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Ask HN: Outsource cold email outreach list?

1 points by alangibson ↗ HN
Received wisdom teaches us that cold emailing lots of potential customers is one of the best ways to get a b2b project off the ground. But I feel like building a 100 person email list is one of the tortures of the damned.

Has anyone tried outsourcing the dirty work of searching LinkedIn and Google for decision makers in your target market then tracking down their contact info? If so, can you suggest any strategies for success?

Note here that I'm excluding the higher value work of understanding the contacts needs and doing the actual personalized communication.

3 comments

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jppope
You might want to reconsider this... if you are trying to outsourcing your initial cold emails you'll regret that decision later. Your first customers are the foundation for everything in the future, and you want to have a solid relationship with them... starting with your first communication.
alangibson
I'm talking here strictly about outsoucing identifying the potential customers, not understanding their pain points or actually communicating with them. Are you saying that the process of identification is itself valuable?
nss00
When creating an initial outreach list it helps to have an ideal customer profile to look for rather than a general ‘job role at company type’ search.

In the early stages, creating this profile might be an iterative process until you start having conversations with people. If you want, I can send you a guide for how I build these types of lists.