Build a cold list

1. What cold outreach is, and what it builds on

Cold outreach is letting strangers know about what you sell, privately, one to one. Email, phone call, direct message, text, voicemail — anything that reaches one person at a time counts. If you can find a way to contact somebody one to one, you can use it for this.

The volume is the same whichever way you choose: you can knock on 100 doors, make 100 phone calls, send 100 direct messages or send 100 voicemails. It worked 100 years ago. It works now. And when platforms change, it will keep working on the next ones.

It builds on warm outreach rather than replacing it. The recommendation is explicit: start warm before you go cold. Warm outreach here means offering people you already know something free and asking whether they know anybody — no pitch. Until you are used to simply talking to people in general, the cold version is the advanced version of a thing you have not done the easy version of yet.

2. The one difference that creates all the others: trust

Strangers do not trust you. They do not know you. To them you are a weirdo, and historically strangers were dangerous. Your job is to close that gap in as short a time as possible, so that they can know and trust you enough to eventually do business with you.

Compared with people who already know you, strangers create three new problems, in order:

#	The problem
1	You have no way to contact them, because they were never your contacts
2	Even if you can contact them, they ignore you
3	Even if they give you their attention, they are not interested

This page solves problem one. Problem two is on SOP 28 and SOP 31, problem three is on SOP 28 and SOP 29.

3. Three ways to build the list

There are three, and they run from easiest to hardest.

3.1 Scrape them

Treat this as step one. The view here is to subscribe to as many of the list-scraping, lead-scraping and outbound softwares as you can. Search all of them against your own criteria for the kind of customer you want.

Then test before you commit: pull a representative sample — say a few hundred — from each software. Three things have to be true of the sample before you buy more:

• the contact information is up to date;
• the leads are responsive;
• they are actually the sort of person the software claims they are.

If all three hold, you have found a source worth buying from, and you buy more.

3.2 Buy them from a broker

People buy and sell lists the way people buy and sell anything else. Go to many list brokers and ask each to build you a list, giving them the same audience criteria you typed into the software. Most of them will give you a sample list to show you the quality.

A broker is not automatically better or worse than software. Sometimes a broker can be more nuanced than software, because lists are their whole business. Sometimes they cannot. It depends on the quality of the broker, like anything else.

Test the sample the same way you tested the software. Where a broker's sample performs, stay with them and ask for more lists. Some brokers might only have a certain quantity — then buy all of it, and ask them whether they know anybody else, which is the warm-outreach move applied to your supplier.

3.3 Elbow grease

This is assembling the list by hand.

Step	What you do
1	Join the groups and communities you believe hold your audience
2	When somebody meets your qualifications, check the group's own directory for a way to contact them — links to their social profiles and so on
3	If there is a contact route, add them to your list
4	If there is not, you can reach them inside the platform hosting the group — but this is the last resort

Why the last step is the last resort. Contacting people inside the group risks your membership, and if that group is generating your leads, losing the membership costs you the leads it was producing. So look for a way to reach them off the platform first.

Read it as a small version of the whole method: post value in the group, then contact people independently, off that platform, so that you are not interrupting the flow of the group and do not get removed from it. The rule of thumb across every version of this is that you give more to the community than you take.

4. The trade you are making as you move down the list

The three ways get harder in the order given, and the difficulty is the point.

The easier a list is for you to get, the easier it is for everybody else — including your competitors — to get the same one. As you work down from software, to brokers, to assembling it yourself, you move toward lists that have not been hit repeatedly.

Source	Who else has worked it
A $99-a-month software with unlimited leads	Many people have probably already hit those leads
A list assembled by hand from groups you joined	Far less likely that many people have solicited them

The qualifier on the first row is worth keeping exactly as it is stated: a heavily worked list does not mean you cannot succeed on it. It means many people might have hit it already.

The hand-assembled list might be far more responsive — especially if those people have already seen you provide value in the group you found them in. That is the point where the advertising methods stop being alternatives and start compounding.

5. The warmest cold audience there is

Interest groups. A group organized around an interest contains some of the highest-quality leads available cold, for one reason: it is a concentrated pool of people already looking for a solution.

They are already micro-engaged, which makes them problem aware. They know they have a problem, or they know there is a gap between where they are and where they want to be, and they are already searching. You do not have to make them problem aware. You intercept them and provide the solution.

There is software that scrapes information from inside these groups as well, and using it is recommended.

6. The action step

If you have	Start with
Money	Find a scraping tool by searching for an outbound lead scraping tool or a database lead scraping tool, and find brokers the same way
More time than money	Start at the third way, since it costs only time
No money at all	Skip the software and the brokers entirely and assemble the list manually

Most software is not expensive, so the no-money route is for people who genuinely have nothing to spend.

7. Why this channel is worth the work

Seven reasons, in the order they are given:

1. You do not need to make content or ads. Content is a bonus, not a requirement. If you want a business that does not depend on a face or a character, this channel is a viable route to one.
2. Your competition cannot see what you are doing. Everything happens privately, so nobody knows what you say to prospects and nobody can copy it. You can grow as large as you like in silence — as one company in the same space did, reaching $10 million a month from cold outreach while a direct competitor in that market had no idea it existed.
3. It is reliable. Once the first person has gone all the way through, the numbers through the funnel work like clockwork and the rest is volume. The pipeline also stacks: after a year or two you are holding leads you first contacted six, twelve and eighteen months ago.
4. There are fewer platform changes to absorb. Content algorithms change; paid platforms change their costs and their rules and ban whole categories of business. Cold-call law has not changed materially, and the process itself has almost not changed at all. Things have changed — but not on the scale the other channels change.
5. Compliance is less painful. You have legal compliance to satisfy and not platform compliance on top of it. Entirely legal categories are banned outright on some platforms.
6. It makes the business more sellable. A buyer looking at a team of twenty people cold calling every day knows the owner can be swapped without interrupting the flow of customers. A single rainmaker is a much larger risk, and a riskier business is a less valuable one. One business is said to have sold at the multiple it did partly because 50 percent of its sales came from cold outbound, and the buyer could see that doubling the outbound team would roughly double the sales — which is more or less what they then did.
7. It is hard to copy, so you do not have to innovate nearly as quickly. With content or paid ads you need new material, new hooks, new angles and new campaigns continuously. Here you are looking for the right opening script, the right follow-up and the right thing to offer — and once you have them you can run them for twenty years.

8. The checklist

Question	The answer
Who runs this	You
What you are building	A list of strangers you can contact one to one
Three routes	Scraping software, list brokers, manual assembly
Order to try them	Easiest to hardest, which is also most-worked to least-worked
How to test a route	A representative sample, say a few hundred, checked for currency, responsiveness and fit
The warmest cold audience	Interest groups
The community rule	Give more to the community than you take
How large the list should be	Not established on this page
What a list costs	Not established on this page

9. What this page does not cover

What to say once you have the list is on SOP 28, and the reading level to say it at is on SOP 31. How much of it to do, and how to follow up, are on SOP 29. The voicemail that borrows a third party's name is on SOP 30. Warm outreach, which this channel builds on, is on SOP 17 and SOP 18. Using these lists to build a paid-advertising audience is on SOP 36.

Pricing, delivery and the legal requirements in your region are not covered on this page.