26:33Lead Gen Jay · Tutorial
How Claude Code Replaced My Entire Cold Email Strategy
A 26-minute playbook for turning micro-SaaS apps into cold email lead magnets that average 4% reply rates.
March 24thThe argument in one line.
Apollo and ZoomInfo's per-seat dashboards and capped exports have been replaced by API-only databases that sell unlimited data for a flat monthly fee, and pairing one of them with Clay's free signal data and a self-hosted Supabase database lets a cold email operator own unlimited, verified leads for a few hundred dollars a month.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You run a cold email or lead generation agency and need more volume than Apollo's export caps allow.
- You already use Claude Code or Codex and don't mind making API calls and standing up a database yourself.
- You're paying for Apollo, ZoomInfo, or a similar seat-based database and want to know what actually replaced it in 2026.
- You need specialty data, like local businesses or Instagram creators, that mainstream B2B databases don't carry.
SKIP IF…
- You send a small volume of cold email a month and Apollo's existing tier already covers it.
- You don't want to touch an API, a coding assistant, or a hosted database just to get your leads.
- You need a point-and-click filter-and-export dashboard, not a queryable backend.
The full version, fast.
Apollo and ZoomInfo built expensive dashboards for enterprise sales teams, not cold-email volume, so a new generation of lead databases sells access with no front end at all: GetLeads and Blitz API charge a flat monthly fee for unlimited verified contacts, queried through an API from Claude Code or Codex and stored in a self-hosted Supabase database for about $20 a month, so the data stays owned even after canceling. Clay adds a second layer: its Audiences give unlimited free people and company data with buying signals, minus the email, which GetLeads or Blitz API can then enrich into a full contact. Budget options include DIY scraping with Claude Code and Apify's scraper store, and Consulti covers specialty data Apollo doesn't sell, like local businesses pulled from Google Maps and a 100-million-profile Instagram database.
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00:00 – 01:17
01 · Cold open: the old playbook is dead
Jay declares Apollo and ZoomInfo lead-gen advice from before 2026 obsolete and previews the new stack.
01:17 – 03:58
02 · Why Apollo and ZoomInfo got expensive
Apollo still has a strong 250M-lead database and pre-verified emails, but its pricing and export caps serve enterprise sales teams, not cold-email volume, and the UI/filter/export tooling, not the data itself, is what makes it costly.
03:58 – 12:02
03 · GetLeads and Blitz API: unlimited data through an API only
Both platforms sell unlimited B2B contact data for a flat fee with no dashboard, queried via API from Claude Code or Codex and stored in a self-hosted Supabase database for about $20 a month; GetLeads' partner plan is $249 a month, Blitz adds mobile numbers and hiring signals.
12:02 – 17:37
04 · Clay: free audience data, paid enrichment, and the GetLeads combo
Clay's Audiences give unlimited free people and company data with signals but withhold the email; running that data through GetLeads or Blitz API enriches it into a full verified contact, and Jay's own CLI clones Clay's internal, Enterprise-only table-builder API.
17:37 – 19:35
05 · Free route: DIY scraping with Claude Code and Apify
For a zero-dollar budget, Scrapling lets Claude Code or Codex get around most bot blockers on sites like Apollo or ListKit, and Apify's actor store has pre-built scrapers for Crunchbase, Instagram, LinkedIn and review sites.
19:35 – 22:26
06 · Consulti: specialty databases for local business and Instagram leads
The sponsor segment: Consulti pre-scrapes Google Maps local businesses, including owner emails, plus a 100M+ profile Instagram database searchable by bio keywords, covering niches like veteran-owned companies that Apollo's LinkedIn-sourced data can't filter for.
22:26 – 23:25
07 · Closing pitch and CTA
A 50%-off Consulti code, links to the free skills community and the self-hosted Reacher verifier setup, and a subscribe ask.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Apollo and ZoomInfo still hold a genuinely good database, but their pricing and export caps make true cold-email-volume list building impossible.
- The reason legacy lead databases cost so much isn't the data, it's the dashboard: filters, exports and a clean UI are the expensive part to build and maintain.
- GetLeads and Blitz API sell unlimited lead data for a flat monthly fee by removing the front end entirely, so every request has to go through their API.
- GetLeads' partner plan is $249 a month for unlimited B2B contact data, or $500 a month if you'd rather not post on LinkedIn twice a month to earn the discount.
- Storing millions of purchased leads in a self-hosted Supabase database costs about $20 a month and means you keep the data even after canceling the API subscription, unlike a canceled Apollo seat.
- Reacher, a free open-source email verifier, checks up to 10,000 emails a day at no cost, so there's no reason to trust a lead database's own verification claims blindly.
- Clay's Audiences give away unlimited people and company data with job-change, funding and hiring signals for free, but withhold the email address to force a paid Clay-credit enrichment.
- Running Clay's free audience data through GetLeads or Blitz API for enrichment gets a verified email without paying Clay to waterfall it.
- Clay's own public API only exposes search and routines; table-building is Enterprise-only, which is why a full clone of the internal table-builder API is described as 'a little bit black hat.'
- Claude Code and Codex can now get around most bot-blocking on their own, using an open-source tool called Scrapling pointed directly at sites like Apollo or ListKit.
- Apify's actor store already has pre-built scrapers for Crunchbase, Instagram, LinkedIn, G2 and Google reviews, most available for a few dollars a month.
- Local businesses like plumbers, restaurants and roofers mostly live on Google Maps, not in B2B databases like Apollo, and usually don't have emails attached even when scraped.
- Niche targeting requests like 'veteran-owned companies' have no filter option in Apollo because that data doesn't come from LinkedIn, the primary source every mainstream B2B database is built on.
The lead database stack moved from dashboards to APIs.
WHAT TO LEARN
Unlimited data, verified separately and stored in a database you control, now costs less and gives more ownership than any seat-based dashboard ever did.
02Why Apollo and ZoomInfo got expensive
- A big, well-maintained database isn't the same as one built for your use case: signal data is often secondhand and already stale by the time it reaches a paid dashboard.
- The expensive part of a lead platform is usually the interface, not the underlying data, since building filters, exports and a clean dashboard is a genuine technical undertaking.
- When evaluating any lead database, check whether it's actually sourced from primary data or just repackaging the same source every competitor uses.
03GetLeads and Blitz API: unlimited data through an API only
- A database with no dashboard and unlimited data for a flat fee only works if you're set up to query an API and store the results yourself.
- Owning your lead data in your own database means it survives a canceled subscription, unlike data that only ever lived inside a vendor's paid dashboard.
- Verify a lead database's own data-quality claims yourself with an independent free tool rather than trusting its built-in verification label.
04Clay: free audience data, paid enrichment, and the GetLeads combo
- Free, unlimited data and a paid, unlimited email address are often sold as two separate products by the same company, so it's worth checking whether a second, cheaper tool can fill the gap.
- Combining a signal-rich data source with a separate enrichment tool can end up cheaper than paying one vendor to do both.
- A platform's public API often exposes far less than its own interface does, and closing that gap is usually possible by watching what the interface calls internally.
05Free route: DIY scraping with Claude Code and Apify
- Scraping is realistic as a zero-cost option now because AI coding tools can route around most bot-blocking on their own.
- A marketplace of pre-built scrapers means most sites worth scraping already have one somebody else maintains, so check there before building one from scratch.
06Consulti: specialty databases for local business and Instagram leads
- Mainstream B2B databases are built on LinkedIn as the primary source, so any audience underrepresented there, like local businesses or niche demographics, won't show up no matter how good the filters are.
- When a client request has no filter option in any major tool, that's a signal a specialty or manually-built database may be the only real answer.
Terms worth knowing.
- ICP
- Ideal Customer Profile: the specific type of company or person a cold email campaign is built to target.
- Cold email
- Unsolicited outbound email sent to a prospect with no prior relationship, usually sent at scale through a sequencer.
- Enrichment
- Adding a missing piece of contact data, most often a verified email, to a lead record that already has partial information like a name or LinkedIn URL.
- Waterfall
- Querying multiple data providers in sequence until one returns a match, a common way to find an email address inside a tool like Clay.
- Buying signal
- An event, such as a funding round, a job change, or a hiring push, used to flag that a company is more likely to be ready to buy.
- Sequencer
- Software that sends a scheduled series of cold emails to a list, such as Instantly, Smartlead, or Email Bison.
- MCP
- Model Context Protocol: a standard that lets an AI coding assistant like Claude connect directly to a third-party service's API.
- Clay Audiences
- A Clay feature that returns unlimited free people and company data with buying signals, but withholds the email address.
- Reacher
- A free, open-source email verification tool that can check up to 10,000 addresses a day without a paid subscription.
Things they pointed at.
01:17toolApollo
04:45toolBlitz API
17:37toolScrapling
17:57toolApify
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“The days of paying Apollo and ZoomInfo thousands of dollars to access their lead data finally over.”
00:45
“If you watch one of my videos about lead databases or building your own ICP or lead list before 2026, erase it from your memory. Everything I taught you is now wrong.”
03:14
“Most of us don't even use the signals and they don't even work very well. Apollo's usually getting this data secondhand.”
07:34
“You can verify 10,000 emails every day completely free.”
13:26
“They give you the LinkedIn, the company, the person's name, but they do not give you the email. The reason for that is Clay wants you to spend Clay credits.”
19:35
“If you're looking for veteran company owners, the answer is there are none, and there's no scraper on Apify that can help you find that either.”
Word for word.
Read-along
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metaphor
The days of paying Apollo and ZoomInfo thousands of dollars to access their lead data finally over. There's now a brand new generation of lead databases and services and tools that have made these old expensive platforms . In this video, I'm going to be taking you into the future.
I'm going to show you what the top 1 % of cold emailers are using right now for building their lead lists. I'm going to show you where you can get unlimited verified emails for insanely low prices. That's right, actually unlimited.
And where you can access specialty databases that nobody else is using. Then I'm going to show you how to use Cloud Code to build your own in -house lead databases completely free. If you're new, welcome to the LeadGenJ channel.
If you're not new, welcome back and you know you're about to get some gold. I run agencies and software companies that do well over a million... per month.
We've been listed on Inc. 5000 many times, and I've been one of the top cold email educators on YouTube for over five years. And if you watch one of my videos about lead databases or building your own ICP or lead list before 2026, erase it from your memory.
Everything I taught you is now wrong. And that's because the game has changed. And because you follow this channel, you're going to learn how you can benefit from these changes more than anybody else.
So if that all sounds good, I'm going to go and show you my screen and show you what me and the top 1 % of cold emailers are using in 2026, 2027. Now, before I show you all of the new stuff, let's talk about the old stuff, what we used to teach.
And that's using a database like Apollo, a great company. They maintain a really good database. They've got a ton of filter options.
They're quick. They're reliable. The problem is they've got such high prices and low export limits.
It's impossible for you to do cold email at scale the way that you need to in order to get great results. And that's because these old platforms like Apollo and Zoom Info, they started to go away from serving cold emailers like you and me. And they're trying to serve enterprise companies and...
sales teams who are using these to prospect with hand -to -hand combat, one email at a time. But that's not really how we do things. We set up sequencers and we send massive amounts of emails.
And to do that, we need massive amounts of data. And in the past, that was pretty hard to come by at scale and for a reasonable price. Well, not anymore.
As competition has started to enter the market, technology became more accessible, software became more accessible. Amazing companies have started to spring up and these companies are offering basically unlimited lead data for super low prices so i'm going to walk you through a couple of these companies that i use that i can vouch for i'm going to show you how to get insanely low prices even lower than advertised and start to build your own lead database so that you're never going to be roped into these giant prices for low export limits ever again so let's start with apollo we're logged in right now i'm going to show you what makes this a good lead database and why switching now makes sense so why apollo is great they have over 250 million leads that's a ton and most of these filters are available in just about every lead database.
Now the thing that makes Apollo great is they pre -verify their email so you can do email status verified. Awesome, but when? They've got these buying intent signals, they've got these revenue signals, these funding signals, job posting signals, and this makes it really easy to fine -tune a list that's going to be hyper -focused to your ICP.
One of the things I always say when you're building a list using something like Apollo is make sure that nine out of the ten people on that list are actually a good fit for you before exporting the entire thing. And that usually means adding a lot of ink inclusion and exclusion keywords.
But the thing is, most of us don't even use the signals and they don't even work very well. Apollo's usually getting this data secondhand. So by the time this funding information comes in and somebody is raising a seed round in Apollo, they're probably getting that from Crunchbase.
It's already late. So if you're interested in signal data, I'm going to show you how to do it way easier. Moral of the story here is most B2B databases, Apollo, ZoomInfo, all work the same way.
They're going off of LinkedIn data. So at their source, they're tracking people's LinkedIn profile, seeing when they change jobs, what companies they work for, and that's how they're categorizing their companies and their leads. But one of the reasons this is so expensive, and this is what's solved in the newest generation of technology, is all of the tech involved in keeping the user interface here.
really clean and easy to filter and easy to export. As somebody who's built a cold email tool myself, consulting here, I'll tell you, it is a technical nightmare. However, you're able to save a ton of money if you're not worried about the user interface, about the filter, about the dashboard.
And hence, this is where the new generation of technologies has come alive. And those are companies like getleads .io and Blitz API. Now, if you're in the space, you may have heard of these so far.
I actively use both of these platforms, getleads .io and Blitz API. And what this new generation of technologies is, is a lead database that does not have a front end that you can go and include filter items and export large CSV files. They actually built it AI forward.
So in order to access the database, you need to make API calls to request information from their backend database. Now there's pros and cons to that. Not everybody needs it, but one of the main pros is unlimited data.
Both of these companies offer you unlimited data for a flat monthly fee. So if you're running a cold email agency, you're managing clients, highly recommend setting one of these up.
And the one that I would actually recommend you getting started with is called getleads .io. Main reason being you're able to get access to their unlimited data for $250 per month. They had this partner plan going and he says he's going to get rid of it soon.
So if you're interested in this, there's going to be a link down below where I can do a warm intro and get you this deal. But this is one of the best deals that I've ever seen. $250 per month and you get unlimited data.
All you have to do is post on LinkedIn twice a month. Super easy. easy to fulfill or 500 a month to not post on LinkedIn.
Still really good. Blitz API is a little bit more expensive, but they also do a very good job. Now, some things to note about these technologies here, you're going to need to be pretty proficient with cloud code or codex, and you need to be able to make API calls and you're going to need to store this data somewhere.
Remember, you're requesting the data from their database, but then what? You need to put it somewhere. So in order to get the most out of these platforms, the other thing that you're going to need is some sort of backend database that is AI friendly, that as you query this with your cloud code or your codex, you're actually putting it and storing it inside of a backend database.
And what I recommend for this is a platform you may have already heard of called Supabase. And as you can see, if I come in here, you'll see this data backup database. So I'm actually doing this.
I am using this. There's tens of millions of records inside of the Supabase table. It's about $20 per month for me just to maintain this.
And my AI is able to create the databases, query the databases, edit the data. databases and no matter what cold email campaign or instantly or smart lead or email Bison that I'm doing I have all of the data very well tracked and maintained now you might be thinking to yourself jay i'm not that ai forward i i know i'm going to screw this up if i can't go into the front end like i do in apollo and set the filters and export into csv file and store it into google sheets i'm not going to get it to work well i'm about to solve that for you as well i literally created skills for everything it's the same skills that i use to query the database build my icp and then use it inside of get leads and build the database in superbase and maintain it so i'm going to give you the skills in the link down below absolutely free you don't need to pay me anything so that you can Start using Getleads and Supabase right away and start building your own database.
Now, I know your next question is going to be cool. They give you data. Data is cheap and free pretty much everywhere.
I can go get pre -scraped lists from anywhere. Are these just pre -scraped lists? Is this old, stale data?
And the answer to your question is mostly no. They do a very good job keeping this up to date. However, I always say to second guess all of your email databases, including my own.
And believe it or not, now you can launch your own open source completely free. email verifier software do go to reacher .email this is actually a public open source github repo and you can verify 10 000 emails every day completely free and if you want to go above and beyond that like me i think i pay them a thousand dollars a month now just so i can verify unlimited emails essentially but for free you can now verify 10 000 emails per day so don't trust that blitz or get leads is going to give you accurate data check it yourself and you can use reacher instead of paid verification tools now here's where it gets a little bit tricky and to give you some some tips and hints here so each of these platforms because they don't have a front end i'm going to go ahead and log in because i actually have an account here i actually use this stuff you're going to need to integrate your cloud code or your codecs so each of these is going to have very complex api documentations querying a lead database is super complex i'm going to come into integrations here and you'll see that they've got an mcp setup you can generate api keys and you can hand this off to your cloud now i'm going to give this one step further for you because using this is fine it's able to kind of
to figure things out. I want you to get great results from this, not just be able to query it, but be able to query it efficiently and actually get results that are going to be right for you. Excluding the correct people, including the correct people, applying best practices to a lead database and filters.
These are essentially the same best practices I would follow if I was going through this Apollo database and setting the filters myself. Except instead of doing it manually and waiting for it to load, waiting for it to export, now you set the filters using my cloud code skills that you're going to get down below. Give it your A.
API key for get leads and now it's going to know exactly how to query this database and give you the results that you want so cool just to kind of reiterate what we just talked about the first thing you're going to need to do is set up your own database your own hosted database to put all of the data that you're querying from get leads IO or from blitz API we use super base for this because it's easy super AI friendly and it scales really cheaply so even as this gets bigger and bigger and bigger it's only going to be a couple 10 more dollars per month so essentially nothing and you own this data unlike apollo where you cancel and now you don't have access to all of the data that you paid for already here you do and the limits are unbelievably generous on both of these you can essentially query this forever and you're still not going to run out of credits now the other really amazing thing about these platforms i still can't believe it sometimes is the other data that they're able to provide so coming into what's included in full on blitz i have the 600 per month package let's see exactly what's included here
this includes unlimited mobile phone numbers so if you're somebody who does cold calling or cold texting or voicemail drops like we do a lot these mobile numbers are worth their weight in gold in fact if you were to pay apollo because they typically don't give you mobile numbers you have to pay extra for mobile numbers mobile numbers before now have been a very expensive commodity now through both of these platforms blitz and get leads you're able to get those mobile numbers essentially for free now you may also be asking yourself let's see what else is included with some of these platforms well blitz now offers job postings and hiring signals so if you're somebody who relies on scraping linkedin for this information now you can use blitz or get leads to get this information for you and it's very accurate i would say more accurate than apollo's hiring and posting signals and as you can see here both of these platforms are very friendly for using this for client work these are built for cold email agencies so if you're running a lead gen agency or a cold email agency it's almost required now that you have at least one of these platforms now right now i do recommend
to getleads .io because it's $2 .49 per month. Unbelievable. Please hit me up so that you can get access to this.
It's going to be linked down below. And they've got unbelievable coverage. 53 million cell phones.
It's unbelievably fresh. And I actually like the API usage more. It's less steps for me to actually get somebody's value.
Versus Blitz, you have to do multiple queries before you actually get to the email. I don't want to go too in -depth on that in this video because you're going to have a cloud code skill that helps you do it successfully. But just know, because of the nature of how complex lead databases are and querying them, it's not just, here's the filters, give me the emails.
There's usually multiple steps to get there. Other really cool things I want to mention here is some of the other things that they offer, like live leads. So in the past, you'd have to subscribe to multiple tools to get LinkedIn profile information, website visitor info.
information, company follower information. So I think this is extra. I don't use it, but I just want you to know that it's there.
So if your mind is already going, holy shit, this is unbelievable. What could you possibly tell me after this that's going to blow my mind more than this? What else is there?
Well, let me show you. I'm going to show you a little hack that's going to cost you a few bucks, but if you're willing to pay the money. you're serious about this you're managing cold email for clients or you're doing this for yourself at scale where else to get essentially unlimited free data and then use these tools to make it truly unlimited and that is with clay so clay has gotten a little bit expensive let's go to clay .com and see what their current pricing is when i signed up it wasn't quite what it is now you are going to need at least their growth plan which is 446 dollars per month so that you can do any http request which you're going to need to do you're going to need to do api calls within the clay tables in order to make this work but why this is so insane let me clay also gives you free data however they don't give you email addresses so let's come into clay i'm going to show you what i mean so if i come into clay i'm going to come into audiences people now audiences is where they give you pretty much unlimited free data it's really insane now clay does have an api cli mcp and just side note there if there's ever an option between mcp and cli choose cli however let's talk about audiences
to come into people here and let's just say that i want to find people i'm going to click search filters and it gives me all of these options so under these filters i'm in people now and it gives me all of these different options for things that i can select where it's just going to give me free data all of the leads listed i did not pay for those estimated followers look at this is insane it just gives you all of this data for free however there's a big however they do not give you the email They give you the LinkedIn, they give you the company, they give you the person's name, but they do not give you the email.
The reason for that is Clay wants you to spend Clay credits so that you can enrich that data and get that person's email. But they'll give you the data. The data is free.
It's pretty much unlimited free inside of Clay. And in the past, you had to bring in some sort of outside tool in order to enrich it in multiple steps, or you had to pay Clay to waterfall it and see if you can find that person's email. Well, those days are now over because...
We have getleads .io, which has unlimited enrichment. So now you can use all of the information from Clay, all of the signal data, all of this incredible data that they give you, including all of these different signals that are available to you as long as you have one of those paid Clay accounts, job postings, promotions, news and fundraising, job changes, topic intents, and then they'll give you everything but the email, and then you can use one of these to actually enrich it and find the email.
Now you might be saying to me, but Jay, that's a whole other software that I need to learn. It's expensive. Now I need to learn Clay.
What are you talking about? So who is Clay actually for? Or why is it powerful?
Do you need it? Well, it's not going to be for everybody. However, if you're running a cold email or lead gen agency or doing lead gen for yourself at scale, and you have any sort of a complex workflow for enrichment or personalization, you want to dig into that person's website.
You want to do research into their background. You want to find somebody else that works at that company. And you want to add them to a sequencer at the end.
Play will help you do that at scale. And they let you bring in other softwares to do it. So if you want to use Consulti to do some sort of enrichment or catch all of it.
verification you can do all of that inside of these clay tables and clay gives you unlimited data so combining the unlimited data from clay which is super accurate there's this is a very well -funded company they maintain a very good database probably more accurate and more up to date than either get leads or blitz api however now you can use get leads api and blitz api inside of clay to get unlimited email addresses it also kind of solves the lead database problem so instead of backing this all up in super base which i still recommend doing now it gives you something to actually visualize that you have a table the data is coming into it's nice now if you don't feel like building the tables yourself in clay or you don't know how to use clay but you want to use it i actually built something that builds all of the tables for me so what you'll notice if you come into their api and cli i'm actually going to come into developer documentation it doesn't do that many things you can search their database you can set up routines tables is not even available to you it's enterprise only i really hope clay doesn't terminate my subscription for this because i'm about to
you something that's their api doesn't let you do very many things my api that i built for clay lets you do everything build entire tables build specific cells build rules take my clay playbook and install it all inside of clay and where this is i'm going to come into lead genji systems obviously we've got my cold email system here which is insane but i'm going to click on cli and then we've got our clay table builder now what we essentially did with this cli and all of the similar ones is deconstructed their internal api when you click a row what internal api calls when you click a table what happens and we've rebuilt it into our own cli so if you come in here and you install this and now you can tell your cloud code yo build me this sort of table install this playbook from lead gen j here's the playbook and it'll actually build it and install it right there in clay for you so you don't need to worry about clicking around or building tables the days of clicking around user interfaces are gone everything now happens inside of cloud code all right so so far and you've gotten any value out of this video whatsoever i would really appreciate dropping a like let me know in the comments if this is helpful and make sure that you check the links in the description because i've got some insane resources for you including free skills
free discounts for these platforms. Now let's continue. The first part of this video is pretty much dedicated to people who are willing to spend a few bucks.
Typically ones that are running cold email or lead generation agencies and managing clients. Those tools make sense for those people. But what about if you're operating on a budget?
What if you want actually free leads? What if you don't want a multi hundred dollar per month subscription? Well, there's a lot of really amazing options for you as well.
The first one is do it yourself scraping. So Cloud Code, Codex has never been better at scraping. websites it's unbelievably easy for it there's a github repo here called scrapling this will let your cloud code get around most bot blockers so if you point it at a site like apollo you point it at a site like listkit and it'll just go ahead and start scraping that site for you and if you want to save yourself some time and stress you can use something like appify so most of you are already familiar with it if you've seen the channel before appify will let you scrape pretty much anything and people have likely already built scrapers for whatever it is that you want to scrape say i want to scrape crunch base and i want to scrape it because i want to know what the latest company funding information was well look at all these crunch based scrapers that other people have already built and maintained you can come into appify and use any of these scrapers and what i would encourage you to do is actually to come to their store and try and find a scraper that a lot of people aren't using so i'm going to come into the generate leads these are all going to be the lead gen scrapers and see what's possible let's say i'm looking for contact details and let's see where i can scrape from we've got instagram so i can get emails from instagram
I get emails from LinkedIn, WhatsApp script. I don't know how the heck that works. TikTok, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, basically any popular platform online, review sites, Crunchbase, G2, that you can think about scraping, scrape it.
If you can send somebody an email because you saw their G2 review or their Google reviews, you can actually say something unique to that person. And all of those scrapers are available here. And you'll be able to do it for a couple of bucks a month.
Most of these scrapers aren't free, but they're unbelievably affordable. And I still find myself reaching for them all the time when I'm trying to scrape something. unique now in addition to do -it -yourself scraping or using appify to scrape there is one additional site that i would like to point you to for specialty databases and to make life really easy for getting started and it's under 100 bucks a month which brings me into my next point the sponsor of this video me i set up to solve one of the biggest problems that i was facing for getting results from my clients which is they would come to me and say yo i need to target plumbers i need to target veterans where do i go what filters do i put in apollo so i can find only veteran company owners?
And the answer is there are none. And there's no scraper on Appify that can help you find that either. So I set out to build a lead database that brought everything together.
So it wasn't just reselling the same data as ListKit or GetLeads or Apollo or ZoomInfo, but actually had data that nobody else was using. What I realized was if you work hard, to get the data that you're emailing and not a lot of other people are using that data go figure those people get emailed less and it works better they respond more and that's why we built consultee i built this for the top one percent of cold emailers and it brings all of the data into one place and helps you run all your entire cold email campaign autonomously but what's really unique about consultee especially as it relates to this video is this we have our typical b2b database within consultee here however what you have not seen is a local business database if you're looking for Google Maps data, you're looking for local businesses, there's not a lot of databases or places to go to find your local plumber, your local restaurant, your local roofing company.
Those guys aren't really readily on Apollo or any of these B2B databases. They're on Google Maps. So you have to try and scrape Google Maps yourself, which is a long, tedious process.
And most of those companies don't have email addresses when you scrape them. Well, we solved all of that inside of Consulti because we pre -scraped all of those companies for you, found all of their email addresses, and that includes includes the owner of that local business.
So I think consultee, I'm gonna go ahead and click on check and it's going to give me verified emails only. And if I wanna find all of the martial arts companies, maybe I wanna sell to martial arts studios. You're not gonna find that inside of Apollo.
Nope, the only way to do it is here inside of this database where you can find these local businesses. But what if you wanna find like veteran owned companies? What if you wanna target moms?
Well, a lot of my clients were coming to me with those exact requests. built this instagram database so we've scraped all of instagram it's over 100 million people and we know exactly what they have in their bio and we have their emails and phone numbers so if you want to target mothers fathers veterans content creators whatever is not easy to find inside of apollo you can come into this instagram database and find it here just by using bio keywords including and excluding and of course if you're using any of my products or services you better damn believe that it is as api friendly as humanly possible you can query any of our databases using api we've got an mcp server a cli and all of the skills to go along with it so if you're looking for specialty databases like this because you have a unique use case there literally is nowhere else to go if there was somewhere else to go i probably wouldn't be suggesting all of my competitors if you're looking for unlimited b2b data i'm probably not your best option although we have it got it we do a very good job with it where we really exceed is creators instagram local businesses and of course b2b data and we're unbelievably cheap and if you're looking for a data
that you can just come into a front end like this and query it, nothing's gonna be a higher value. than consultee. So I do hope you plan to check it out.
And we've got a very generous free plan. And by the way, guys, because you made it all the way to this point in the video, I'm going to do something special for you. I am going to give you 50 % off your first month at consultee if you're interested in trying it out.
The code will expire shortly after this video is released. So make sure that you grab it soon. It's going to be in the description.
And with that being said, do not close out of this video without checking the description and grabbing the skills that I've created to help you get the most out of clay automation out of get leads .io and create your own lead database. I'm also going to go ahead and throw in some information on setting up your own Reacher so that you can build your own email verifier completely free.
That's going to be linked in the description. Make sure you grab it. If you found this video helpful, drop a comment, drop a like.
And if you're not already subscribed to this channel, on this channel, we talk about only the things that we're actually using to grow our agencies, to grow my software companies. I don't just make random update videos. I give you exactly what I'm doing in my business so you can implement it and you can get rich too.
So be sure to subscribe and I'll see you soon.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Jay opens by declaring everything he taught about lead databases before 2026 obsolete, then spends 23 minutes replacing the old Apollo and ZoomInfo playbook with an API-first stack built for AI coding tools.
Named ideas worth stealing.
12:02model
The owned-data enrichment stack
- Clay Audiences (free signal data, no email)
- GetLeads or Blitz API (enrichment to a verified email)
- Supabase (self-hosted storage, ~$20/mo)
- Reacher (free independent verification)
A four-layer stack that combines Clay's free signal data, an API-only lead database for enrichment, a self-hosted database for permanent ownership, and a free verifier to double-check accuracy.
Steal forany cold email or outbound system that needs owned, verified contact data instead of a rented seat in a vendor's dashboard
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
19:35product
“I am going to give you 50% off your first month at Consulti if you're interested in trying it out.”
Mid-to-late sponsor integration framed as solving a data gap he'd just demonstrated (veteran-owned companies, local businesses), with a time-limited discount code and a link to a free community for the rest of the tools.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
AFFILIATECommission earned if you click.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
- leadgenjay.com ↗
- Book a strategy call ↗
- Supabase, where my lead database lives, about $20 a month ↗
- Reacher, open-source email verification you can host yourself ↗
- Clay, audience and signal data included, Growth plan needed for API calls ↗
- How Claude Code Replaced My Entire Cold Email Strategy ↗
- Free Cold Email Marketing Course for 2026 (7 Hours) ↗
- Instagram ↗
- Twitter/X ↗
- LinkedIn ↗
Visual structure at a glance.
