u/rasmusnilselid

So I built a tool where I'm able to get emails for 10-20% of the price it costs to buy them from Apollo.

If you wanna know how, read everything below and let me know what you think. 

The way it works is I scrape Apollo data using the Instant Data Scraper Chrome extension. 

All you're doing is collecting all the information for leads except for the emails. 

What you really need is the names of the people and the domain or website for the company they work at. 

Then my tool uses an email verification system and guesses different combinations for what the email could be, using different combinations of the name and the website domain. 

It runs the email verification on all the different combinations and only returns an email to you if it passes all tests. 

It has accuracy of 25-50%.
On average, around 35%.

That means if you scrape a thousand names from Apollo, which is very easy, you get around 350 verified email addresses. 

Downsides
#1 If you have a small ICP/target audience, this is not a way to work because you're missing out on all the emails that would have otherwise returned as unknown if you instead spent credits in Apollo downloading them and then run the verifier.

#2 If you download emails from Apollo or another platform and then run a verifier, you will get a slightly higher rate of emails that pass all verification tests. Let's say you get 350 out of 1000 that pass all verification tests. If you instead download the emails and verify all of them, you might get 450 or 500. 

#3 More work goes into it. You have to manually scrape data using a Chrome extension or something similar, and then handle and process that data. Once you get used to it, though it's simple, and at scale it's certainly worth it, in my opinion. Apollo shows 20 leads per page, and you can go through 100 pages, so you have to do it in batches of 2000 at a time.

Upsides
#1 You pay way less. In Apollo, you can buy 1000 credits for $25. Keep in mind that this allows you to download 1000 emails from Apollo, but roughly 10% of them will fail the verification. Roughly 40% of them will be returned as unknown (Catch-all), roughly 50% will pass all verification tests. So really what you get for $25 in Apollo is like 500 verified emails and 400 unknown emails.
Doing it this way, you can get 1000 verified emails for $3-$5
That's like 80-90% cheaper

#2 This way, the only emails you get are verified and have passed all verification tests, which means they will have an extremely low bounce rate. My average bounce rate on this kind of list is less than 0.1%

#3 This is a good way of doing things if you have a really big TAM, meaning there's no lack of the kind of people you want to email. For example, I'm running campaigns to all founders in Europe and there's over a million of them. I'm not going to be able to email all of them anyway, so I might as well do it this way and get the emails for a cheaper price. Yes, I know additional segmentation gives better results but if you've already done the segmentation and there's more leads than you can email right away, this is a good way to start off. 

#4 It works with leads from any platform as long as you can figure out a way to scrape the names and the websites. It's pretty easy on Apollo if you have a basic plan there. 

Let me know if you would be interested in using this kind of tool at this price point and how many emails would you want to get access to this way 

So I built a tool where I'm able to get emails for 10-20% of the price it costs to buy them from Apollo.

If you wanna know how, read everything below and let me know what you think. 

The way it works is I scrape Apollo data using the Instant Data Scraper Chrome extension. 

All you're doing is collecting all the information for leads except for the emails. 

What you really need is the names of the people and the domain or website for the company they work at. 

Then my tool uses an email verification system and guesses different combinations for what the email could be, using different combinations of the name and the website domain. 

It runs the email verification on all the different combinations and only returns an email to you if it passes all tests. 

It has accuracy of 25-50%.
On average, around 35%.

That means if you scrape a thousand names from Apollo, which is very easy, you get around 350 verified email addresses. 

Downsides
#1 If you have a small ICP/target audience, this is not a way to work because you're missing out on all the emails that would have otherwise returned as unknown if you instead spent credits in Apollo downloading them and then run the verifier.

#2 If you download emails from Apollo or another platform and then run a verifier, you will get a slightly higher rate of emails that pass all verification tests. Let's say you get 350 out of 1000 that pass all verification tests. If you instead download the emails and verify all of them, you might get 450 or 500. 

#3 More work goes into it. You have to manually scrape data using a Chrome extension or something similar, and then handle and process that data. Once you get used to it, though it's simple, and at scale it's certainly worth it, in my opinion. Apollo shows 20 leads per page, and you can go through 100 pages, so you have to do it in batches of 2000 at a time.

Upsides
#1 You pay way less. In Apollo, you can buy 1000 credits for $25. Keep in mind that this allows you to download 1000 emails from Apollo, but roughly 10% of them will fail the verification. Roughly 40% of them will be returned as unknown (Catch-all), roughly 50% will pass all verification tests. So really what you get for $25 in Apollo is like 500 verified emails and 400 unknown emails.
Doing it this way, you can get 1000 verified emails for $3-$5
That's like 80-90% cheaper

#2 This way, the only emails you get are verified and have passed all verification tests, which means they will have an extremely low bounce rate. My average bounce rate on this kind of list is less than 0.1%

#3 This is a good way of doing things if you have a really big TAM, meaning there's no lack of the kind of people you want to email. For example, I'm running campaigns to all founders in Europe and there's over a million of them. I'm not going to be able to email all of them anyway, so I might as well do it this way and get the emails for a cheaper price. Yes, I know additional segmentation gives better results but if you've already done the segmentation and there's more leads than you can email right away, this is a good way to start off. 

#4 It works with leads from any platform as long as you can figure out a way to scrape the names and the websites. It's pretty easy on Apollo if you have a basic plan there. 

Let me know if you would be interested in using this kind of tool at this price point and how many emails would you want to get access to this way 

So I built a tool where I'm able to get emails for 10-20% of the price it costs to buy them from Apollo.

If you wanna know how, read everything below and let me know what you think.

The way it works is I scrape Apollo data using the Instant Data Scraper Chrome extension.

All you're doing is collecting all the information for leads except for the emails.

What you really need is the names of the people and the domain or website for the company they work at.

Then my tool uses an email verification system and guesses different combinations for what the email could be, using different combinations of the name and the website domain.

It runs the email verification on all the different combinations and only returns an email to you if it passes all tests.

It has accuracy of 25-50%.
On average, around 35%.

That means if you scrape a thousand names from Apollo, which is very easy, you get around 350 verified email addresses.

Downsides
#1 If you have a small ICP/target audience, this is not a way to work because you're missing out on all the emails that would have otherwise returned as unknown if you instead spent credits in Apollo downloading them and then run the verifier.

#2 If you download emails from Apollo or another platform and then run a verifier, you will get a slightly higher rate of emails that pass all verification tests. Let's say you get 350 out of 1000 that pass all verification tests. If you instead download the emails and verify all of them, you might get 450 or 500.

#3 More work goes into it. You have to manually scrape data using a Chrome extension or something similar, and then handle and process that data. Once you get used to it, though it's simple, and at scale it's certainly worth it, in my opinion. Apollo shows 20 leads per page, and you can go through 100 pages, so you have to do it in batches of 2000 at a time.

Upsides
#1 You pay way less. In Apollo, you can buy 1000 credits for $25. Keep in mind that this allows you to download 1000 emails from Apollo, but roughly 10% of them will fail the verification. Roughly 40% of them will be returned as unknown (Catch-all), roughly 50% will pass all verification tests. So really what you get for $25 in Apollo is like 500 verified emails and 400 unknown emails.
Doing it this way, you can get 1000 verified emails for $3-$5
That's like 80-90% cheaper

#2 This way, the only emails you get are verified and have passed all verification tests, which means they will have an extremely low bounce rate. My average bounce rate on this kind of list is less than 0.1%

#3 This is a good way of doing things if you have a really big TAM, meaning there's no lack of the kind of people you want to email. For example, I'm running campaigns to all founders in Europe and there's over a million of them. I'm not going to be able to email all of them anyway, so I might as well do it this way and get the emails for a cheaper price. Yes, I know additional segmentation gives better results but if you've already done the segmentation and there's more leads than you can email right away, this is a good way to start off.

#4 It works with leads from any platform as long as you can figure out a way to scrape the names and the websites. It's pretty easy on Apollo if you have a basic plan there.

Let me know if you would be interested in using this kind of tool at this price point and how many emails would you want to get access to this way

I've done cold email for my business for three years now.

Here are some tips for things I've been able to do with Claude Code in the last months that make a giant difference.

When building lists, I start off with a broad company list in Apollo.
Export it for free.
Run it in my AI segmentation tool.
This tool scrapes each website and labels each company yes or no if it matches my ICP or not.
Remove all companies that are "no".
Import the "Yes" companies back into Apollo.
Filter on them and download emails for leads at those companies.
This is a way to get very segmented, specific lists at bulk scale, without doing any segmentation yourself.

I built a similar tool for MX Lookup.
Instead of using email provider matching features in smartlead or Instantly let's say you start off with a list of 10,000 leads, you can build a tool that checks the email provider for all of them. Then if all your sender addresses are Google, you just email all the leads with Google as a provider, giving you a much higher reply rate.

3
Obviously, you need to verify lists before emailing them.
Before I used to just remove all addresses that are returned as failed.
Meaning I would include two kinds of emails in my campaigns.
- Passed all verification tests.
- Unknown. Probably Catch-All.
This meant an average bounce rate of anywhere from 1% to 10%.
In the past months, I stopped including unknown catch-all emails in my campaigns, and now the bounce rate is at like 0,05%.
Obviously, this only works if you have a big TAM and you miss out on a lot of good leads returning from the Verifier as "Unknown".
But in terms of keeping deliverability and reputation clean, this is a great strategy.

I use MailSpot to auto-categorize and write draft replies for all incoming leads showing interest (that's like an email AI service tool).
I don't only do this because I'm too lazy to write the emails myself, but on a typical day I have about 30 follow-up emails to send to various leads that showed interest in the past but then went cold.
The conversion rate of the follow-up for these kinds of leads drastically goes up if you do some account research, researching their company and how your offer relates to them.
This is not something I want to do for 30 leads every day, because even throwing them into ChatGPT, it takes a few minutes per lead on average.
This kind of tool does the account research for you and has a knowledge base of your company, so it's able to automate that process and you can then just proofread the email and send it.