Where can I get sales email lists, how can I verify if an email address is genuine, and how reliable are the sources developers use to find clients?

#279 · why AI agents aren't making you money

Where can I get sales email lists, how can I verify if an email address is genuine, and how reliable are the sources developers use to find clients?

There are several ways to get sales email lists. One simple option is to use a scraper like Pipeline Labs, which aggregates old leads from sources such as Apollo, Lucia, and Zoom Info. These leads aren’t the highest quality, but they’re inexpensive—around $150 for about 1,000 leads (sometimes closer to $180). You can try it for free; I ran a quick test and got 100 leads for just 18 cents, all with email addresses. However, many of those addresses will be outdated or deleted, leading to 'email address not found' errors—that's the trade‑off for using lower‑cost sources. To verify whether an email address is genuine before you send, you can use an email verification service such as Million Verifier or MailboxValidator (or similar platforms). Just upload your list and they’ll check each address for you, helping you avoid bounces.

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Related answers

youtube ↗Cold Email

I'm starting an AI service agency and need to land a few clients for testimonials. What's the best way to find good emails for cold outreach? Also, how do you track down direct phone numbers for the actual decision maker? Appreciate any tips you have.

I feel like I've already answered this, but to be clear, I would use Apify's 1.5 per 1k scraper, which gets you about 1,000 leads for roughly $1.50 to $2. Then I'd run them through Million Verifier to validate emails—I'm not affiliated with them. That would give me about 60-70% valid emails, meaning you'd spend around $3 to $4 per thousand leads on average. That includes phone numbers too, though they're sparser than emails. You could also enrich with something like Lead Magic for phone enrichment if needed, but I wouldn't worry about that right now. [gasps and sighs]

cold emaillead generationapifyemail verification

youtube ↗Lead Generation

What tools or stack do you use to get leads for cold email and enrich them?

To turn those leads into a CSV list, you can enrich them in various ways—Vain and Airbrake now include built‑in enrichment, or you can use any mail finder. I've found that mail finders generally give higher quality results and let me extract a larger percentage of valid emails, though they add another platform to the stack. So that's an option as well.

cold emaillead enrichmentmail findercsv

youtube ↗Cold Email

Are Apollo leads being overused/milked by everyone, causing poor results despite sending 3,000 emails?

It depends on where you're selling to; right now it's August, and many people in the EU are on vacation, so out-of-office replies are common. More broadly, Apollo leads are definitely being milked—many creators have promoted cold email, so more people are using the same leads, increasing message frequency and raising the bar for good copy. As a result, your results suffer. This is typical competitiveness. To insulate yourself, find leads from other sources instead of just Apollo, which is an old database that caches Sales Navigator leads. Go directly to Sales Navigator, or combine it with other lead-scraping avenues like vain.io, or scrape the web yourself using tools like an appy scraper for Google search results, then use a mailfinder to get emails and decision makers. There are many paths to a profitable email campaign; Apollo and Amplify are just the lowest-hanging fruit, but if they're insufficient, you need to go above and beyond.

apollo leadscold emaillead scraping

youtube ↗Cold Email

Do you recommend using an email verification tool like Million Verifier in cold email?

Using raw Apollo scraped emails hurts deliverability, so it’s risky. I still do it sometimes to get campaigns up quickly, but I mitigate risk by using a cheap done‑for‑you mailbox provider (~$3.50 per mailbox). I launch campaigns fast, verify they work on the first send, turn off bounce‑rate pausing, and only start verifying email lists after I’ve confirmed initial interest. My first approach is always run‑and‑gun.

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