DOSSIER — Nick Saraev's Maker School: the complete A→Z system for finding clients online (domains → mailboxes → warmup → scraping → AI personalization → offers → sequences → launch → retrospective → 10x → reactivation)

Source: 📚 Paid Course — D:\TranscribeHQ\outputs\Courses\Maker School by Nick Saraev\ — 18 lesson files read, 149,421 bytes total:

• 1. Maker School - Pre Program/2. What will you build/2. Three lead generation methods_1080p_transcript.txt (1,134 words)
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 1/Setting Up Cold Email Campaigns Tutorial_1080p_transcript.txt (8,498 words — THE core infrastructure lesson)
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 2/1. Select niche(s)_1080p_transcript.txt (745 words)
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 8/3._Set_up_scraping_infra_..._html.txt (Skool lesson page — THE core lead-sourcing lesson; no video exists for it)
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 10/3._Scrape_1,000_leads_..._html.txt + Day 12/Lead Generation Method 🚀_1080p_transcript.txt
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 13/Crafting Irresistible Offers for Cold Email Success 💡_1080p_transcript.txt (2,020 words)
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 15/3._Set_up_cold_email_webhooks_..._html.txt
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 16/3._Write_six_cold_email_sequences_..._html.txt
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 18/Campaign Email Setup Guide_1080p_transcript.txt
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 19/2._Run_through_final_pre-send_cold_email_checklist_..._html.txt
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 20/Email Marketing Masterclass 📧_1080p_transcript.txt
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 21/Turning on Email Sending Today_1080p_transcript.txt
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 27/Building a CRM for Effective Customer Management 💼_1080p_transcript.txt
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 28/Cold Email Retrospective Analysis_1080p_transcript.txt (1,419 words)
• 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 29/Improving Cold Email Sequences 📧_1080p_transcript.txt
• 3. Maker School - Month 2/Day 11/Generating Specific Niche Leads..._transcript.txt + Day 25/Quick Lead Scraping Task_1080p_transcript.txt
• 4. Maker School - Month 3/Day 1/Cold Email 10x Strategy 📧_1080p_transcript.txt (1,995 words)
• 4. Maker School - Month 3/Day 10/Reactivating Contact Lists for Business Growth 💼_1080p_transcript.txt (3,722 words)
• 4. Maker School - Month 3/Day 13/Increasing Lead Generation Strategies 💡_1080p_transcript.txt

Read: in full, 2026-09-06. Every transcript above was read line by line. The Day 8 scraping page, Day 10/12 scrape pages, Day 15 webhooks page, Day 16 sequences page and Day 19 checklist page were read from the Skool HTML extractions because those lessons have no video. The Month 1 Day 12 Skool page was also read for the lead-file naming convention.

Written for: Sam — the question "how does Saraev actually find clients online, what is the multi-Gmail / multi-domain thing, how do the pieces connect, and how do I run it for ANY of my own projects, A to Z".

Conversion used: ~PKR 280 / USD 1

Epistemic key used in this file:

• verbatim — Saraev's exact words (transcript or Skool page).
• saraev, paraphrased — his idea, my compression, because the original was rambling or repetitive.
• my adaptation — my extrapolation to Pakistan / Sam's projects. Not his. Argue with these freely.
• tension — where the source conflicts with something Sam has already locked. Flagged, not resolved.

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0. The one-paragraph map (read this first, then the sections)

saraev, paraphrased The whole method is a pipeline with seven stations, and the multi-domain / multi-Gmail thing is only station 2. The stations are:

1. Pick a niche (a service + a market type; pick three, let the market decide).
2. Build sending infrastructure — buy 3+ throwaway domains, put 3 mailboxes on each in Google Workspace, connect them to a cold-email platform (Instantly / Smartlead), turn on warmup, add SPF / DMARC / DKIM DNS records. Then wait 21 days.
3. Build scraping infrastructure — a repeatable way to turn "people in my niche" into a spreadsheet of first name + last name + email + company, PLUS bio data for personalization. (LinkedIn Sales Navigator → PhantomBuster → Anymailfinder, or Apollo → Apify → derrick-app, or ~8 other routes.)
4. AI-personalize every lead — feed the bio to an LLM, get a one-line "icebreaker", store it as a column.
5. Write offers and sequences — 2 offers per niche (6 total), 2 sequences per niche (6 total), each = personalization + who-am-I + offer, 3 emails max.
6. Launch on day 21, with webhooks so you reply within 5 minutes, then a weekly retrospective that kills the losers and split-tests a new variant against the winner.
7. Scale: 10x the mailboxes once ROI is proven (buy pre-warmed ones), scrape 3,000 leads at a time instead of 1,000, and run quarterly reactivation on every past client and positive lead.

The reason there are many Gmail IDs and many domains is spam-pattern avoidance: one address cannot send 1,000 emails a day without being banned, so volume is spread across many addresses, and the addresses are spread across many domains, and none of those domains is your real business domain so your real one is insulated if you screw up. Every section below is one station, quoted from the lessons.

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1. Why this exists — the philosophy of lead generation (Pre-Program lesson)

Source: 2. Three lead generation methods_1080p_transcript.txt

Saraev promises three lead-gen methods and defines the term first.

verbatim "Lead generation method is pretty self-explanatory. It's just anything that gets a lead from the big corners of the internet into your email address into, I don't know, like your phone contact book. Just something that gets you talking to somebody essentially."

The economics argument that justifies the entire infrastructure spend:

verbatim "Every single one of these platforms only takes a few hours to set up. It's like a one time cost. And then after that, you just have to spend a couple of hours per week to maintain the lead flow on a per lead basis. So if you just break it down to how much a single lead costs, these are all orders of magnitude more affordable than anything else you could try. I know this because I've tested this multiple times and I've also experimented with like 30 or 40 different lead generation sources in my time in automation."

verbatim "Some of these are going to cost maybe a cent to two cents a lead. ... Pay-per-click ads is a benchmark, which most people believe that you need to do in order to succeed in business. The cost of a pay-per-click ad lead might be $10, $20, or $30. In our case, they're going to be a couple of cents."

The three methods, in his words:

verbatim "So, the very first one is cold email. To start, we're going to build a series of powerful high converting cold email campaigns. I'm going to show you the most cost effective ways to source leads. I'll show you a variety of options depending on your budget and that sort of thing. I'll then show you how to write powerful copy that converts and then how to set up mass outreach in an affordable and what I call risk mitigating way. These are growth hacks, plain and simple."

verbatim "The second big lead generation source that is specifically fine tuned to people that are where you are right now, which is the start line, is Upwork. ... I've made over a million dollars using the leads that I've gotten from Upwork. That doesn't mean that I made a million dollars on Upwork. It means that I made a million dollars over a million dollars with the leads that I've generated from that platform."

verbatim "And then the last method that I want to talk about is the community approach. And this is the most organic. It's the one that doesn't actually technically require any money ... All you really is going to require is just your time to build a little bit of a reputation."

The meta-lesson, which is the real answer to "no matter what our category of work":

verbatim "lead gen methods, any one of these could just disappear overnight. You know, like Gmail could patch their cold email thing. Upwork could become 100 times more expensive. Communities fundamentally could change the way that they work, right? ... you don't need these three lead generation methods to succeed. You just need the mindset that I'm going to be instilling with you to find the highest ROI lead generation source possible."

saraev, paraphrased This dossier covers the cold-email pipeline in depth because that is where the domains / Gmail question lives. Upwork and community posting run in parallel on the same daily checklist (see §12) but are separate lessons.

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2. Station 1 — Pick the niche (Month 1, Day 2)

Source: 1. Select niche(s)_1080p_transcript.txt

He rejects the standard ICP exercise outright:

verbatim "most programs will force you to spend days trying to figure out this ideal customer persona. ... in reality, if you're at the start line of your business, you have no idea what your core virtue is until you've been working in it for at least a few years. And frankly, I personally believe that these core virtues, total addressable market, ideal customer personas, I think that most of that is bullshit."

verbatim "Instead of guessing at what our core virtues are, we're going to test what our most effective niches are by letting the market decide for us. We're also not going to worry about whether our market is big enough to get like a million customers, because our problem right now isn't to get our millionth customer, it's to get our first customer."

The definition and the formula:

verbatim "I will broadly define a niche here as a service plus a market type. ... When I write my niche, I do so in this form. I build service for market type. For instance, we build hands-off customer acquisition systems for videography companies. I build content production pipelines for marketing agencies. I create CRMs for recruitment companies."

His sheet has three columns — example niche, example service line, example positioning statement — and example rows:

verbatim "I build sales systems for website developers. I build marketing systems for Instagram influencers. I build hiring systems for PPC agencies. I build product development systems for SEO specialists."

The task and the time-box:

verbatim "what I'd like you to do today is to pick three niches. That's your task. You don't need to think extremely hard about this ... set a 20-minute timer and get started. If this takes you more than 20 minutes, I'm suspecting you're going into analysis paralysis mode, and you should just pick whatever comes to mind and then move on."

saraev, paraphrased Three niches matter later: two offers per niche (§7), two sequences per niche (§8), and the Day 28 retrospective (§10) picks the winner. Month 2 then collapses to ONE niche (Month 2/Day 11: "these leads are now going to be specific to the single niche that you have picked with us a couple of days ago").

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3. Station 2 — The sending infrastructure: WHY many domains and many Gmail IDs (Month 1, Day 1)

Source: Setting Up Cold Email Campaigns Tutorial_1080p_transcript.txt (8,498 words). This is done on Day 1 because of the 3-week warmup.

verbatim "what we're going to be doing is setting up our cold email today because it takes about three weeks in order to warm up all of the cold email domains and then mailboxes. So the goal here is we're going to finish this basically first. And then by finishing this first, it's going to give us the next three weeks to do a bunch of other great, cool stuff."

3.1 The four ground rules (his "language of cold email")

Rule 1 — one address cannot send volume:

verbatim "you can't send thousands of emails per day from the same email address because if you do, Google Outlook, all of these big mail servers all over the world, these would mark you as spam and they would ban you. The reason why is because typically that's what spammers do and they just identify spamming behavior and they're sort of pattern matched"

Rule 2 — so spread volume across many mailboxes:

verbatim "The way that cold email systems work, like cold email platforms, is they will get you to connect like 20 mailboxes instead of just one. What you do is you distribute that email volume across everyone. So if you wanted to send a thousand emails per day, you wouldn't send a thousand emails from one mailbox, you'd send, I don't know, 20 emails from 50 mailboxes. If you do the math, then that's still technically a thousand emails per day. But now, for every one of those 20 or 50 mailboxes, the volume looks pretty reasonable."

Rule 3 — mailboxes must be "warm":

verbatim "in order to send a large number of emails to people that you don't know, so this is where the cold and cold outreach comes from, your mailboxes need to be warm. That just means that you need to simulate behavior on them. ... the cold email platforms that I'm going to recommend that you use all have built-in tools that do the warmup for you. They simulate the behavior. They have a big network of other email addresses. You send, receive, send, receive. And after 21 days or so, after three weeks, you've simulated enough behavior sufficiently for the major platforms not to think that you're like, you know, trying to spam"

Rule 4 — recipients can mark you as spam, and that poisons everything similar:

verbatim "the recipients of your email, they also have the power to mark your messages as spam. And so if they do mark your messages as spam, even if you don't like really look like you're spamming ... this will be a very negative signal against you. It's going to hurt the likelihood of a future message landing in their inbox or in anybody else's inbox to share similar qualities or traces of them. So obviously your goal is to minimize the likelihood of somebody wanting to mark your email as spam. How do you do that? Well, you gotta choose a great list, you gotta write awesome copy, you gotta send it a reasonable volume, and you need to configure your mailboxes properly"

saraev, paraphrased That last sentence is the whole course in one line: list (§5), copy (§7–8), volume (§3.2), configuration (§3.3–3.6).

3.2 The numbers: 3 domains × 3 mailboxes × 30/day

verbatim "in addition to distributing the volume of the email across the mailboxes themselves ... We also have to distribute across the domains themselves. What I mean by this is we're going to be buying multiple domains and then for every domain we're going to be setting up a couple of email addresses per domain. That's how this works. My recommendation if you're starting out here is to set up three domains and then for each domain to set up three mailboxes each. As of the time of this writing you can send around 30 emails per day per mailbox so that's nine mailboxes times 30 equals 270."

verbatim "In practice, I recommend sending less than whatever the threshold is, because cold email is typically growing a little bit more competitive and a little harder over time. So if you try and stick right at the threshold, and then when the threshold goes from 30 to 25, we're kind of going to be left out in the dusk"

Why start small — the sunk-cost argument:

verbatim "you don't really know what you're doing at the beginning and you run a higher risk of like screwing up your emails you know messing them up having people mark you with spam and every time you do that you basically just have to like make a bunch of more mailboxes and then wait another three weeks that three weeks is a sunk cost right so we're just trying to minimize that as much as possible"

Cost-per-lead framing:

verbatim "if you're going to run ads. you might get a cost per lead or something of like 20 or 30 or 40 bucks. With email, you get the same cost per lead, sorry, same results, same outcome for like two bucks if you do the math."

3.3 Step A — buy the domains (Namecheap, prefix trick, insulation)

verbatim "First thing is I love using Namecheap. ... The second thing is you need to grab the domain that you picked before. So, you know, workflow loop is an example. Once you have the domain, you need to add some prefixes to it. Prefixes are just things that go before the domain, so stuff like go, get, start, now, hi, hello. So now you need to grab workflow loop, and then you also need to buy another three. You need to buy go workflow loop, get workflow loop, hi workflow loop, start workflow loop, hey workflow loop."

The two reasons for the prefix domains — redirect and insulation:

verbatim "when you make your website, which we're going to do later, you're going to be able to do so at that root domain, workflowloop.com, and then the other ones, the ones that are go, get, hello, hi, start, whatever your prefixes are. you'll be able to point all of those to that main domain so that if you send somebody an email and then they go like, I wonder who the hell this guy is, and they type in your website, it's going to go to the main one. And in this way, you're also going to save your website so that when you have your own business email, that'll be like peter.workflowloop.com. Workflow loop is going to be insulated from the effects of the cold email. So if, I don't know, you really do screw things up or you end up bombing the email addresses, it's just not going to have any impact on your domain"

The live example he actually bought: systemsorcerer.com + gosystemsorcerer.com + getsystemsorcerer.com + heysystemsorcerer.com. Promo-code habit:

verbatim "before you buy, you're going to Google name cheap promo code. ... And I usually get anywhere from, I don't know, 5% to 25% off of my domains by doing this."

3.4 Step B — connect the domains to Google Workspace (the "many Gmail IDs")

The three-layer model he draws:

verbatim "buying the domains is just one part. What we need to do is connect the domains to an email platform like Google Outlook, one of these big names ... So those are two separate things. Then on top of that, what we need to do after is we need to get a cold email platform, which will connect to all the ones in Google or Outlook or whatever. So there's sort of three separate steps here that we need to do."

saraev, paraphrased So the stack is: Registrar (Namecheap) owns the domains → Google Workspace hosts the mailboxes on those domains → Instantly / Smartlead sends through all the mailboxes and warms them.

Cost and the reseller alternative:

verbatim "In Google Workspace's case, it costs about seven bucks per month per mailbox. The total cost means for nine mailboxes, you're spending about $60, $63. ... Basically, spend money on things that get you in front of customers, don't spend money on things that don't."

verbatim "there are some other approaches that can get this cheaper if you are super cash strapped. Like I've seen a couple of the automation companies I consult with, they actually buy bulk domains from resellers. ... Basically you can get that cost of three or four bucks a month instead. ... I don't like doing this because the resellers then have control over the mailboxes and sometimes they just screw up with the setup"

The click-path for the FIRST (primary) domain, verbatim sequence:

1. > verbatim "sign up to Google Workspace ... Because we want to use the domain we already own, we want a professional email address."
2. > verbatim "My username's gonna be nick at systemsourcer.com"
3. > verbatim "Ooh, look at that, $28. Don't be afraid when you see this, because this is just them trying to upsell you on some shit. There is unfortunately no way to get around this, so you have to start with their free trial."
4. Go to admin.google.com → Domains → Manage domains → Verify domain.
5. > verbatim "copy the below code and paste in the DNS section of that domain in your website. So copy the value, and then the default value for host is always just an at sign ... This is the TXT records"
6. In Namecheap: > verbatim "select your domain and name sheet ... go manage, then I'll go advanced DNS over here on the right. ... go to the host record section, click add new record, scroll down to TXT, host is at, the value is this. I sort of like have a weird superstition that I need to set this parameter called TTL, excuse me, to the lowest to one minute"
7. Back in Workspace: confirm, wait a few minutes → verified → Activate Gmail.
8. The MX record: > verbatim "in order to do this right, you need to click add new record, then go at. enter smtp.google.com, set your priority to one, and then set the TTL to one minute personally. But click save, make sure that it's 100% saved and you're good to go."

For the OTHER three (prefix) domains — same thing, added as secondary domains:

verbatim "you need to click add domain, and you just have to add the other domains. So this first one here is getsystemsourcer.com. ... now I need to just add this verification code two more times ... I go at, I paste this in. ... Make sure this is a TXT."

verbatim "Personally, I like to verify multiple at the same time because this is going to take time regardless."

verbatim "all of the secondary domains ... under the status column, they'll be verified, but they'll say activate Gmail. So now we just have to do the same thing ... I'll go MX record, smtp.google.com. I'll go host at priority one. Then I'm just gonna set the TTL to one and I'm just gonna copy and paste these three times."

3.5 Step C — create the 9 mailboxes by bulk CSV (the naming pattern)

verbatim "now we've hooked up those domains to Google Workspace. And now all we need to do is just get three mailboxes per domain. In order to do that, just go to directory, then users. ... you can actually just bulk update users. The way you do is by downloading user info in, sorry, downloading blank CSV template here. Then go to a sheet, open up a new Google sheet. and just import this new thing"

The three-name pattern per domain:

verbatim "I do three variations. Let's say I'm doing get systemsourcer.com. My first one is always just my first name, so Nick. My second one is my first name plus a period plus the first initial of my last name. And the third one is my actual full first and last name. So now we can do the exact same thing again, just for go systemsourcer."

verbatim "Recovery email. I like to just set my own email for recovery. So just nickceraf at gmail.com. It's sort of my like off domain one."

verbatim "The one that we don't need is the main one, nickatsystemsourcer.com. Cause this is just gonna be like your actual business email. This is what you're gonna send and receive emails to prospects with. This is what you're probably gonna sign up to software platforms with. So you can just put that one aside. The ones that we're going to use for cold email are all of the rest of these."

3.6 Step D — connect the mailboxes to Instantly and switch on warmup

Platform and pricing:

verbatim "I want to do Instantly.ai. Instantly for me is just the easiest guys to use. ... Hypergrowth is 97 bucks a month. That's 25,000 uploaded contacts, 100,000 emails monthly. Growth is sort of like the beginner one with only 1,000 uploaded contacts, 5,000 emails monthly. ... We are gonna be uploading 3,000 contacts, so I don't know. Personally, I would do the hypergrowth one"

verbatim "you can get on the monthly play. You can do 2,000 active leads for 39 bucks a month for Smart Lead."

The OAuth trust step (once, in Workspace admin):

verbatim "click on OAuth is what you're gonna do. And then the last thing you have to do is I want you to copy this record ... There's a link right over here. So just copy this link and then paste this in and this will automatically take you to where you need to go. ... Then do configure new app. And what you need to paste in here is you need to paste in this, this long string. Click search, instantly will pop up. And then just click all, continue. This will authorize as trusted."

Per-mailbox IMAP step:

verbatim "open up three of these. ... Head over to the settings icon for all three. ... Then click see all settings. Then forwarding and pop map. And then enable IMAP. Then just scroll down, save changes. Okay, now we've done all of the bullshit. We are good to connect these mailboxes. What you need to do is just click login. You can connect to the first one, click continue, allow. This will now connect Gmail to instantly."

Warmup:

verbatim "go over here to where there's this little fire icon. ... Once you enable warm up, this account will start sending receiving random machine generated emails between other users and Instantly's warm up pool. So click yes, then click yes, then click yes. You are now going to be simulating behavior on these accounts"

3.7 Step E — SPF, DMARC, DKIM (the three DNS records, and the 48-hour trap)

His framing — you already know how, because you did TXT and MX:

verbatim "So SPF records and DMARC records, these are very similar. ... Go to your domain registrar and find the DNS settings. In Namecheap, that's advanced DNS host records. Then click Add Record, and then set host to at and value to this."

SPF — TXT, host @, the Google SPF string, on each of the three domains: > verbatim "That whole process really only took like a minute or so"

DMARC — two differences:

verbatim "instead of the at sign, we need to go and underscore DMARC. And then instead of the v equals spf, we go to v equals dmark1. And we basically have to copy this whole string, but we have to replace the mailto postmaster at example.com and mailto dmark at example.com with the main email address that we set up before. So nickatsystemsourcer.com."

DKIM — cannot be done on day 1:

verbatim "It's called DKIM, but DKIM takes around 48 hours or so. So just set a calendar reminder on how to do this in two days. ... we just go back to admin.google.com ... just type in DKIM up here. ... You just need to generate a record, like a very special record. ... Google domain key, then TXT record value. ... And then in two days, all we need to do is we just need to click start authentication"

saraev, paraphrased He mis-pastes DKIM keys between domains twice on camera and corrects himself — the lesson embedded there is that each domain has its own DKIM key; do not copy one key across domains.

3.8 Total cost of the starter stack

verbatim "The total cost in order to run an email system like this, as you can see, at nine emails, that's 63 bucks a month plus 90 something bucks a month for instantly. If you want to do smart lead, it's a little bit cheaper. ... that can bring your cost from 150 down to 160 down to, I don't know, I guess like about 100 bucks a month or so. Regardless, I wouldn't count the pennies. I would just get going."

verbatim "The second that you have the cold email, good to go. We don't need to worry about like the specific configuration for another 21 days. And between now and those 21 days, you're going to talk to enough people that it's actually somewhat likely that you're going to have at least a customer by then."

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4. Station 2b — the mid-warmup checks (Day 18) and the Instantly masterclass (Day 20)

Source: Campaign Email Setup Guide + Email Marketing Masterclass transcripts.

verbatim "our campaigns are now just three days away from sending. ... If we have any issues with our DKIM, DMARC, SPF, the setup and configuration of our campaigns, that sort of thing, now is the time to fix this. Now, instantly it's really easy. You just go to the top right hand corner of the page, you click this little button. It's this little grid with four boxes and one is a check mark. ... it'll automatically check if all of those records are done. And if they aren't, a little red box will pop up under the email that you need to fix."

Day 20 is a reading day — Instantly's own masterclass:

verbatim "You're going to learn stuff like 600 templates that you could use for your cold email. You're going to learn how to upload leads with CSVs, how to add leads to campaigns automatically. You're going to learn all about variables, spin tax, delivery optimization, HTML, how to do personalized videos and images. ... I recommend you set aside at least an hour of your time today to go through this in large detail."

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5. Station 3 — The scraping infrastructure: HOW the search is actually done (Month 1, Day 8)

Source: Day 8/3._Set_up_scraping_infra_..._html.txt — Skool page, no video. This is the answer to "how is the search done".

5.1 Framing

verbatim "Today, we're going to set up your email scraping infrastructure. In Month 1, we're going to scrape 4,000 emails, but this infrastructure will last you much longer than that. This will be a reusable, repackagable system that you can rely on for your own cold email outreach, and any client work that you do (i.e if you sell a cold email system to someone else), too."

verbatim "It is very difficult to scrape emails for free. Emails are one of those things where, when you spend a bit of money, it saves you a disproportionate amount of time. The difference between spending $0.00 per lead and $0.01 per lead, for example, is not just one cent—it's dozens of hours (or weeks of progress, whichever is larger)."

5.2 The definition of a "lead"

verbatim "A 'lead' here refers to a collection of: First name, Last name, Email address, Company name/domain name" (Day 10 page)

verbatim "A lead refers to a collection of first name, last name, email address or company name or domain name. So you need one of these two and then you need all of the rest of these." (Day 12 video)

5.3 Personalization is non-negotiable — and why

verbatim "Here's the secret in 2024: you need to make use of AI personalization. I and a couple of other people have popularized this process, and when you compare it to the results people were getting pre-personalization, it's a night and day difference."

verbatim "What is personalization? Simply put, it's using publicly available data to make your outreach seem warmer and more friendly. The impression the prospect gets is no longer 'yuck, another cold email' and is instead 'damn, this person did their research'."

verbatim "Pre-personalization, you might have expected a reply rate of 2%. Post-personalization, it's not uncommon to get reply rates of 5%-10% or more. My best campaign has a reply rate of 25%, though those were some special circumstances. That means, on average, your emails are going two and a half times as far"

The mechanism, four steps:

verbatim "When you scrape your lead, you do it on a platform that includes a bunch of additional information about them aside from just their name & email (bio, description, summary, job history, that sort of thing). Think Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. You send these fields to AI, along with a prompt like 'use this information to create a short, one-line introduction for a cold email'. This becomes a variable called 'icebreaker' or 'personalization'. You then use this in your email copy, like {{icebreaker}} or {{personalization}}. The rest of your email is templated. This lets you get the best of both worlds: a customized intro which grabs interest, and a templated offer which lets you split test your approach."

The example output:

verbatim "{{personalization}} here gets replaced with something like: Hey Peter, love what you do man. I'm a big fan of your podcast on recruitment and find your journey from healthcare -> the agency space really interesting."

Result on a ~400-send campaign:

verbatim "I received another 10 positive replies, all variations of the above. Around a third of them were qualified, and the other two thirds were people interested in learning more about me and my approach. Even when people aren't interested, you'll still get a number of warm replies with this approach that you can segway into partnerships, social media following, testimonials, and consultations later on."

verbatim "Now imagine if I sent this to 40,000 people instead of 400. I'd have received 1,000 positive replies—many of which I could close. The infrastructure we're going to build today will let us do that."

5.4 Route 1 — LinkedIn Sales Navigator → PhantomBuster → Anymailfinder (~$170/mo)

verbatim "LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium feature on LinkedIn that lets you search for people on their platform using keywords and advanced filters. ... If I wanted to find creative agencies with 1-10 employees in New York, for instance, I could do it easily."

verbatim "The problem is it doesn't let you export this data into a more useful format, like a spreadsheet (LinkedIn would prefer that you use their UX, obviously), and that's limiting. ... PhantomBuster is one of them. They run a LinkedIn-specific service that lets you export ~2,500 of these leads per day (75,000/month at full utilization). You just use their 'Sales Navigator Search Export', pump in your LinkedIn cookie, and you're good to go."

verbatim "Once you've scraped these leads, though, you'll still have another problem: you'll have basically everything about this person except for their email address. ... Enter email enrichment platforms like Anymailfinder. These use AI, web scraping, and their own proprietary pipeline to find the emails of leads you supply them. Generally you need at least their first name, last name, and company name, and it works ~40% of the time. If you supply a domain name (www.companyname.com) you can bump that up to ~50%."

verbatim "From there, you can pump these leads into AI using your automation platform of choice and a prompt like what I provided above to produce your icebreaker. I add each icebreaker to a spreadsheet, then export that to Instantly, Smartlead, or whatever your cold email platform is. Using this method, you can easily scrape ~30,000 leads per month."

verbatim "Costs: LinkedIn Sales Navigator account (~$90/m), PhantomBuster account (~$70/m), Anymailfinder account (~$0.01-$0.02 per enriched email). You also have to spend tokens on your LLM provider (arbitrary) and operations for your automation provider (depends on platform). ~$170/mo + Anymailfinder credits"

5.5 Route 2 — Apollo → Apify → derrick-app / PhantomBuster (~$80/mo, his cheaper pick)

verbatim "Apollo is a lead database that lets you scrape leads based on job title, company size, industry, and location. They have several hundred million contacts in their database and claim to have the most accurate data in the industry. In contrast with Sales Navigator, Apollo actually includes the email addresses of each entry—which makes our lives a lot easier. But. Apollo is expensive. As of the time of this writing, scraping and then exporting 37,500 email addresses into a spreadsheet would cost you at least $1,300!"

verbatim "The real value here comes when, instead of buying each email address like you're supposed to, you scrape them using a web scraper like Apify. Since most of the information of interest is available on Apollo.io and displayed to you in little cards, this is straightforward to do."

verbatim "Using the Apify x Apollo.io lead scraper, you can scrape 1,000 leads per day for $45/month. This adds up to 30,000 leads per month (a little fewer than PhantomBuster). Furthermore, you don't need a paid Apollo account to do this. You can sign up for free with a business email address and then cycle through accounts as soon as you max out your 'email credits'."

saraev, paraphrased Note the second use of throwaway business emails here — the same multi-mailbox stack feeds free Apollo signups. That is one of the "how are all these things related" links.

verbatim "Apollo data usually doesn't come with detailed, user-generated content like LinkedIn does. But they do give you the LinkedIn profile URL. You can easily enrich this using a platform like derrick-app.com or PhantomBuster—derrick-app.com is a spreadsheet tool that hooks up to Google Sheets, and PhantomBuster has a module that takes as input a LinkedIn profile URL and outputs a spreadsheet with the data of interest. ... Since ~75% of Apollo leads have LinkedIn URLs, you'll be able to acquire the majority of them."

verbatim "Disclaimer: this particular approach is most likely short-term. You can try it—just know that lead aggregator platforms like Apollo are actively trying to solve this as we speak."

verbatim "Costs: Apollo account ($0/mo), Apify Apollo.io scraper ($45/mo), derrick-app.com (per lead—something like $25 for 10,000 LinkedIn enrichments) OR PhantomBuster account (~$70/mo). ... ~$80/month"

5.6 Route 3 — the master list of other search methods (all 7, none collapsed)

verbatim "The above two are my preferred strategies as of today. But there are hundreds of ways to scrape emails. Here a bunch:"

1. > verbatim "You could get a list of websites from Google search results using something like Apify's Search Results Scraper, then request each website using something like Make.com's HTTP request module -> feed their HTML into a regex that looks for email addresses. You could personalize this with data from the website."
2. > verbatim "You could scrape thousands of Instagram profiles using PhantomBuster's Instagram profile scraper, and then look for email addresses in each bio. You could personalize this with data from the profile."
3. > verbatim "You could get local Google My Business listings of your niche using Apify's Google Maps Extractor. Then you could feed the URLs of the websites into Anymailfinder's 'Company Search'. You could personalize this with data from the websites or the Google My Business Listing."
4. > verbatim "You could scrape thousands of TikTok profiles using Apify's TikTok profile scraper, and then look for emails in each bio. You could personalize using data from the bios, video descriptions, etc."
5. > verbatim "You could buy leads using Instantly's Lead Finder, then enrich them using their Lead Enrichment tool. You could personalize them using the LinkedIn descriptions provided by said enrichment."
6. > verbatim "You could scrape Twitter profiles using PhantomBuster's Twitter profile scraper, then look for email addresses in each bio. You could personalize this with data from each Twitter profile/bio."
7. The universal rule: > verbatim "More generally, you can feed basically any first name, last name, and company names/company domains into an email enrichment platform like Anymailfinder or DropContact and you'll get ~40% results—so as long as you have a method that lets you generate contacts, you can leverage it."

saraev, paraphrased Item 3 (Google Maps → Anymailfinder company search) is the one that answers "clients who are sitting there physically" — it is the route for local, brick-and-mortar businesses.

5.7 The Day 8 task — 25 leads, then the Make.com personalizer

verbatim "your task is to set up your pipeline and try it on a sample of 25 leads. If you've chosen the first route, for example, get Sales Navigator, create a sample search, feed the URL into PhantomBuster, set the # results to ~60 or so, and then feed the output of that into Anymailfinder. If you're chosen the second route, sign up to Apollo, familiarize yourself with Apify's Apollo.io scraper, set the # results to ~35 or so, and then grab the LinkedIn profile URLs using derrick-app.com or PhantomBuster."

verbatim "Once you have 25 leads (I define a lead as their First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Company Name), personalize it using a flow like the one that I attached as a blueprint below. There are notes, so make sure to click the 'Notes' in the Make scenario builder to see them. ... Resources: Sign up to PhantomBuster · Sign up to Anymailfinder · Make.com Lead Personalizer"

tension The Make.com "Lead Personalizer" blueprint itself is a downloadable attachment on Skool and was NOT captured in the transcription — the page only names it. See the skipped ledger.

---

6. Station 3b — the scraping cadence and the file-naming discipline (Days 10/12/14/25, Month 2 Day 11/25, Month 3)

Source: Day 10 + Day 12 Skool pages, Day 12 + Day 25 videos, Month 2 Day 11 + 25 videos, Month 3 Day 13 video.

The volume schedule:

verbatim "We'll scrape 4,000 leads total in the first month, and spread the scraping out over the course of the next two and a half weeks." (Day 10)

verbatim "Go and scrape 1000 leads. If you're a little bit higher or lower, that's OK. But I'm going to repeat this video for the next four until you've scraped a whole 4000 at the end of month one." (Day 12)

Do NOT upload straight into the sender — stage in Sheets with a naming convention:

verbatim "Don't add these leads to Instantly, Smartlead, or your cold email platform of choice just yet. I recommend exporting said leads into a Google Sheet, and using the following naming convention: Source, Segment, Date. For instance, 'Apollo, Recruitment Agencies 1-10 Employees, Sep 4 2024'. Since you'll be scraping a ton of leads as you scale your cold email campaigns, organization is important. Learning this now will save you a lot of pain later."

verbatim "when you export your file, I recommend you follow a similar convention: mm-dd-yyyy-source-segment. For instance, '09-06-2024-apollo-recruitment-agencies-1-10-employees.csv'"

Which enrichment source he personally uses:

verbatim "You can personalize based off website data. You can personalize based off LinkedIn profiles. I usually do LinkedIn. You can do Instagram." (Day 12)

Month 2 — narrow to one niche and start varying the lead source:

verbatim "assuming you're somewhere in the realm of like nine to maybe 12 mailboxes or so, that's what I usually recommend for beginners, you're probably somewhere around 2,500 to 3,000 to maybe 3,500 emails sent. So we're at the point where we're going to run out of leads soon unless we top it up. ... Now that you're in one niche, you can actually vary the lead sourcing. from campaign to campaign or sequence to sequence as well."

verbatim "Make sure that these are leads in your chosen niche because you are now burning through those leads a little bit faster given that we're spending all of our time and energy on one niche." (Month 2 Day 25)

Month 3 — 3,000 at a time, and the then-current tool ranking:

verbatim "You are going to be scraping 3,000 leads now, as opposed to the 1,000 that you may have been scraping last month or the month before. Obviously, the main reason for that is we are now 10x-ing our outbound through cold email, thus 10x-ing the number of leads that we really need."

verbatim "Probably the most popular one right now is the apollo.io lead scraper on appify or leads rapidly sourcing from apollo.io lists. You can of course use my phantom buster. LinkedIn sales navigator approach as well, especially if you want to amp up the personalization, increase the quality and the response rate. But I'd encourage you to play around with multiple lead generation methods to figure out the right one for you on both a cost basis and a results basis"

---

7. Station 4 — Offers: what makes someone say yes to a stranger (Month 1, Day 13)

Source: Crafting Irresistible Offers for Cold Email Success 💡_1080p_transcript.txt

The problem the offer solves:

verbatim "when you reach out to somebody cold before you've met them, before you have a warm connection with them, they will inherently be skeptical. ... A lot of people scam, a lot of people spam. You just need to find a way to beat that skepticism. So in order to do so, you need to offer something that's so good that your prospects logically can't say no to it. This is something that's considered very valuable by your prospect, is super easy to say yes to, and it's not going to take you very much time and money to put together for them."

Worked example 1 — the 1SecondCopy blog-post offer:

verbatim "Just send us a title and we'll give you a completely free 500 word blog post on the topic, no strings attached. ... at the time, a few years ago, AI was not yet understood to be like a writing tool. This is before ChatGPT. So a 500-word blog post by a professional writer was considered very valuable"

verbatim "we didn't ask for anything but a title. ... it might take you 10 seconds to do so. Logically, there's no reason for you not to get back to us because the cost benefit is so out of whack. ... Now, for that campaign, we sent about 20,000 emails. Our initial campaign had a 9% reply rate."

Worked example 2 — the LeftClick appointments guarantee:

verbatim "One of the winners was I will guarantee you 20 booked sales appointments in the next 60 days or you don't pay a cent. No strings attached. All you have to do is say yes and I'll get started. ... all I asked for was a yes, right? Before all I asked for was a title, now I'm all I'm asking for is literally just the letters Y-E-S. ... I ran many campaigns and variations of this offer. probably like at least 15. The best one had a 7% reply rate across a few hundred emails."

The three structural rules:

verbatim "you should structure your offer in a way that minimizes financial risk, meaning it should have some type of free or money-back guarantee component. You should also structure it in a way that minimizes friction, so convenience. You should let your prospects start immediately with basically no work on their end. You should also focus on things that do not cost you a lot of money to produce."

The scalability warning:

verbatim "if you were to get 100 yeses tomorrow, you should be able to do that without running yourself out of business. Some people build offers that aren't very scalable. And so they launch it, and all of a sudden they get 50 people being like, yeah, this sounds amazing. Let's do it. And then they're like, oh, shit, I can't actually do it. So they only say yes to five of the 50, and then they just wasted 45 possible leads."

The 90% formula:

verbatim "I will give you thing in time or your money back. Just send me some input to the process."

Permission to copy:

verbatim "There's no rule saying you have to develop your own proprietary offer either. You can actually just copy someone else's. I definitely did when I started that article offer that I came up with. That was not my own."

The swipe file — all six, uncollapsed:

1. Lead gen: > verbatim "I'll guarantee you 20 book sales appointments in the next 60 days. You don't pay, no strings attached. Just say yes."
2. Content writing: > verbatim "just send us the title and we'll give you a completely free 500 word blog post on the topic, no strings."
3. CRM / PM system: > verbatim "I will build you a world-class photography CRM at no cost. I'll pay for it all myself. I'll do all the work upfront. And only if you like it will I ask you to work with me. Just say yes, and I'll send you a link within 48 hours."
4. Seminars: > verbatim "I'll give you a completely free entry into some super big program."
5. Website widget: > verbatim "I'll build a world-class widget on your website at no cost. I don't charge you anything until you get your first 10 paying clients from it, which makes it completely risk-free. Just say yes, and I'll send you an onboarding form."
6. Proposal system: > verbatim "I'll build you the same high converting proposal template that's made this company $5 million in the last two months. I'll do all the work upfront and only if you like it will ask you to work with me. Just say yes and I'll send you yours in 48 hours."

Why it costs nothing for an automation business:

verbatim "The great part about automation is that the majority of our systems are templated. So if you build one of these systems once for somebody ... you can actually just copy and paste that system again for any future clients."

The task: > verbatim "you're gonna create two offers per niche. So six total."

---

8. Station 5 — Sequences: the copy formula, subject lines, follow-ups, schedule (Month 1, Day 16)

Source: Day 16/3._Write_six_cold_email_sequences_..._html.txt

verbatim "Cold email is right around the corner, so it's time to write six sequences (two per niche). As you can probably guess, each sequence will use one of the core offers we developed earlier. Since we're going to run two per niche, we're going to get to test their effectiveness against each other. This is free data—you should always be testing different approaches during cold email, because the time is going to pass anyway"

The three-part formula:

verbatim "I follow a simple copywriting formula on almost all of my campaigns: Personalization. Who am I/why is this important? Offer."

Part 1: > verbatim "This starts off every email because of how high leverage it is. Clients see your personalization, think 'wow—this person did their research', and it buys you enough time to finish the rest of your pitch. Campaigns that don't have personalization tend to suck, so make sure you have it!"

Part 2, with the template and the filled example:

verbatim "Say something like 'I work with [company]. We do [high value thing], and I was wondering if you wanted [cool outcome].' Then, provide social proof, like 'I just did [amazing social proof] for [other company], and they're really similar to yours, which makes me confident this is worth your time.'"

verbatim "I work with LeftClick. We book ~20 qualified sales appointments per month for recruitment agencies, and I was wondering if you wanted some free leads (I have a lot I can send you!) We just finished a campaign for RecruitmentPros that made them $143,503 in two months. From what I can tell, your businesses are similar, which makes me confident this is worth your time."

Part 3: > verbatim "Last but not least, your offer. Since you already did the heavy lifting on Day 13, you'll simply have to adapt this slightly to context. Once you're done, make sure you sign off with a brief, casual signature"

Subject lines:

verbatim "My subject lines are usually very simple—'{{firstName}}, question' or similar. Sometimes I just send '{{firstName}}?' ... My prevailing principle is do whatever it takes to get them to open the email, even if it's 'hacky'."

Follow-ups:

verbatim "For your first few sequences, don't go crazy with follow-ups. I recommend you stick to three emails total—the first one (with your offer), and then two casual, short reminders that seem as if they were written by a real person. ... Notice how I make use of bullet points to make the email seem shorter. I also tend to re-state most of my first email here (in case they missed it). ... This is the final followup in my sequence, so I let them know this is it. Just make sure that, however you follow up, it seems like you wrote it yourself (ideally on your phone), since that increases the likelihood of a response."

Schedule: > verbatim "I like Monday-Saturday 7:00am-7:00am ET. This depends on where you're selling to, though."

Loading: > verbatim "Once you've finished your sequences, add them to your cold email platform. Make sure to strip HTML/check formatting/do any other platform-specific things you have to in order to make them look good before moving on."

---

9. Station 6 — Launch: webhooks (Day 15), pre-send checklist (Day 19), turn on (Day 21)

9.1 Webhooks — the 5-minute reply rule

Source: Day 15/3._Set_up_cold_email_webhooks_..._html.txt

verbatim "One of the highest-ROI things you can do while running a cold email campaign is getting back to your prospect within five minutes. Leads that receive instant replies tend to convert at a far higher rate—many studies and surveys show numbers around the 400% mark. As someone still at the start line in your business, you don't have the luxury of sacrificing that."

verbatim "Broadly speaking, you'll need to 1) set up the webhook event in your cold email platform, 2) catch the webhook event in your automation platform, and 3) trigger a notification wherever you're most likely to see it. For me, that's Slack—but for you, that might be email, a text message, a phone notification, or somewhere else."

9.2 The pre-send checklist — all six items

Source: Day 19/2._Run_through_final_pre-send_cold_email_checklist_..._html.txt

verbatim "We're making sure this is perfect because cold emails can be very high leverage, so wasting even a day or two of your time because of poor configuration is a lot of opportunity cost."

1. > verbatim "read through every one of your six email sequences out loud. How do they sound? Do you have any spelling errors, or areas that sound weird? Fix them now."
2. > verbatim "Preview each of your email sequences to make sure the variables are filled in properly. The worst thing that can happen in a campaign is sending empty messages like 'Hi , I see you're with ' (speaking from experience)."
3. > verbatim "Make sure your leads are queued up and ready to go. Do you have all 3,000 leads added, with personalization? If not, do that now."
4. > verbatim "Ensure your email schedule is set up how you want it to. ... My preferred times are usually 7:00am-7:00pm ET ... I usually send Monday-Saturday inclusive."
5. > verbatim "Double check your daily volume. On average, I like to send between 20-30 emails/day/mailbox. I've seen people go as high as 50, though this runs the risk of landing in spam more often. A conservative start might be 20 now, 25 in a week, and 30 the next week."
6. > verbatim "best practice is usually: strip any/all HTML, don't include links in the email body, avoid images in your copy, at least a 7 minute delays per email per mailbox, 2 followups max to start."

9.3 Day 21 — turn it on

verbatim "assuming that you follow the program day by day up until now, this is the 21st day, meaning that your mailboxes are now warmed up and completely ready to send. ... Preview your outgoing emails ... Double check your volume settings, make sure you didn't like add a couple extra zeros anywhere. You're not sending 3000 emails a day, you're sending maybe 300 or something. And when you're confident things are good to go, just click launch"

---

10. Station 6b — The weekly retrospective and the split-test loop (Days 28–29)

10.1 The retrospective method (Day 28)

Source: Cold Email Retrospective Analysis_1080p_transcript.txt

verbatim "By now, you will have sent somewhere around 2,000 cold emails, assuming that you took my initial recommendation of nine mailboxes. If you did six mailboxes, it will be somewhere around 1,400. If you did three mailboxes, it would be somewhere around 700 or so. ... we're now reaching the point of statistical significance."

verbatim "Since you will have six sequences total, remember we'll have written a full six, this exercise will also let you identify the highest performing sequence, and then you're just going to turn off the old one. And then tomorrow, what you're going to do is write a new sequence that you'll then split test against that winner."

The instruction to read EVERY reply:

verbatim "read through every reply. And when I say every reply, I literally mean every reply. ... even if it's out of office."

The five questions per reply:

1. > verbatim "are there any spelling or grammatical or other egregious mistakes that are impacting your credibility? ... at the back of people's minds, they're going to think, well, shit, if this guy can't even figure out how to send me a properly written email, how the hell is he going to build me a system?"
2. > verbatim "what email is this in response to? Is it in response to your first email in the sequence, the second email in the sequence, the third ... If the original email is buried in the reply ... scroll down to the bottom of the email ... Then read that one from start to finish and just see if there are any issues you haven't considered, maybe with the variables being filled out"
3. > verbatim "how clear was your value prop in the email that they responded to? Could your offer be better? Do you think that your writing is as tight as you thought it was when you first wrote it?"
4. > verbatim "what was your overall response rate? So count up the number of emails that you sent to new people ... 30 out of 600 would be 5%."
5. > verbatim "figure out your positive reply rate. ... define your positive as any email that expresses interest in your offer or asks for a reply. ... 8 divided by 30 is 26. So you have 26% basically of your total reply rate, which is 5%, is now your positive reply, which is going to be somewhere around like 1.25%."

The benchmark:

verbatim "Positive reply rate of 1% to 2% is actually really good. That means if you send it 100 emails, you're basically going to have a call, which is pretty sweet."

verbatim "record these insights and any action steps in that Google Doc or whatever note-taking tool you have, and then share the findings in a school post."

saraev, paraphrased The Day 10 Upwork retrospective page adds the timing rule that applies to all retros: results lag, so evaluate weekly, never daily — "most people do that too quickly. They'll experiment with strategy A for one day, not see any results, and then quit."

10.2 Write three new sequences and split-test (Day 29)

verbatim "if one of your offers is performing disproportionately well, I just mean like the rates of reply on that are maybe half a percent or higher than others, you can just repurpose it. Just write a new email that uses that exact same offer. and then use novel ways to present your pitch. So change the way that the information is laid out, experiment with maybe really short form stuff versus long form stuff"

verbatim "in instantly, the way to do it is really easy. We just have like a little variant picker. Same thing in SmartLead, you can just create split tests and variants, but basically do this in the same sequence as your original campaign, just so you can test it against your old emails"

verbatim "if your first week or your first couple of weeks your campaign was at like 1% or something, just know that that's basically the worst your campaign will ever be because it's just going to slowly improve."

Month 3 cadence change: > verbatim "we're just going to do our cold email retrospectives every five days from here on out." (Month 3 Day 1)

---

11. Station 6c — The CRM, only when you need it (Day 27)

Source: Building a CRM for Effective Customer Management 💼_1080p_transcript.txt

verbatim "Too many people spend all their time making CRMs and project management systems and how even automations before they've acquired their first customer. ... We're only going to build things when we explicitly need them."

verbatim "back when I had like three or four leads coming in a week, I didn't really need a CRM. I didn't need one because my Gmail was my CRM"

verbatim "27 days into the Consistent Outreach Program, you're probably now starting to generate more leads. ... because you've recorded 150 videos, sent close to 2,000 cold emails, made a bunch of high quality community posts, you are now in a position where Serum can actually help you, not just hinder you."

verbatim "My video specifically references ClickUp. ... This is going to take a little bit of time. Might be an hour and a half, might be two hours ... don't try and make it perfect. Just try and make it good enough."

---

12. Station 7 — Scale: 10x the inputs (Month 3, Day 1)

Source: Cold Email 10x Strategy 📧_1080p_transcript.txt

verbatim "If you 10x your inputs, you will often 10x your outputs. ... CPAs, and that doesn't stand for Chartered Professional Accountants, it stands for Cost Per Acquisition, can get as low as 10 to 30% of other lead gen methods"

verbatim "Biggest question is Nick. Is it really that simple? I just 10x it. Yeah, you just 10x it. Don't overthink it. There's no magic here. You just buy 10x the number of mailboxes. You start sending 10x the number of emails."

The honest diminishing-returns caveat:

verbatim "you're probably going to spend 10 times the money you're like six seven eight times the results but you're really going to say no to six seven or eight times the results ... even if you get two times the results for spending 10 times as much money it's still positive"

The math, step by step:

verbatim "We're going to start by calculating our cost per meeting and our cost per conversion. ... let's say it costs nine dollars per meeting and I've closed I don't know one in five meetings on average ... and on average I make a thousand bucks That means that I'm spending $45 right now to make $1,000. That's over 20 times ROI."

verbatim "how much money do you want to make per week? ... Perhaps more importantly, how many meetings can you take? And if you're solo, be pragmatic. Let's say your goal is you want to make 2,000 bucks a week. ... if it takes five meetings to close ... that means that you're going to have to book 10 meetings. ... $45 times two, 90 bucks per week, or 360 bucks a month approximately, maybe 400 bucks a month in total. So 400 bucks a month to make $8,000 a month."

verbatim "Now right now, maybe I only book two meetings per week, so I need to scale up 5x. If I have three mailboxes, I need 15. Pretty straightforward math."

Pre-warmed mailboxes replace the 21-day wait:

verbatim "If you are making money, then get on pre-warmed mailboxes. You don't have to warm them up anymore. You don't have to wait. You can jump on a solution like instantly and you can literally buy mailboxes for I think $5 or $10 a month. It's more than usual. But you could start sending that increased volume today"

Domain-to-mailbox ratio at scale:

verbatim "Note that you are going to have to purchase an equivalent number of domains. I do a 1 to 3 ratio myself. So if I want to buy 45 mailboxes, I'll need 15 domains usually. But you don't actually have to do it inside of Google Workspace"

The 48-hour podcast campaign proof:

verbatim "I went on Apollo and then I scraped a list using leads rapidly. I spent $3 on that list. Then I took that list and I pumped it into Instantly's pre-war mailboxes. ... $135 plus the $3 in the lead list, $138. I finished, I copied a campaign from a previous one that I wrote and then within, I don't even know, like 24, 48 hours, I generated 13 opportunities for that podcast campaign."

Alternative mailbox vendors named: > verbatim "You could use Inboxology, you could use cheapinboxes.com or .net, I think."

The loss-aversion argument for spending:

verbatim "I personally think anybody that's not investing at least a few hundred dollars a month is silly, even if you have like a nine to five job and you're making only 3K. Spend $200 a month on that on cold email and just email similar companies offering your services. I guarantee you within a month, you will have 10 job offers lined up"

---

13. Station 7b — Reactivation: mining the contacts you already paid for (Month 3, Day 10)

Source: Reactivating Contact Lists for Business Growth 💼_1080p_transcript.txt

verbatim "one of the biggest points of leverage that you have as an agency ... is your contact list. Even after you guys are done a project with somebody, it's not like that contact has disappeared, right? ... Since you spent money acquiring the lead, logically, if you think about it, your goal should always be to recoup as much of that sunk costs as humanly possible."

verbatim "Anytime I consult with an established agency ... Very first thing I say is like, well, have you tried reactivating your contact list? How many contacts do you have? How many leads have you talked to that have said yes but haven't signed? And then how many clients have you actually worked with? ... Then you can check back the next day, and you can literally have $10,000 or more on your plate."

Why this one is manual, not automated:

verbatim "We're not automating this because if you think about it, like these are clients that have paid you. These people are extraordinarily valuable to you. Even if there's a 1% chance that your automation fucks up or something. The amount of money you're leaving on the table by destroying their goodwill, if they feel like this is just some cheap AI auto-reply or auto-follow-up, is really big. So we're going to do this ourselves."

The steps:

1. Two segments: > verbatim "The first is positive leads that didn't pan out. So people that might have responded yes to your email campaign and then maybe you sent them a proposal but they just never got back to you. ... Or it can be past clients that did."
2. Sources: > verbatim "go through your Upwork messages, see all of the open contracts and closed contracts ... go through your email and just look for proposals sent, proposals signed, or maybe invoice transactions."
3. Research: > verbatim "jump on their ... LinkedIn profile really quickly. ... maybe one of your leads has an active Twitter account for the business, and the business just launched a new feature, right? This is gold."
4. Message rules: > verbatim "express genuine interest in how they're doing, not just their business, but them. But also don't hide that you're reaching out for business purposes. ... These people are going to think that you have an ulterior motive. And it's true. You do have an ulterior motive. So you just want to make that abundantly clear to them. So hint at a solution to a problem they face and just leave it up to them."
5. Channel: > verbatim "do this on as personal and medium as you can. ... you also have their Facebook profile. You'll have their SMS number. ... Actually contact them on like a really like like on the most personal medium that you can and if they don't respond to that then move down the list."

The template he wrote on camera:

verbatim "Hey John, ... hope you're well, man. I saw XYZ company just raised 12.3. You know, huge news. And I remember hearing about how this was something you were pushing for personally. I'm wondering if you've seen some of the recent news around Claude computer use. I remember one of your specific problems was reviewing workplace video for workplace OSHA violations. And I recently built something for a client. That 100% automates it. Given how I remember you were spending around 5k a month on this was curious if you'd be interested to see an example. Let me know can record a vid or we can get on a quick call. Either way appreciate I want you to know I'm thinking about you and XYZ. Best of luck moving into the new year. Cheers, Nick."

Cadence and the maths:

verbatim "I recommend the quarterly for the vast majority of people, because if you think about it, it's just once every three months you get, let's say, 12 new clients every three months. Then the next three months you have an additional 12 clients of reactivation every single time. ... That's like 48 reactivations at the end of the year, which is huge. Assuming that like 10 percent of those convert, you've just added yourself another five clients."

verbatim "This works well for low ticket products like content writing, but a little bit harder for higher ticket products like, you know, five or ten thousand dollar CRM build or whatnot. So be smart about it."

The $10K-from-one-email story: > verbatim "I think I can swing another 100,000 words. And because of that, I made over $10,000 additional through just a single email."

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14. How it all connects — the dependency diagram in words

[SARAEV, PARAPHRASED — assembled from the Day 12 Skool checklist, which lists every day's three tasks]

The four "why are these related" links, stated plainly:

1. Domains ↔ mailboxes: volume is spread across mailboxes, mailboxes are spread across domains, and prefix domains all redirect to the one root domain, which never sends cold email.
2. Mailboxes ↔ scraping: the throwaway business emails are also what let you cycle free Apollo accounts (§5.5).
3. Scraping ↔ copy: the scrape must bring back bio data, because the sequence's first line is {{personalization}} generated from it (§5.3, §8). No bio, no icebreaker, and "campaigns that don't have personalization tend to suck".
4. Copy ↔ retrospective ↔ scale: 2 sequences per niche exist so the Day 28 retro has something to compare; the retro yields cost-per-meeting; cost-per-meeting is the only input to the 10x decision.

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15. Applied — running the framework against Sam's projects [MY ADAPTATION — not Saraev's]

my adaptation Sam asked "for our personal projects no matter what our category". The infrastructure is identical for every project; only the niche formula, the scrape filter, and the offer change. Scorecard:

[MY ADAPTATION] Cost of the starter stack in PKR at ~280:

[MY ADAPTATION] The 10x maths with Sam's actual constraint. Saraev's example assumes two meetings a day is takeable. Sam is solo across five personas plus pipelines; realistic capacity is maybe 3–5 calls a week. Work backwards from that, not from a revenue goal, exactly as Saraev says ("how many meetings can you take? And if you're solo, be pragmatic").

[TENSION] Email vs WhatsApp in Pakistan. Every station of Saraev's system assumes the prospect lives in email. For samaischool-style local outreach the physical businesses respond on WhatsApp. The scrape route still works (Google Maps → phone numbers instead of Anymailfinder), but the sending infrastructure (domains / mailboxes / warmup) does not transfer, and the equivalent WhatsApp-number-rotation problem is not covered anywhere in Maker School. Flagged, not resolved.

[TENSION] with Sam's hard rules. Memory hardrule_agency_crosspromo_lane_no_paid and hardrule_no_fabricated_promises: any Fanvue-agency offer drafted above must be a real deliverable Sam can fulfil for 100 yeses (Saraev's own scalability rule, §7) and cannot promise numbers Sam has not produced. Saraev's "$143,503 in two months" social-proof line is only usable with a real figure.

[TENSION] Paid-API rule. Memory feedback_no_paid_claude_api_for_brain: the personalization step (§5.3) calls an LLM per lead. Route through the VPS-native bridge or DeepSeek, not a paid Claude key.

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16. What was checked and REJECTED (negative space)

• Reseller mailboxes at the start — Saraev names them, prices them ($3–4/mo), and rejects them for beginners: "the resellers then have control over the mailboxes and sometimes they just screw up with the setup". He reverses this in Month 3 once ROI is proven.
• Paying Apollo's list price — rejected: "$1,300" for 37,500 emails vs $45/mo via Apify.
• Sending at the 30/day threshold — rejected in favour of below-threshold: "play it safe".
• More than 3 emails per sequence at the start — rejected: "don't go crazy with follow-ups".
• HTML, links, images in cold email — rejected in the Day 19 checklist.
• Building a CRM before Day 27 — rejected: "my Gmail was my CRM".
• Automating reactivation — rejected: goodwill risk outweighs the 1% failure chance.
• ICP / TAM / core-virtue exercises — rejected: "bullshit ... let the market decide".
• Monthly reactivation for high-ticket — rejected in favour of quarterly: "they'll just think that you're squeezing them for money".
• Judging a strategy after one day — rejected (Day 10 retro page): "life has a bit of built-in lag".
• Daily retros in Month 1 — weekly; only in Month 3 does he move to every 5 days.

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17. Skipped-content ledger

Read but not reproduced here:

• The Day 1 transcript's on-camera fumbling (card declining, tab-switching tips, "I look really cool when I do it") — ~15% of that lesson, no method content.
• Day 12 / Day 25 "Lead Generation Method" videos are the same recording; Day 25 not quoted separately.
• Month 2 Day 18 / Day 30 and Month 3 Day 4/9/18/23/27 scrape-lead pages are repeats of the pages quoted.
• Month 3 Day 5/10/15/20/25 "Cold Email Retrospective Insights" — repeats of the Day 28 method on a 5-day cadence; not opened individually.
• The Day 10 Upwork retrospective page — only its "lag" principle was used.
• The Day 28 transcript's arithmetic self-correction ("my numbers were fucked up back there") — corrected figures used.

In this source but NOT read at all:

• The Make.com Lead Personalizer blueprint (Day 8 attachment) — the actual prompt and scenario are not in the transcription; only its existence.
• The niche Google Sheet (Day 2) — only the example rows he read aloud are captured.
• The reactivation Google Sheet template + message templates (Month 3 Day 10 attachment).
• The ClickUp CRM build video and the Gamma CRM doc referenced on Day 27 (separate resources, not in the lesson transcript).
• The Instantly masterclass (Day 20) — external, not in the library.
• Saraev's YouTube cost-per-meeting video linked from Month 3 Day 1 — may exist in outputs/YouTube/NickSaraev/; not checked.
• All Upwork lessons (Days 2–4 profile/proposal/10-applications, weekly Upwork retros) and all community-post lessons — the other two lead-gen lanes. Each deserves its own dossier.
• Pre-Program lessons 1–6 and "Three cornerstone skills" — mindset framing, not the pipeline.

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18. Method notes for whoever resumes

• Highest-yield technique: the Skool _html.txt pages are where the written method lives (Day 8 scraping, Day 16 sequences, Day 19 checklist, Day 15 webhooks). They have no video, so a transcript-only grep misses the core of the search method. Always ls the day folder and read the numbered task pages.
• Locating a lesson: strip whitespace with sed 's/\s\+/ /g', drop blank lines, then sed -n '/^Day 31/,$p' — the task body always starts after the sidebar's "Day 31 / Congratulations" line.
• Blocked: attachments (Make blueprint, sheets) are not in the library. If Sam still has Skool access, download the Day 8 blueprint JSON and the Day 10 reactivation sheet; that would close the biggest gap.
• Read next, in order: (1) 2. Maker School - Month 1/Day 2/3. Create Upwork Profile + Day 4/1. Send 10 applications + Day 5/3._Create_proposal_template → Upwork lane dossier; (2) Day 3/Building Relationships in Online Communities + Day 6/Creating Community Posts + Day 7/Mastering Community Posts → community lane dossier; (3) check outputs/YouTube/NickSaraev/ for the cost-per-meeting video and any newer (2025+) cold-email infrastructure updates, since he flags Apollo-via-Apify as "most likely short-term".

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19. The numbers on one page — leads per month, leads per day, how they are approached, and the close rate

19.1 How many leads CAN be scraped in 30 days (tool capacity)

saraev, paraphrased So the ceiling he gives for one person with one paid scraper is about 30,000 usable leads a month, roughly 1,000 a day.

19.2 How many leads the PROGRAM actually has you scrape (what he tells students to do)

saraev, paraphrased The scrape volume is pegged to send volume, not to tool capacity. With 9 mailboxes at 20–30 a day you send ~270 a day, so 4,000 leads covers roughly two weeks of sending plus the 3-email follow-ups. He says this directly in Month 2: "you're probably somewhere around 2,500 to 3,000 to maybe 3,500 emails sent. So we're at the point where we're going to run out of leads soon unless we top it up."

19.3 How the leads are approached

[SARAEV, PARAPHRASED — assembled from §5, §8, §9] Every lead gets the same treatment, in this order:

1. Enriched before contact — bio pulled from LinkedIn (his default) and an LLM writes a one-line icebreaker stored as {{personalization}}.
2. Email 1 — personalization line, then "I work with [company]. We do [high value thing]... I just did [social proof] for [other company]", then the offer with a one-word yes. Subject line {{firstName}}, question or {{firstName}}?.
3. Email 2 and Email 3 — two short, casual reminders that look typed on a phone, bullet-pointed, restating the offer; the third says it is the last. Three emails total, at least 7 minutes apart per mailbox, Monday–Saturday, 7 am–7 pm in the prospect's timezone, no HTML, no links, no images.
4. Reply within 5 minutes — a webhook from Instantly/Smartlead pushes every reply to Slack or phone: > verbatim "Leads that receive instant replies tend to convert at a far higher rate—many studies and surveys show numbers around the 400% mark."
5. Book a meeting — positive replies go to a call; Instantly/Smartlead auto-categorise replies positive/negative and can move leads to sub-sequences.
6. If they never close — they enter the quarterly reactivation list (§13) and get a hand-written personal message on the most personal channel you have.

19.4 Reply and close rates, in his own numbers

[MY ADAPTATION — derived by multiplying his figures; he never states a single "lead-to-client" rate]

• Positive reply 1–2% × meeting close 20% = 0.2–0.4% of leads emailed become clients, i.e. roughly one client per 250–500 leads.
• At the starter volume of ~270 sends a day, that is about one new client every 1–2 days, or 15–30 a month, if the copy is at his "really good" benchmark. A beginner at 1% reply with a quarter positive lands closer to one client per ~2,000 leads, which matches his Day 28 line that 2,000 emails is where "statistical significance" begins.
• At the Month 3 scrape rate of 18,000 leads a month, the same maths gives 36–72 clients a month in theory; he warns the real result is "six seven eight times" for a 10x spend, not ten.

tension He calls it "closed one in five meetings" and "20 times ROI" in the same breath as "$9 per meeting" — those are illustrative numbers from a hypothetical, prefixed "let's say". The only campaign figures he presents as real are the 9% and 7% reply rates, the ~400-send campaign with "another 10 positive replies", and the podcast campaign: 13 opportunities from $138 in 48 hours. Treat the 20% close rate as his rule of thumb, not a measured result.