The question I get most in response to this newsletter is some version of "how do you actually find people and email them?"
Three tools. That's it.
Apollo
It's a B2B database. I tell it what I'm looking for (founders in London, under 50 employees, specific industries) and it gives me a list of people with their emails, job titles, company info.
Before Apollo I was manually hunting through LinkedIn and guessing email formats. Now I get a qualified prospect list in about 30 seconds.
Instantly
This is the sending infrastructure. The thing most people don't realise about cold email is that sending from your normal inbox at any kind of volume will destroy your deliverability. Instantly handles warm-up, rotation across multiple inboxes, and makes sure your emails actually land in the primary tab instead of spam.
I tried doing this manually for a while. It was a nightmare. Instantly just handles it.
Perplexity
This one surprises people because it's not a "sales tool." But it's probably the most important one.
Before I email anyone, I need to actually understand their business. What they do, what problems they likely have, what's happening in their market. Perplexity gives me that in seconds. It's the reason my cold emails don't sound cold.
When someone reads "I noticed you're scaling into three new markets this year" and that's actually true, the reply rate goes up dramatically.
How they work together
Apollo finds the person. Perplexity researches them. Instantly sends the email. My AI agent sits in the middle and does the drafting, personalisation, and scheduling. I just review and approve.
The result? 90 personalised cold emails a day. Maybe 20 minutes of my time.
The thing I'd say if you're thinking about doing outbound is: don't start with the email. Start with the research. A well-researched, genuinely relevant email sent to 10 people will outperform a generic template sent to 500. Every time.
All three have free tiers. If you want to try them out: