21:04Patrick Dang · Tutorial
How To Generate Leads with AI in 2026
A screen-recorded walkthrough of using Apollo's AI to find, qualify, and cold-email thousands of prospects — plus the human judgment AI still can't replace.
January 8thThe argument in one line.
List building isn't an effort problem you fix by grinding harder for opt-ins, it's a data problem, solved by buying existing high-intent signals and filtering them through an honest survey campaign before automating delivery.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A coach, agency owner, or SaaS founder running client or personal newsletters who is tired of grinding for opt-ins through lead magnets and ads.
- Someone doing or considering cold outreach who wants a filtering mechanism so a purchased list stays engaged instead of just growing raw numbers.
- An operator who already has a newsletter and cares more about open rate than subscriber count.
SKIP IF…
- You want a technical walkthrough of specific data vendors, APIs, or verification tools — this video names the framework, not the tool stack.
- You're categorically opposed to any purchased-data or cold-outreach-based list growth on principle.
The full version, fast.
Glover argues list building was never an effort problem, it's a data problem, because an entire data-as-a-service industry now sells access to people who've already signaled intent on a topic. His four-step "Qualified Intent Pipeline" runs it: buy narrowly-specific, recent-intent data (not broad demographics); verify and run it through a non-salesy "survey activation" cold campaign offering a free subscription; honor every opt-out, which removes about 40% of purchased leads; then auto-push the qualified 60% onto the newsletter via API within minutes. The result across 17 clients: 79,000+ delivered subscribers at 50-70% open rates. His closing point: the pipeline step is the least important part — intent and qualification upstream are what make it work, and growth alone still fails if the newsletter itself isn't run well after delivery.
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00:00 – 02:00
01 · The List Myth
Cold open reframes "the money's in the list" and promises the real numbers behind a system that delivered 79,000+ subscribers with 56% average open rates and zero opt-in forms, then backs it with receipts: 17 active clients, ~250 cold-email inboxes, 500,000+ cold emails sent.
02:00 – 02:56
02 · Data Not Effort
Names "the old advice" (grind for opt-ins, better lead magnets, more ads) as the enemy and reframes list building as a data problem, introducing DaaS (data-as-a-service) as an industry most operators don't know exists.
02:56 – 04:06
03 · The Bakery Analogy
Contrasts old-school opt-in list building (handing out flyers on a sidewalk) with buying a list of people who searched "fresh sourdough near me" this week — same goal, completely different starting point.
04:06 – 05:29
04 · Buyer Not Product
Points out that personal data is already bought and sold constantly (card swipes, Google searches, ads, even phone conversations) and reframes the opportunity as choosing to become the buyer of that data instead of just the product.
05:29 – 07:02
05 · Generate High Intent
Step 1: spend the most on premium, narrowly-specific intent data tied to the newsletter's exact topic, not broad demographics, because a smaller engaged list beats a bigger indifferent one; shows real open-rate screenshots in the 51-54% range.
07:02 – 08:10
06 · Clean And Qualify
Step 2: verify purchased emails to avoid dead inboxes, then run leads through a "survey activation" cold campaign that offers a free newsletter subscription in exchange for answering three questions, instead of pitching them directly.
08:10 – 10:01
07 · Let Them Say No
Step 3: give leads multiple chances to opt out and honor it. About 40% decline or go quiet and get removed entirely; the remaining 60% are marked engaged and qualified.
10:01 – 11:31
08 · Qualified Intent Pipeline
Step 4: automate delivery of qualified leads to the newsletter via API within minutes of engagement. Names the whole four-step system the "Qualified Intent Pipeline" and points to a free linked training on running the newsletter itself.
11:31 – 13:25
09 · The Real Bottleneck
Closes on the thesis: "the money is in the list" was only half right — it's the list of people who already raised their hand elsewhere. Warns that growth without good newsletter operations still burns the list down, then asks viewers to subscribe and comment.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- The reframe: list building was never an effort problem, it's a data problem, and that problem is already solved by an industry called DaaS, data-as-a-service.
- You can buy a list of people who searched for your exact topic this week, instead of guessing who wants your offer and hoping they find you.
- Your own data is already being bought and sold through card swipes, searches, ads, and even ambient listening. The choice is whether you're the buyer or just the product.
- A list of 2,000 people who open is worth more than a list of 10,000 people who don't, because open rate protects revenue, not subscriber count.
- Buy the most specific data affordable: 'business owner' data underperforms 'business owner who just took this exact action in the last week.'
- Verify every purchased email before use, then run a non-salesy 'survey activation' campaign instead of pitching cold-bought leads directly.
- About 40% of purchased leads decline or go silent during the survey step, and they get removed entirely rather than force-added to the list.
- The 40% opt-out isn't waste, it's the filter that keeps open rates at 50-70% as the list scales into the thousands.
- Qualified leads get pushed onto the newsletter via API within minutes of engaging, with zero manual list-building work.
- The real leverage sits in the intent and qualification steps, not the automation. A clean pipeline still fails if the upstream data is bad.
- Growth without newsletter operations is only half the system. Dumping qualified subscribers into a list you pitch daily will burn it down anyway.
- 17 active clients and roughly 250 cold-email inboxes sending daily produced over 500,000 cold emails and 79,000+ delivered newsletter subscribers.
The four-step system for buying, not building, an email list
WHAT TO LEARN
List growth stalls because of a data problem, not an effort problem. Buying narrowly-targeted intent data, filtering it through an honest opt-out, then automating delivery beats grinding for opt-ins one at a time.
01The List Myth
- The 79,000+ subscriber number isn't a projection, it's actual delivered volume, achieved with an average 56% open rate and zero opt-in forms.
- Treat "grind harder for opt-ins" as a red flag: if a list isn't growing, the constraint is usually which data you're starting from, not how much effort you're putting in.
02Data Not Effort
- Reframe list building as a data problem, not an effort problem. You can't out-hustle a targeting problem with more content or more ads.
- Data-as-a-service (DaaS) is a real, active market most operators don't know exists. Buying pre-existing intent data is a legitimate alternative to building an audience from scratch.
03The Bakery Analogy
- Old-school opt-in list building is the equivalent of handing out flyers on a sidewalk, hoping a few passersby happen to want what you're selling.
- Buying intent data flips the game: instead of guessing who wants your offer, you start with people who already signaled they do, this week.
04Buyer Not Product
- Your data is already being bought and sold constantly, through card swipes, searches, ads, and even ambient listening. You can choose to be the buyer of that data instead of the product.
05Generate High Intent
- Spend the most on the first step: premium, narrowly-specific intent data, someone taking an action tied to your exact topic, recently, outperforms broad demographic data.
- A smaller engaged list beats a bigger indifferent one. Open rate is the metric that actually protects revenue, not subscriber count.
06Clean And Qualify
- Verify every purchased email against a cleanup service before using it, so you aren't sending into dead inboxes and tanking deliverability.
- Don't pitch cold-bought leads directly. Position the first outreach as a short survey with a free-subscription incentive tied to the exact problem the data says they already have.
07Let Them Say No
- Give purchased leads multiple explicit chances to opt out, and actually honor it. About 40% decline or go quiet and get dropped entirely, never silently added.
- The opt-out step functions as a bouncer: it's what keeps open rate at 50-70% instead of collapsing under a big but indifferent list.
08Qualified Intent Pipeline
- Automate the hand-off. Qualified leads get pushed onto the newsletter via API within minutes of engaging, removing manual list-building work entirely.
- The growth mechanism itself isn't where the leverage is. It's the intent and qualification steps upstream of it that determine whether the list is worth having.
09The Real Bottleneck
- A newsletter growth engine is only half the equation. Dumping thousands of qualified subscribers into a list you then pitch every single day will still burn it down.
Terms worth knowing.
- DaaS (Data-as-a-Service)
- An industry built around selling access to existing behavioral and intent data, like searches, purchases, and ad interactions, rather than software, letting buyers target people who already signaled interest instead of building an audience from scratch.
- Intent data
- Behavioral signals, such as a recent search, purchase, or ad click, that show someone is actively interested in a specific topic right now, as opposed to broad demographic data.
- Survey activation campaign
- A cold-email sequence framed as a short survey with a free-subscription incentive rather than a sales pitch, used to qualify purchased leads before adding them to a list.
- Qualified Intent Pipeline
- The four-step system named in this video: buy high-intent data, clean and qualify it via a survey campaign, honor opt-outs, then automate delivery to the newsletter via API.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
01:28
“This is the actual odometer.”
02:38
“List building was never an effort problem. It's actually a data problem.”
06:26
“A list of 10,000 people who don't open, it's worth far less than a list of 2,000 people who do.”
11:55
“The bottleneck was never how hard you were working. The bottleneck was intent.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogy
When I started online seventeen years ago, the first thing I learned was build an email list. So I did what everyone said, create lead magnets, opt in pages, content, ads, and worked, kind of.
It was just slow and expensive and never fast enough to really feel like momentum. And it wasn't until I stopped thinking about list building as an effort problem that everything changed. By the time this video is over, you're gonna understand why the money's in the list.
It was right about the destination, but it was completely wrong about the road to get there. And I'm gonna show you the actual numbers behind the system that so far has delivered over 79,000 subscribers to client newsletters with an average open rate of 56% without a single opt in form.
Now I wanna be careful here because you've probably been sold hundreds of subscribers a day before and it turned out to be garbage. Bot traffic, dead emails, people who never open. So I'm not ask you to take anything on faith here.
Let me put the receipts on the table first, and then I'll walk you through exactly how it works. Right now, as I'm recording this, we have 17 active clients that we send subscribers to. We've delivered over 79,000 subscribers straight to our own newsletters and client newsletters.
We have around two fifty email inboxes that are actively sending cold emails every single day, and that number just climbing. We've sent over a half a million cold emails so far with nearly a quarter million of those being sent in the last ninety days alone. So these aren't projections that I'm giving you.
This is . And by no means am I saying that we're doing massive numbers here. I have friends that are literally sending millions of emails per day, so I know we're a small fry in the world of cold email volume.
The reason I'm sharing this with you is because I spent a better part of two decades growing my email list the hard way before I figured out the easier way that I'm about to break down for you here in this video. So let me go ahead and give the enemy a name here because it's an idea that almost everybody in this space still repeats.
The old advice was build a list. And for the most part, the way that people teach it, that hasn't changed in fifteen years. Write a better lead magnet.
Run more ads. Post more content. Grind for opt ins one at a time.
The whole thing actually gets framed as an effort problem. They tell you that if your list isn't growing fast enough, then you're just not working hard enough. You're not posting enough.
You're not optimizing your landing page enough. Here's the reframe that I have for you, and it's what this entire video is about, so let it sit with you.
List building was never an effort problem. It's actually a data problem. And that problem is already solved.
In fact, there's an entire industry being built around this idea right now. You may have heard of SaaS, software as a service.
But what's now on the rise is a completely new business model that people are calling DaaS, data as a service. And most people have no idea that it even exists.
Think about it like this. Imagine that you open a bakery and you're told that the way to get customer is to stand on the sidewalk and hand out flyers one person at a time hoping a few of them are hungry and happen to like your bread. Well, that's the equivalent to old school opt in list building.
You're guessing who wants it and you're doing it one handshake at a time. Now imagine instead you could get a list of every person within five miles who searched fresh sourdough near me and they did it this week.
Same bakery, but now you're playing a completely different game. You stopped guessing and you started with the people who already raised their hand. What I'm telling you is that list, it already exists.
In fact, you can get even more specific than that. If you wanted to, you could get a list of people who searched fresh sourdough near me and they have a pre existing buying history of purchasing sourdough bread more than three times in the past month at bakeries within a five mile radius of your bakery.
That's a little creepy, I know, but it's reality. This is actually the part that most people don't like to think about but I want you to hear it from me as just a calm observation instead of a rant.
Because whether you realize it or not, your data is already being bought and sold everywhere you go. When you swipe your credit card, that information moves. When you search Google, that information moves.
When you start seeing an ad for the exact thing that you were just thinking about, that's because information move. Even when you're just talking near your phone, that data gets captured. So like it or not, your data is being sold right now.
And most people hear this and they feel a little uneasy. And you know what? I get it.
It feels a little like we're , but once you get past that, here's the thing that I figured out that changed everything for me. There are places that you can go right now where you can be the buyer of that data instead of being just the product. And if you know what kind of data to buy, you know where to buy it, most importantly you know how to activate it, well then you stop being the person on the sidewalk handing out flyers.
Instead you become the person who already knows who all is hungry. And by the way, if this reframe that I just gave you, if it landed for you, if you've spent months or even years grinding for subscribers one at a time and you're only now realizing that the bottleneck was never really the effort, then do me a favor, drop a comment below that says intent.
I read them and I wanna know how many of you have actually been stuck on the wrong problem this whole time. I promise you're not alone. Okay.
So now let me show you the actual process because the reframe is nothing if I don't give you the mechanism too. And I promised you receipts not just theory. So here's how we do it today.
Step one is we generate a high intent audience. This is where most of our money goes and it's on purpose. We actually pay top dollar for the most premium highest quality data possible.
These are people that have expressed recent intent on exactly what the newsletter is about.
And I do mean recent and exact. If the newsletter is about say scaling a coaching business, we're not buying business owner data.
We're buying people who just took an action that says they're actively trying to solve that specific problem right now. And here's why this first step matters way more than just volume alone because I know what you might be thinking, I thought it too.
Just give me the biggest list that you can. Well, no. Because bad data will absolutely collapse this entire system.
Think about it. If you fill a newsletter with people who don't care, then your open rates are going to crater. And low open rates mean fewer eyeballs on the offers that you actually put in front of them.
So a list of 10,000 people who don't open, it's worth far less than a list of 2,000 people who do. And that's the whole reason that our newsletters and a lot of our clients' newsletters consistently hold open rates of fifty, sixty, even 70 plus percent. Even as they grow into the thousands.
And this isn't a trick, it's not metric manipulation, it's just that everyone on the list actually wants to be there. So that's step one.
Now step two is the part that almost nobody does. We clean it up and we qualify them before we add. We don't just take that raw intent data and start blasting people onto a list.
First, we actually run it through a cleanup and verification service to validate those emails so we're not sending into dead inboxes. Then, and here's the key move here, we send that data through our own multi step cold email campaign. But it's not a pitch.
We actually call it a survey activation campaign. And the positioning for this campaign is super simple. We just reach out and we say, hey, we're surveying people who are interested in x y z topic.
And we know this is the exact topic that they already care about because that's the data that we bought. And so we say we're surveying people interested in this topic and we would love for you to take thirty seconds and answer three quick questions. And then we tell them as a gift for just participating in this, we're gonna give you a complimentary subscription to a high value newsletter that talks about the exact problem that we know they're already trying to solve.
So notice what's happening here. We're not asking strangers to want something new.
We're literally offering people something about a problem that they've already told the market that they have. Step three of our process is we let them say no and we honor it.
This is where I break from almost everyone else that's selling growth. The survey campaign actually gives them multiple chances to opt out and tell us that they're not interested or to just not engage. And transparently speaking about 40% of them it's exactly what they do.
They either say no or they just go quiet. And when that happens we remove them. We don't still add them to the newsletter ever.
So right off the top 40% of the data that we pull gets eliminated. The other 60% they do express interest and we mark them as engaged and qualified.
That sixtyforty split it's one of my favorite numbers in this whole system because it proves that the thing works the way that it's supposed to. It's kind of serving the same role as like . If I let everyone in, the room would be full of people who genuinely don't want to be there.
And the open rates would tell on us within a week. But instead, only the people who said yes and are genuinely interested, only those get through. And step four of our process is we automate the delivery.
The second someone engages and gets marked as qualified, then we've built a process that pushes them onto the newsletter through the API literally within just a few minutes.
So right now, the way that we've got it set up, there's no manual work. That's the mechanism that makes hundreds of subscribers on a daily basis actually possible. And once they're on, as long as the operator runs the newsletter the right way, then the open rates typically hold above 50%.
Quick side note here, this part of the process can be done manually or even semi manually. It's what we did originally. But it is time consuming and over time it can actually get quite expensive to manage it properly.
Now before we continue, let's zoom all the way out and give this whole thing a name here because a named idea is one that you're more likely to remember. What we're really running here is a qualified intent pipeline.
Intent on the front because we only start with people who are already looking. Qualification in the middle because the survey filters out anyone who doesn't say yes. And a pipeline on the end because we've automated the delivery and we're not doing it manually anymore just by more hustle.
And most people obsess over the pipeline step, but the magic really is in the intent and qualification steps. When you get those right, the pipeline step happens automatically. Now before I take this any further, let me be straight with you about where to go if you want to set this up for yourself.
I put together a free breakdown of how the newsletter side of this actually works, and that's the part where you keep those open rates above 50% so the subscribers are worth having. Because quite frankly, you can have a list of a 100,000 people or more, but if they're not opening or they don't know you or like you or trust you, you're not gonna make much money from them.
So the training shows how to do things the right way. It's linked below in the description. It's free and it's the same foundation behind the business that we built to a $100,000 in revenue over the course of just eleven weeks.
So go grab it and actually apply it next to what I'm teaching you right now in this video. Because the growth engine part is only half of the equation. If you drive thousands of qualified people to a newsletter and then treat it like every other marketing list pitching them every single day, well, you're gonna burn the whole thing down no matter how good the data was.
Now I wanna close this video on the one thing that I need you to walk away with. The bottleneck was never how hard you were working. And I proved that to myself the slow way over seventeen years.
I was grinding for opt ins, convinced that if my list wasn't growing, I just needed to post more, run more ads, hustle even harder. But it was never that. The bottleneck was intent.
The moment you stop trying to build an audience from scratch and start activating an audience that already exists, well growth all of a sudden stops being a hustle and it becomes a predictable system. And so that's why the saying the money is in the list, it was only half right. Yes, the money is in the list.
It's just not the list that you sweated to build one form at a time. It's the list of people that have already raised their hand somewhere else and they're sitting there waiting for someone to actually reach out to them. Most operators will never do this though, not because they can't get access, but more so because they don't even know the data is here to buy and they don't have the process to activate it without burning it.
So that's the flip that I want you to consider making. I want you to stop only being the product whose data gets sold and you become the buyer who turns that data into an audience of thousands who actually open and respond. If And you want to go deeper on the newsletter side of things, on how to run one of those newsletters so that open rates hold and the subscribers actually turn into sales, well then watch the video that I'll point you to in the description.
And if this reframe changed how you see list building even a little, consider subscribing because this whole channel is about giving you a better way to think about what you're building, not just more tactics to chase. So with that being said, now I wanna hear from you. Tell me in the comments, Have you been treating list building as an effort problem this whole time, or did you already suspect that it might be something else?
Take a side. I'll be reading, and I'll see you in the next video.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Seventeen years of grinding for opt-ins taught Justin Glover the wrong lesson. This breakdown lays out the four-step "Qualified Intent Pipeline" his agency runs: buy narrowly-targeted intent data, filter it through an honest opt-out, then auto-deliver the qualified leads — a system that's put 79,000+ subscribers into client newsletters with 50-70% open rates and zero opt-in forms.
Named ideas worth stealing.
10:06model
The Qualified Intent Pipeline
- Generate a high-intent audience (buy specific, recent-intent data)
- Clean & qualify (verify emails, run a survey-activation cold campaign)
- Let them say no and honor it (drop opt-outs, ~40%)
- Automate delivery via API to the newsletter
Four-step system for growing a newsletter list without opt-in forms: buy narrowly-targeted intent data, verify and "survey" it with a non-salesy cold campaign, honor opt-outs, then auto-deliver the qualified 60% via API.
Steal forany cold-outreach-to-newsletter funnel, or B2B lead gen that wants engaged subscribers instead of raw volume
02:45concept
SaaS vs DaaS
Contrasts software-as-a-service (renting tools) with the emerging data-as-a-service industry (buying pre-existing intent and behavior data) as the underlying mechanism that makes the pipeline possible.
Steal forframing any data-driven acquisition pitch
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
10:44link
“It's linked below in the description. It's free and it's the same foundation behind the business that we built to a $100,000 in revenue over the course of just eleven weeks.”
Soft-pitch mid-video for a free related training on newsletter operations (not this video's main subject), framed as the other half of the system rather than a hard sell.
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PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
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Visual structure at a glance.
