AI in Context, Ep 03: Build lead lists

Machine transcript of the replay, unedited. Times link to the moment on YouTube.

0:00So anyways, let's get started because I don't want to waste everybody's time either. I think this is a super interesting topic and I want you guys to automate your leads completely. Like I want you guys to automate everything to do with LeadGen because like it's not worth your time. Agents could do this so well. Oh, I've got the one and only Matt here as well. Wonderful. That's awesome developer. So I'm not going to do a roundtable. I'm just going to get started on this one. Like the goal here is I'm going to talk about like 10 minutes, 15 minutes max on this one, because I think it's a lot more of a conversation to be had than anything else in terms of leads. But let's give you good examples. Yesterday, I was talking with Fritz, we were at the same event, he was at in Boston, best Ottawa. Like if you're targeting B2B, like SAS style people, banks, financials, etc, you've got a lot of data at your fingertips, like you've Zoom info, you've got Apollo, and you have the people to reach out to, right?

1:02But maybe if you're targeting contractors, that's not the right lead list. And you'd probably be much better off going for Google Maps scraping at that point, and reaching out to them via text, or via calling, or things like that. So it's like What I'm trying to say here is we're going to go over building a lead list, but I'm also going to give you like a bit of the of the nuance behind it. The expected outcome of today is I have like a bunch of prompts, is a single prompt actually set up so that you can plug it into Chatty PT or Claude and have an automation that is automatically running in the background, finding you leads and doing things. Is it free? Absolutely not. I am paying money for each of these tools. my cost personally, I'm running around $150 a month for this tool, you can get away with about $30 as like a baseline minimum, which is like $19 for Apify, and then you do most of it through like your Gmail, and like that's low volume. Once you reach a certain volume, you start needing to pay for these things because like you're dealing with bot detection here, right? You're dealing with if your email is sending out thousands of emails, you are spam and you will be shut down. So like there's a reason that we need to do this in multiple ways, so that A, we're respectful, B, it's scalable, and C, we can track all this data, which is not the most evident thing.

2:22So before I get started into that, and I will share my screen and show you the pretty diagram I made that shows you every single step and how to break it down, is there something that someone really wants to get out of this in terms of, I would like to have a thousand leads and prospecting by the end of this, like, tonight. Is there someone who has that kind of idea? Yes, Adam, go. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm actively working on it right now myself. I was previously working with a contractor who put together basically a blueprint to follow for a couple of my ICPs. Something else that I'm thinking about is buyer signals. So I'd like to talk to you about, You know add that as part of the conversation as well because you know, you can say like, oh sure My ICP is I don't know construction companies under 20 people, right? But that's not there's There's a lot more that you can do to cut that down in terms of identifying businesses that are probably more actively looking for Implementing AI So that that's a that's another characteristic that yeah, I'd like to explore And I guess stuff outside of the standard like Apollo, you had mentioned Google Maps, that's great, yeah.

3:43So thanks. Awesome, yeah, super. So like the terminology for this in the industry is omni -channel approach. So like how can I target someone from multiple different angles as well as signal -based outreach more or less, oh, they're hiring for this role. So how do I have crawlers that are looking for that kind of information? What kind of things are available for that? And then how can I act on them in either an automated or non -automated way, but just be aware of it and act on it. So yeah, no problem. I'm going to cover that at the end of it. I have a section for that as well. So awesome. Here you go. Let us go into my whiteboard because I love whiteboards. Everyone who's starting to know me is like, this guy loves his whiteboards. From ICP deletes.

4:32Why do I formulate this way? sending leads to people I sent is not complicated at an equal one, it gets complicated with volume. Like finding a person to reach out to, writing an email to them and sending them an email is simple per se. The complexity happens with regards to doing it at scale and those are most of the pitfalls. One of things I notice with people starting to do lead generation for their own business, if they're novices at it, is they try to jump from crawling to running very quickly and that's why it doesn't work. You need to grow up into lead generation. Like this year personally I've sent out 262 ,000 emails as of like about a week ago when I did my analytics on this. I did not start at 262 ,000 emails. Last year, I did about 26 ,000 and the previous year I did about 260. So I'm doing like 100x increase every single year. And that's normal because I learned a lot of stuff. And then I started applying it and like changing my channels and doing more of it. And that's how I got to where I am now.

5:52So first thing is the process is this you start with your ICP and ICP is like ideal client profile. Now, this is like general knowledge. One of the things that's like a bit of a mind twist, you may have an ECP before you have an ICP, which is you might have an early client profile that is not the ICP that you're actually going to scale your business with. And you need to realize that your first 10 clients are not ICPs necessarily. Sometimes they are ECPs. They're people who are willing to take a chance. They're people who are willing to be in a different mindset. So it's like, take into account that your goal until you get 10 sales out of your outreach is actually to fine tune your ICP to find it and to get to somewhere where it's nice.

6:44Will this work with LinkedIn? Yes, there are ways to make this work with LinkedIn. Absolutely. The restrictions with LinkedIn are, of course, connection requests. You're only allowed up to about 200 connection requests per week. And it is a much more involved process just because you're doing lower volume, higher quality. I've done a bit of everything. Let me get back to you at the end. I prefer starting with email as like a baseline and then adding on more targeted channels because it's in fact the same thing, but just more effort into fewer leads. So once you have your ICP, you pick the channel. So email, phone, in -person, DMs. Let's add LinkedIn here just to make mail that happy. There you go, LinkedIn. You find the people, right? Contact database, Google maps, you can go through LinkedIn sales now at this point. Event lists, I love event lists. Such an easy way to go get quality people. If someone paid money to go to an event and you find a list like that somewhere, a very amazing source, especially like when you yourself go to events, if you have access to people through, especially the speakers who are relatively easy to find, that's great. Right, Adam just mentioned Reddit. Reddit is a very, it's good for branding, it's less good for conversion in terms of outreach.

8:08You're better off using Reddit as a platform to broadcast your opinions and not as much as a way to find people, unless you're doing signal based, hey, I saw that you made this comment, I'm gonna send a DM specifically to you. That's, it's, it's difficultly scalable because of the game anti -bots, and I do expect anti -bots to become more and more of a thing as we go towards AI sloppification of the internet, not less so. So I would take that into consideration. Next, once you find the people, you need to put them into a spreadsheet. Eventually that will evolve into a database, but like start with a spreadsheet. People overbuild very often when it comes to reach. And then you check the list, you make sure, hey, who is my priority here?

8:57If you can contact all of them, great. Oftentimes it's not the case. Your AI is going to find a lot of people, and you need to go through and disqualify. It's better to disqualify than it is to just go wide, wide, wide initially. And it's better to find the people who respond first and then scale that than it is trying to go very wide, because then the signal to noise is just too low. So you want to reduce that and be a bit more conscious of it initially. And finally, reach out, you know, short, true, be honest. So on the reach out comment, I'm going to come back to this, but personalization is pretty much bullshit. I've said this before, trying to do research on that specific person, unless you have actually done research and you care about that individual and you really went ahead, that's only worthwhile in enterprise sales. Most of the time, keep it short, keep it true, follow up with them and then follow up again. So I'm going to come back to this one, really important. When someone's gone through a first sequence, 95 % of people never contact that person again, which is crazy, not every, like in the market at any one time, 97 % of people not ready to buy, like, and then you have 3 % ready to buy and you need to like, you cannot make an informed decision on your outreach based on a single sequence at a single point of time, because that's, it might not be in their moment of buying.

10:37For example, right now, for AI services and like AI Sherpa ship, holy crap, it's the right time to buy. Like over the next two, the last two days, I've had 15 different meetings. And it's like, because it's the right time of buying and also like I've been seed planting on this for a long time. So that's the kind of thing where you need to come back to things and not just send them one and done. And then repeat the cycle. This This is a daily thing. This is something that, in the intent, it's much better off doing 50 a day than doing 500 once and then dropping it. You want to create a system that doesn't require you to think about it. You just want the AI to constantly be finding new people, okay? Okay. Before I go on, because the next thing I was going to do is just like the math with regards to like how many people do I need to contact to get results? Is there anyone who has like more comments other than the Reddit, LinkedIn, et cetera, all this? Yes, I've got Adam. I've heard the industry standard for replies should be around 2%. I mean, have you also like higher or low?

11:48Do you agree with that? So right here, this is the kind of situation where I was looking at a 5 .4 % for initial reply to 0 .8 % because of the copy was different. So where is that 2 %? 2 % is an average. Sometimes I find that 2 % is very misleading. The best campaigns I've ever sent were a 45 % open rate and an 8 % reply rate. And then the worst campaigns I've sent were $5 ,000 or $14 ,000 and almost zero of it. So like take the 2 % with a grain of salt because it is an average. And so it does not take into account those nuances. My indicator is if my reply rate is below 2%, it means my copy sucks.

12:40That's the indicator. If it is above 2%, my copy is good, do more. Cool. Any other questions on this? Cool. So one of the things that I get often asked with regards to outreach is how much do I need to do, right? It's all great and all to do it. We all know why we're doing it because we want to make money, because we want to sell people, because we want to show our service, because we want to get people to come to our event, because we want to get them to make an action, right? But the best way to determine that is what is my capacity to deliver and then walk back from there. So if your capacity to deliver is like five people, so I'm going to use, now that you're, you're my, you're my test gummy for this one. So say I'm doing a new hackathon, right? I want to have 50 people there and I know I want this kind of quality of people and I want them from all over, you know, the U S that's the kind of situation where I would walk back from my 50 and determine what are the actions I need to take with regards to LinkedIn outreach, with regards to Luma, with regards to all of my different channels in order to achieve that.

13:55Because I know that 50 people, I need actually 100 people to fill in the form. For that form, I need 500 people to visit my website. To get 500 people to visit my website, I need to be seen by at least 500 ,000 people in terms of impressions. So it's like, in order to determine how much you need to do, you need to walk back from your objective and determine where that goes. So here I've used like a much more basic example of like, I have a service, I'm a consulting, I'm a product and I want to sell things. For clients per month, well, I need to book 16 calls if I assume I have a 25 % conversion rate. I find that high. Personally, people have this idea that book call leads to meeting within like 10 days, within 20 days. That only works if your business this is actually quite optimized and you have a playbook and things are like already running.

14:51Generally speaking, especially if you're an early stage startup, it's more like a 50 days to go from first meeting to new client and from there to getting money in your account, add on another two weeks because on average, we're not very good at chasing payments and we're not very good at getting money in the bank. So like the time delay between someone booking a meeting and you having money in your account is likely two months. And so you need to take that into account. And this is why Outbound is very difficult for people because it's an activity and delay gratification. Whatever you do today, you're not going to see results from it for two months. And so you need to start somewhere and go from there. So Matt's asking, how would you get started with a new venture if you don't know your conversion rights?

15:41I completely love this because let's go down here. When you start, your first phase is pretty much by hand because there is something about a human going ahead and choosing the people, like having the AI find the leads, no problem, but the human going ahead, finding the thing, and doing something that is very personalized and doing multi -channel that gets a very, like a much higher conversion rate. from if you're doing like a by hand outreach, the reply rates I see are like 30 to 40%. So compare that to your cold email, which is like 5 % if it's good copy, 30 to 40 % is massive. So how do you start is you start with a small select group of people who are either warm contacts is always the best, of course, and referrals. But if you don't even have those is find people who are within your niche and who are available, who are spokespeople in that niche, and they will be your connectors.

16:43I would always start with people who will connect you to someone else instead of trying to do cold selling right from the get go when you have a new venture because you don't have enough legitimacy and you want feedback more than you want sales initially. The second thing is you're gonna say, but no, but I want sales. Yes, but sales need to be earned in that context. And when you're doing the outreach and you're starting from a cold start problem, you do need to grow up into that. The moment you start getting people booking more regularly is your signal to say, I need to scale this. And you're going to also note that when you start scaling, your reply rates are going to go down by a lot. So that's the kind of mental model you need to approach it with.

17:30I'm going to come back to that example, Matt, because I'm going to use that a bit more as an example but when we get it to chat to PT for this one. So, there you go. I don't think there's not much here. So if I want four clients per month, and I'm saying that I have 16 calls, I have 40 replies from 2 ,700 cents per month. So that's a 1 .5 % reply rate. So that's Adam, I'm going under market here because I'm assuming I suck initially. And then I say 40 replies of those 40 replies, you're probably gonna need to chase these people. Like, you're probably gonna need to send them five, six, seven emails sometimes if they're very busy people, because the reality is you're tiny in their world. And when you're doing multiple follow -ups, you're either gonna get a hard no, great, or you're gonna get the meeting. So when you're starting off, you need to push the crap out of it. You need to be really chasing these people a lot.

18:33So what good looks like and what bad looks like here. This was coming back to Adams, but I just wanted to show you some stats here. So this is a sequence which I find very, very good. So I sent out, I've got an A -B test going on here. So this is more advanced. I strongly recommend you do not do A -B tests initially. It's not at all necessary. It hinders you more than it helps you. Just do one sequence per test and just do multiple sequences. same thing for LinkedIn, same thing for anything, find your messaging, copy that throughout. So on this one, sent out 5 ,100 people in this list. I'd sent out 12 ,000 emails on this one, and I got 282 replies. So my reply rate, as you can see, it drops as we go down. Like your first message is probably the one that's gonna get replied to, or your last message. Sorry, first, second, or last. generally speaking, good sequences of outreach are three emails up to five emails.

19:39I wouldn't go more because like anyone who sends me more than five emails, holy crap, it's exhausting, so I find three to five. Nailed out to you to your question, this is a directly extracted from Instantly, which is a platform that allows you to do mass emailing. The reason I use Instantly and And I recommend everyone there's, there's like, there's two, there's two competitors in this place in this space. There's instantly and they're smartly. What they are is they are managed email accounts for outreach. And how that works is you will start with like, I've gotten my, let's say my brand is Lemonbrand .io. Every time I start sending thousands of emails from Lemonbrand IO and if I get told like Like this is spam by people and they like say this is spam, well my rating goes down. Google tracks these things, the SMTP, so the Standard Manage Transfer Protocol, so like the mailing protocol tracks these and your domain just loses credibility.

20:44And so what you want to do is I don't want Lemonbrand to be spanned because this is my email. I really want my emails to go through. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to buy a bunch of like GetLemonBrand .com, GetLemonBrand .io, et cetera, not I -O because that's super expensive, .org is another one, like you can go ahead and get domains like this and then you're going to have like simon .b at GetLemonBrand .org, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? All I'm trying to say here is you're going to have multiple domains and multiple email domains by domain, multiple email accounts by domain, and that's how you get up to 500, 600, 700 emails per day.

21:37Because an email accounts can send up to about 30 emails per day before they start getting flagged and their reputation goes down. So what that means is if you want to reach out to 600 people, 600 people per day, you're going to need at least 20 email accounts, right? Because 20 times 30 is 600. And so if you want, again, you generally need one domain per five email accounts. So if you want 20 email accounts, you're going to need four domains. So this is like, this is the logic behind it. That's why I recommend people use managed services like instantly or smartly for this, because then you're able to do that kind of volume. What's great about these platforms, and especially instantly right now, is what I recommend first is they've got really good MCPs and APIs. So you don't need to muck around with anything. Your agents are going to do it for you. You don't need to go into the platform. You do not need to click on the buttons. You do not need to create the sequences. You just need to talk with Claude or chat GPT and have them set it up for you.

22:54The only thing that they're going to ask you to do is they're going to ask you to purchase those domains, purchase those things. FYI, domains generally speaking are $15 per year and email accounts are about $5 per month. So note that when you scale these things, There is money involved. This is why I recommend you start with your own personal email or your own personal LinkedIn first and before you start investing money into scaling this. This is enough of the theory. Let's go to more practice at this point and show you guys exactly what it is and how things work. So I've got here a chat GPT instance.

23:45And what I want to show you is, like, this is finding the right people, how it works, how I go about it, right? It starts with, like, a single prompt that you will build with the agent in order to prepare things, right? So a clear prompt is something like this. Here's my ICP, right? Who they are, where, how big, who's the signing, what's going on when they need me. Like what is their contacts that would make them a good person for me? So to take an example for myself and this I'm going to open questions to it because I want you guys as real examples so I can give you like instant feedback on this. But like I'm one of the biggest segments for me that's growing is managed service providers. So people and IT firms that are helping me get into their clients by giving them visibility. So I've realized this because A, got really positive reactions, had a few conversations with them, and they told me all their pains. And so I was like, oh, well, now I know who they are. I know what they want of it. I know what's going on in their organization. So to give you guys like full disclosure, managed service providers right now are getting barraged by requests about A .I. and like, what do we do about it? Are we safe? Are we getting hacked? Like today, as of this recording this morning, PHP has this massive breach and it's like host level breach. What does that mean? It's like, it's not even on your website. It's at your register. It's like the hosting level that someone can inject code and get server access on you. And like these things are just going to happen more and more.

25:24And so IT are getting a lot of requests of, are we safe? Is it good? And so like they're, that's their context, right? And so that's a good ICP for me because I know what signals to look for, what type of people to look for, what their problems are, and that will allow me to create really good emails that are relevant to them and tell them, hey, if you're like the other MSPs, this is what I've been seeing. Is this you as well? Would you like to talk about it? That's a great way to start an email. Another way to like, for example, LinkedIn outreach, one of the best ways to do that is once you find your ICP, your first goal is just to get a connection, right? And so in that case, I've been using humor because humor is something that AI do very badly. And so if you start with humor, individuals are like, oh, this is a human. They start they started with a funny joke.

26:18So it's like that allows me to then get into the intro space and talk about myself and talk about them and get onto the call. but this is what I mean about getting in their head and empathizing with them. Adam, I love your questions. Go ahead. So I'm curious, are you selling your service to the managed service providers or are they sort of almost like a partner, like they might become like almost like a white label partner for you, for your organization? In my context, it's more partnerships and I'll be honest, the it's something I'm seeing a lot more recently because people don't trust anything online anymore if they it's it's very difficult for me to sell to a large number of people so I need to concentrate my efforts onto a smaller number of people and use their relationships in order to go into the market.

27:17And so like, in my context, that was like a learning of mine that I've used to adjust it. But it's like, my ICP is people that I want to white label with, with partner with and help them do things. So super, super smart. I think another category that's similar is potentially with like private equity companies as well. Because they have portfolio companies, they want to, you know, juice the hell out of them, they do these roll ups, they, you know, centralized back offices, they're trying to a lot of me, all their portfolio companies. So yeah, I've also looked at managed service providers. So it's cool that you're doing that. Cool, awesome. So like, generally speaking for everybody here, anything to do with AI is your biggest enemy is trust. Is just that people have a certain, have grown a certain shell to AI. And there's a lot of, Because there's just such a big volume of snake oil salesmen people who are saying AI is gonna sticks all your problems you know, there's a lot of personal agents that are just open -claws and we anyone who's Explored these things These things are not yet at a point where they're said and forget they don't learn on the job or anything like that So it's like they're birthed by that and so if you're selling to them if you're outreaching to them know that their minds, they are coming from a point of I don't trust anyone who tells me AI will solve a problem.

28:49You need to go of like, hey, what have you done? Like, what, where are you when you're in your journey? So anyways, I could talk about that a lot. I don't, I don't want to distract from like more tactical stuff because like this is already like very high level right now. but like a tiny prompt is this, I've got my ICP, build me a lead list of the best 25 people to match, use the connected tools, right? You're not overseering the agent and you're also not telling it to go crazy. You're telling it to start with a very small amount of people. What's great about 25 is that a lot of these connectors and these Apollos and these like all of these tools, they have a free tier. And this free tier covers this kind of thing. So it doesn't cost anything to get started.

29:40And I think this is really key because if you do get a hundred credits every single month, these are a hundred people that you can contact too. Those are a hundred chances to get meetings booked and they renew every single month. So create an agent that takes advantage of these free resources, this free compute, this free data and use it, right? Even if you don't have anything right now, even if you don't have a product to sell, use that to reach out to people, find their emails, do the basic things. Are there questions before I go on, on defining the ICP, what that looks like? I've got, I'm gonna share this with everyone, like everyone's gonna get this afterwards, so don't worry about that, but like who, I've got an example here, property management companies, managing rental buildings for other owners, in Ontario, Canada, 11 to 200 people, the owner, president or director of operations, their buried intended emails and maintenance requests, and they're currently hiring because of it, which I'm going to lead into the signal -based after.

30:43But is this clear to everyone what an ICP is and how it might be relevant? Cool, I'm seeing nodding heads, so that's all good. This is AI generated, so don't like go into too much detail here, but it's like once you find the people, go ahead and do like, especially in the beginning, don't blindly trust AI, use your judgment, you're the person building this thing, you're the person doing this work, use your judgment and go ahead and go through the list. You're not probably not going to need to remove duplicates or people and you do not contact lists at this point, this is just AIBA. AI is like oh you're in production already and you're doing 10 ,000 most of the time in the beginning you're gonna find people check that they're reasonable check that they're like one of the big things i'm seeing with AI is because data sources are out of date often the people in question are retired so it's like these are things that you need to manually check initially and you're going to learn the signals that say okay this type of person is retired all right so once you have that I've made a little tool here but it's like you can insert your thing and it'll define your ICP do this yourself with your own agent like build your ICP if you need to spend a whole session I actually have a friend of friend of mine gap who has a questionnaire skill that actually asks you questions to find your ICP so I'll make sure to send that over actually in the resources as well because it's like a really useful way to find who is your best buyer.

32:20If you are not new, if you're already established and you've had calls with people already and like transcripts, these are gold to find what I call voice of customer. So like go through the transcripts, find their words and use those as the basis for your copy and if you're outreach. Like a lot of people ask the question, what do I talk about? Well, that's a great way to do that. Perfect. At this point, you'd be ready to start. I know I've taken too much time at this point, but like I would go ahead and say, use the prompt .md. Whisper, go ahead. My ICP in this context is managed service providers. I want to be looking in New York City. I want to be looking for firms that are between 11 and 200 people who are looking for, who have recently either hired someone or who are vocal on social media with regards to AI.

33:32So this would be the kind of prompt I would do with agents. Is it going to be perfect? Very much not, but it gives you a very good baseline on which to start, right? If I wanted this prompt to really go get factual information for all of these things, I would need to give it access to probably clay would be a very good source of data for this for like enriching leads. This is what enrichment of leads means. It's like, I've got someone, I've got their email, but I don't know more information about them. That would be the enrichment piece. And that's extremely valuable in terms of how you go about it. So now this girl is going to ask me, okay, who should I target as a signer, owner, CEOs? Yep. Perfect. Wonderful. Like basic stuff at this point, right?

34:24As we wait for this prompt, I want to open the floor. Is this useful to you? Does this give you clarity or like, I know I haven't been as practical because it really depends on you, but is this useful as a framework to approach lead building and lead lists and how to, how to go about it. Where's the chat domain warmups. Okay. Okay. I'm assuming. Yes. Well, I guess I would be interested to find out the stack because you had mentioned Apify. So the actual, so I guess that's what you're going to talk about next. Yep. Is the actual scraping part. Okay, sweet. Yeah.

35:12So Fritz, you had a question as well. Do you want to send it out so I can answer both one at a time? No, no, I was just responding to your comment. I was saying this is definitely useful. My head's already turned in on some of the clients. Cool, wonderful. So in terms of what to use here, let me share share settings. But no, I need to share another screen is what I need. The thing is, in terms of the tools up here, you're going to be using. So for picking the channel, this is your best bets are always going gonna be Gmail and LinkedIn. These are the two most warm places, Gmail, sorry, I should just say email and not just assume you're on Gmail, but email or LinkedIn are the two best channels in terms of conversion.

36:11Every single other channel is useful, but in terms of conversion, people buy through email and LinkedIn more than they do other channels in terms of B2B. In terms of B2C, your outreach is better as a one -to -many, so we're talking more about inbound, so we're talking about more content, and that, in terms of lead list building, its email and LinkedIn are your highest conversions. To give you guys an example, I was doing a large -scale creator program outreach where we are sending DMs through Instagram. We sent 10 ,000 DMs through Instagram, and we got about a 0 .1 % conversion rate. We found those same people, we would send them stuff in LinkedIn and we got an 8 % reply rate and a 4 % conversion rate. So it's just like, it was a factor of 40 because people on socials are there to interact with their audience. If they want to do business, they usually work with an agency or someone else and so it's mostly email.

37:14So like spending a bit of time to think about what is the right channel for them is the best thing that you can do for yourself. In terms of finding the people, now I personally use only three things here. I use Apollo and I use Apify. And then the last thing I use is Claude or Codex. Now Apollo, if you guys is It's a lead list finder like this. It literally goes and you can find people and just if you enter, you have connectors for it. It is just a lead bank. Most of you know what this is. Apify has lead scrapers. So Apify is a service to more or less share or sell scrapers that developers build. and you can use this to go ahead and find leads online.

38:15Now the issue I have with Apify as a source of email, so like this is a very popular one here. Leads Finder, it costs $1 .5 to find 1 ,000 leads, which is about 30 times less expensive than Apollo for the same thing. The issue with that is that they're not doing anything to like clean your beads. And so your actual cost is this ends up costing about 10 % less than Apollo, and you lose out on domain like viability because your your bounce rate is so much higher. So what you're paying for when you're paying for a service like Apollo or zoom info, zoom info, I find a bit too expensive, they went up market and it's not reasonable for most startups is that you need to take into account that the sticker price is not always realistic with regards to what it costs you as the individual. So you can use this as a test, but I strongly recommend start with like a small test and then go ahead and scale it. Now how How would you do this specifically, is you would use something like Apify MCP, and you would ask your agent to go ahead and do this for you. You don't want to start mucking about with Apify's interface. Here, let me just log into my own account really briefly here.

39:47So right here, right here, there you go. Is this the right account? it's not but it doesn't really matter so like if I go ahead and do lead finder here there you go lead finder and I try for free now um so you can see here they're actually pushing the mcp um this is what the interface looks like you see I've got the job title location da da da da da da um it's it's a lot of hassle for you to click through this interface. And I strongly recommend you not do it. I strongly recommend you use natural language, you follow a process of dividing the MCP, and then ask the agent to go ahead and use the MCP to go fill out all this information and find you a thousand leads. Now note here that Apify gives you $5 of free credits every single month. So again, if you're using this $1 .5 per 1K leads, that's 4 ,000 potential leads. Now assume that 50 % of your list is garbage because like bounces and things like that, you're looking at about 2 ,000 people. That's huge for literally free.

41:06So that's a great place to get started. You can either do this or you can go towards something like Apollo 100. You get a hundred for free and then you, I think it's $50 or $59 a month and then you get like 2 ,500 credits, and you're pretty sure at that point that you're going to get 2 ,500 people. So there you go, find the people. In terms of how do I log these things, you start it with really a basic spreadsheet and again, ask your agent to go directly from Apify into the spreadsheet, right? So if I go here and I say, it has a short list. So right now it's not even using any of the scrapers. I can say, use Apify MCP and do, do, do, and leads Finder to build a list of 8 ,000 people in the U .S. that are professional services business with more than 10 people.

42:16This would be an example of something. Of course, my ICP is really badly defined here, but this is all you need to do with with regards to that, as long as the Apify is connected or you have installed the MCP here, everything is good. The way you would install the MCP is you'd go to your sidebar, you'd go to your account down here, you'd go to your settings, you'd go to your connections, your MCPs, and then you'd go, not connection, sorry, but connect. Did you miss the share, the last share of the... Oh, I'm so very sorry. You're completely right. I have not shared my screen over. The, I'm not... There you go. There you go. And back to chatgpt.

43:10Thank you for telling me that. So as you can see here, Apafy does not, like Apollo has a connector. So like I could browse the directory here and go get Apollo. And that's immediately in here. You also have Apify. Apify does not have a plugin. What you'd need to do is you'd need to add that manually by creating a custom MCP server right here. And you can go ahead and insert OAuth right there and go through that. That's if you want to do it the traditional fashion. What I recommend always, of course, is to go ahead and find US Professional Services, go ahead and ask your agent to connect it instead. So you see right now it's going to connect Apify MCP and then you're gonna approve it.

44:03So I would tell it connect Apify MCP and I would give it the reference right here. So you see copy setup prompt right there, there you go. And it has all the information to go ahead and connect to the MCP instead of you needing to do it. Crap, we're almost out of time. There's so much to say about the lead list building. I feel like I should do a part two. Are there any other questions with regards to this? And we've got it to the point where we've started building a lead list. We've got about, you know, 100 people. We're using the free tools right now. Any other questions that come up? Sorry, I had a quick question.

44:58So I guess when you're starting out, which is the place that I'm in, it's not really too bad because there's not much to manage. But as you scale, like I'm kind of curious how you stay organized, because like if these agents are moving so fast, They're almost moving so fast that you can't really like keep up. So I know you mentioned like you want to move it to a database and etc, etc. But how do you, how would you say you keep organized with all this kind of going on? Um, just like, I'm just doing my two factor authentication on this one. But, um, you need to define what is the basic unit. So like, for example, I would create a process that is only finding 100 people a day, like that is his only job. So what we're doing right now is what that agent would do. Like, go ahead, scrape Apify, find 100 people, scrape Apollo, find 100 people. That's his only job, right? Then I would create another agent whose job it is to take that database. So like it will then import it to a database or a spreadsheet. It will take those people and add them to my outreach.

46:19So if I'm doing LinkedIn outreach, so this is for Nilda, I would use something like Hayreach, which is a tool that allows me to send DMs to people via my LinkedIn account. And so it will take that list and we'll add them to my DMs and we'll choose like the 40 I wanna do per day and it will send that. And that's that agent's job. And so if I want to contact this people by LinkedIn and by email, I would have two agents. One of them that says, I'm going to bring it to LinkedIn first. And then another one that's going to say, OK, I'm also going to send them to an email list. And then you have other agents whose job it is to track these tools and say, hey, has this person replied? and every time there is like a new step in the process you need to update that leads row in the database.

47:10So what it is is you're effectively building the system up one rep at a time from going from nothing up to having more and more things on top of it. Does that answer your question? Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Perfect. All right, wonderful, there you go. Allow access, yes. Do you definitely code these agents or do you just do a general GPT with the tool? I would start off this as just threads in your codecs, your cursor or your cloud initially. And that's always what I recommend. Like you start off with just a project folder. So like in this context, if I went over here to my, to my project, I would create a new thread here and I would say, your job is to find 100 leads per day and da -da -da -da -da, right? That would be its job, that would be its thread. Now, of course, I've said this in the first episode, but I'll repeat it here. Um, if you have these things in these platforms, if the app is closed on your computer, it doesn't run, right? So if you want it to be autonomous without you, you need to have this as a cloud thing. You need to have this as a managed agent in the cloud. And I haven't gone over how to do that yet. That's something I want to cover in a future webinar because it's a bit more advanced. But like, if you are curious, you can ask a question to your agent and say, you're caught at your cloud codex, et cetera. I would like to have managed agents running in the cloud without needing my app to be active. How do I set that up? and it will guide you through the process of setting that up in your platform settings of your platform, like of this. So if I go to the settings of chat GPT on the platform, I actually have a tab called managed agents.

49:04And that is where I would set that up if I was going to be using their platform. Abhinav. Regarding the manage agents, could we have like, I've tried this a couple of times, but it is flaky. Could we have it running on our own digital ocean servers where you have cloud running rather than paying cloud Well, I know it's a little bit of topic, but yeah, in that context. You can. Yes, you can. So, to summarize what Abhinav is asking, can I pay for like a virtual private server from a company like Hotzinger or DigitalOcean or any of these services? Yes, you can. All you need to do is use the agent's SDK from whatever agent you want. So, Codex SDK, Cloud SDK, SDK standing for software development kit and allowing you to do that and then you can have those routines. The issue with that is you're going to need to implement observability tools so that allows you to see them in a, like, I use DAGU for that, D -A -G -U, but there's a lot of tools that exist for that. You do need some level of observability. You could use your subscription for it or not? not if you're doing it through a VPS.

50:22I don't think you can, with Managed Agents, can you as well use your subscription? I think it all uses credits, doesn't it? Most of it, it's in shift right now because currently the model companies are going through a platform consolidation, like custom GPTs are getting, see you David, so custom GPTs are getting retired, platforms are absolutely getting consolidated right now so whatever I say is going to be out of date but yeah I believe right now at this moment it is through credits so let's go back to here while I'm at it there you go by the way while we were doing this here you go this was a just using chat TPT we were able to find 25 people that would be relevant with regards to MSPs in New York right I know Tabish by the way. You do? Yeah, they found me on Upwork.

51:24Oh, awesome. Yeah, and then I asked them exactly this. I was like, do your clients ask you about? Claude or chat GPT implementations. And they're like, yeah, we just tell them we don't do that. I was like, what if there's an opportunity to partner on this? Good for you. You go get a word. Go hunt. It's cool. I'm actually out of time. And I have I have another meeting that's going to be coming up. But like, I, I feel like I have only barely scratched the surface of lead building lead list building. So it's a bit frustrating to me, I'll be honest. I thought an hour would be enough. It was not enough at all. What can I send you guys that would be useful? Do you guys want like a step by step? Here's exactly the tools. Here's exactly what it costs. Here's exactly how I do it and like put this in place. Would that be beneficial for everyone here?

52:21Pretty much so. Okay. That would be great. What was the software they used for mass email again? Instantly is what I use. I -N -S -T -A -N -T -L -Y. I will try to focus on tools because people like tools and being able to use it and repeat it yourselves. Um, but yeah, at the end of the day, it's really important to, you know, let me stop sharing everybody's emails on, uh, to everyone, but like it's lead list building is about making it work at a small scale and then scaling it up. Like, don't try to run before you crawl, start crawling, then you walk, then you run. It's so much easier to think about 25 people, which is a human number, than thinking about 2 ,500 people, which is just a scale that humans have a difficult time thinking about 2 ,500 humans.

53:21So start with a small, small. Cool. It was great. Thank you, Simon. Thank you. Thanks, Simon. Wonderful. Thanks for doing this. I will send - Love these, thank you. Thank you, Tharva, that makes me so happy. So I will send everyone the recap the notes and I will make a video on this that's specifically for that Because like it's great for me to have this webinar so that I get some like live feedback So then I can actually start building these things out because like I clearly see that there's need for a lot more Like Going through the weeds and and cutting the grass and making it clearer for everyone here. So it's great. Okay Thanks Marvit for joining. This was really a pleasure so have a good one everyone and I'm looking forward to next week. Bye.