#126 · Viewer Makes $2,500 Selling Automation

youtube ↗Lead Generation

I recently landed $2,500 using your free knowledge and tools. A professional video company wants me to build a cold outbound system for them. I plan to scrape leads based on search intent for roles like editors and then create a personalized cold email engine. Can you give me advice on how to approach this as my first client?

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.

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Related answers

youtube ↗Cold Email

How can cold email work for consultants to get clients?

Cold email works fantastic for consultants. If you run a software development, no-code development, or AI automation agency, you are essentially a consultant. I regularly pitch people in the AI and automation vertical to use cold email to get clients, and I use it myself to get my own clients. The same system that works for you will work for any other consultant. You don't need to worry about whether it works for consultants—it does. Proof is in the pudding: if you're using the system to acquire clients, then by definition it's working. Additionally, you can explore niche packs inside Maker School and other systems you could sell, such as unique repurposing content creators, trend detectors, YouTube comment ideators, and tools like Vid IQ that help find liars for inbound flows. There are also YouTube-specific tools for long-form content creators. In short, cold email is great for consultants, coaches, and similar professionals.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

I'm planning on doing cold email outreach scraping Facebook ad library. I want to send an email to Loom to each person. I'm offering an autoresponder to help real estate agents with contacting leads as soon as they fill out a form. What would be the best return on my time? Cold emails, personalized texts, or creating Loom videos, free trial set agent, sending that in the email.

Return on your time would be trading a little bit of your money for said time through getting these cold email platforms and using AI to personalize your icebreakers and send them out. If you just think about strictly return on time, that would be the way. But in your case, Lucas, from experience, because you're in maker school, I know you're at the very start line of your business and don't have a lot of access to capital right now. For you, it's not about return on time; you can do things that are poor return on time because you have a lot of time. Something that would be a poor return on time would be things like custom Loom videos. Despite being poor return on time, they're a lot higher intent. So there's a difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Right now you're asking about efficiency, best return on time. What you should really be asking about is effectiveness given 12 hours a day. Why not just work all of that time to bootstrap your first client, and once you have some revenue coming in, focus on scalability.

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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.

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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.

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