scale spammers sending millions of junk emails a day. They're less likely to go after someone sending a few hundred highly personalized, value-first outreach emails, especially when the data comes from LinkedIn where users have implicitly consented to being contacted. My personal litmus test is similar to wearing a helmet while ice skating: if you're not experienced, extra precautions help, but they can become cumbersome. I've found that targeting European markets works fine if you play it by ear and accept the risk; otherwise, focusing on the U.S. market avoids most regulatory hassle, pays more, and lets you scrape freely.
Congratulations on landing $2,500—that's more than 90% of the world makes outside traditional employment. You should be stoked. To build the search intent video system, start by scraping the simplest source: LinkedIn jobs. Use an Appify actor (like a LinkedIn job scraper) to pull job postings. You don’t need company details at first; just scrape the jobs. Then, to get emails, scrape or enrich using the company name to find the website, and use a mailfinder tool (any mailfinder) to get emails from those domains. If the mailfinder doesn’t give you the URL, you’ll need to scrape company details to get the website. Once you have the websites, enrich them to find people at those companies, identify decision makers, and then feed the email and domain into an AI tool that searches the domain and combines results with the email to pull out the person's name (e.g., turning 'nick@leftclick.ai' into 'Nick Sarif'). This makes your outreach far more effective. After gathering the emails, customize your outreach using the scraped information, and you can also scrape job details if needed. This whole process lets you turn raw data into personalized, high‑conversion cold emails.