#74 · How I Went From 0 to 100,000 on Instagram in 83 Days
Digital marketing agencies and SaaS companies are the two main niches on Apollo. You can also use depersonalization in cold email campaigns: if personalization isn’t adding much, you can send generic copy that feels personalized. However, for many campaigns you’ll still need to sprinkle in some personalization to keep them effective.
To gather leads on Apollo for your target niches, start by building a list in Apollo (e.g., real estate agencies, hiring agencies, digital marketing agencies). Export that list’s URL and paste it into a scraper like Apify (or Ampify) to pull the data and extract email addresses—this is cheaper than scraping LinkedIn directly. If your initial list is too small (e.g., only 50 leads), broaden the filters (remove overly specific sectors) to increase volume. Export the results to CSV, then run them through a workflow that combines the emails with profile fields (such as headline, title) and uses AI to generate personalized one‑line icebreakers. Finally, feed those icebreakers and emails into a platform like Instantly to automate your outreach.
I definitely recommend depersonalization now. In a recent campaign I tested sending Apollo leads without any real personalization—just solid copy that pretended to be personal. It worked because it required less effort. However, not every campaign can survive that approach, so you still need to sprinkle in some personalization when the copy isn’t strong enough. The best way to find out is to run a test: send a thousand emails with only the first name and company name, no AI‑generated personalization. If the results are good, keep it; if not, try adding back some personalized elements or other tactics.
See cold email as a gradient, not a zero‑to‑one game. Saturation pushes performance down, but high LTV pulls it back up. With a $200 budget, start anyway—your early campaigns will be the worst they’ll ever be, giving you a baseline to iterate on. Get something live, talk to real people, and treat it as an editing problem. For SAS companies, have the client cover domains, mailboxes, and scrapers because the ROI is so high it’s irrational for them not to.
I have. Honestly, most people never get to that point, and beginners often hit perceived roadblocks that stop them from starting. I don’t worry about that; I just send them to all of the audience members. Note that Apollo’s data is a few years old, so the leads aren’t refreshed frequently. When I run out of an audience on Apollo, I recreate the same audience in LinkedIn Sales Navigator and use tools like Phantom Buster or Appify Scraper, which can give me three to four times more leads. You’ll need to deduplicate, but this works especially well for niches with high turnover or rapid growth, such as recruitment lead generation. I also use non‑traditional scraping methods—directories, databases, conference lists, etc.—to gather low‑hanging fruit, then move on to higher‑ROI sources. The key is to start scraping now rather than waiting for the perfect list.