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.
Obviously you're very financially and resource‑constrained, lacking a laptop, webcam, microphone, and custom domains, yet you’re actively thinking about how to get things done despite those limits — that mindset will take you far. When I say ‘asset,’ I’m referring to the asset‑based outreach strategy I’ve discussed before: you create a high‑quality, customized piece of value that solves a specific problem for a prospect, give it to them with little or no ask, and use it to break the ice instead of sending a plain cold email. These assets are high‑value and very effective when they truly address the prospect’s pain points, though they do require considerable time and effort to produce. Examples of assets include: using AI to generate newsletters from a prospect’s website, then formatting them into a polished newsletter (about 80‑90 % complete) that you send for free; for coaches or consultants, running an automation that pulls the top‑10 trending videos in their niche, feeding those titles into AI to generate a set of strong title ideas, and delivering those titles; video editors editing a prospect’s video and sending it over with a note like, “I love your channel; I’ve edited a bunch of your content for you — just wanted you to have it”; taking long‑form video content, running it through a short‑form clip generator (e.g., Opus, Stockclip) to produce a bunch of short clips, then sending those clips to an influencer or creator with a message such as, “I clipped your content for free; feel free to use it — I do this professionally and would be happy to help you further.” You can mix and match any of these ideas in your outreach. In your situation — no Loom video, no custom domain, no paid cold‑email tool, only an old PC and Gmail — your best leverage is your ability to build such assets rather than relying on pure sales skill. If you need a laptop for a Zoom call, borrowing one from a friend works well. Your resourcefulness and gumption are exactly what will move you forward.
If you're running an automation agency, you have three main options to find clients. First, Upwork: it's the simplest, straightest path for beginners to get your first dollar online, though the ROI is lower than other methods. Second, cold email: cost per acquisition is super low, you can scale it, and you can use AI to personalize outreach; check out my previous videos on my main channel @Nix for details on customizing and personalizing emails. Third, communities: post high-value content daily or every few days in groups where your target customers hang out; this frames you as an authority and quickly builds an inbound presence without the hard work of recording hundreds of videos. In Maker School I provide a daily regimen: send 10 Upwork applications, make a community post, and do cold email outreach each day. I recommend about 270 cold emails per day (nine mailboxes with 30 emails each). With a two-step sequence, that yields roughly 3,240 contacts per month, leading to about 90 engaged people, and assuming a third respond positively, you get around 30 leads per day—fantastic for your pipeline. This is what's working today given your photography background; you don't need to cold‑approach bigger businesses unless you want to, as it's often a pain.
I appreciate the grit — but seriously, try to find even 0 to put toward tools, it'll make your life a lot easier. That said, what you're doing is fine: ultra-personalizing emails and throwing enough of them at the wall is the straightest-line path to making it when you have nothing. I'd combine that with a Loom video or some other custom asset — it's one thing to research a business and write a personalized email, it's another to also hand them something custom while you're at it. I'd also experiment with DMs: while researching a business you'll usually find their Instagram, Twitter/X, and LinkedIn too, so have Claude also draft a customized one-line DM or connection request for each platform and send them all out simultaneously. If each channel independently has, say, a 20% chance of being seen, sending across email plus two or three social platforms takes your odds of being seen from 20% up to around 59% — and if a third of the people who see hyper-customized, well-researched outreach respond, you're looking at something like a 20% reply rate.
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.