You Already Have an Email List - You Just Haven't Built It Yet

Building an email list feels like it takes years. You need lead magnets, landing pages, paid traffic, opt-in forms, a content calendar, maybe some kind of free PDF with a fancy name. You picture this slow accumulation process - a hundred subscribers here, a few hundred there - until eventually you have something worth emailing.

That's true if you're starting from zero. But you're probably not starting from zero. They just think they are.

A client of mine had been running a custom CRM software business for 25 years. He sells to companies with 50 to 500 users - everything Salesforce does, at a third of the price, and you own your data. You get a powerful CRM built on open-source software, customized to your exact needs, without a vendor lock-in or a multi-year contract eating your margins.

He had two car manufacturers in Australia as clients. He had a healthcare company. A bunch of learning and development companies. Referrals and word-of-mouth drove the business for 25 years. He was good at what he did.

He also had over 60,000 LinkedIn followers.

His email list had zero subscribers.

I told him: you already have your email list. You just haven't built it yet.

What Your Followers Are Worth

Your LinkedIn followers voluntarily said, at some point, "this person is worth following." That's a warm signal. That puts them ahead of any cold contact you pulled from a database.

LinkedIn won't let you download your followers. You can't go into your settings and export a CSV of 60,000 people. But a tool called Expandi can get you close. You connect it to your LinkedIn, set up a followers scrape, and within a few minutes you have every one of those followers' LinkedIn profile URLs. From there, Expandi cross-references data sources to pull email addresses for a significant chunk of those followers. On a list that size, you're talking about tens of thousands of email addresses. People who've been seeing your name for years and haven't unfollowed you.

That's your email list. It already exists. You just haven't extracted it.

The Opt-Out Email (I Basically Invented This)

Once you've run the scrape and you've got those email addresses, the instinct is to set up some kind of welcome sequence. Something professional. Something with nice branding and a clear value proposition and a CTA button.

Don't do that.

I send one email. The first email says something like: "Hey, I'm going to start sending daily emails about [topic]. If that's not for you, just unsubscribe below."

The email ends there. One paragraph. You're not selling anything in it.

What happens next surprises people every time. Out of every thousand people on that list, maybe ten unsubscribe. Nine hundred ninety stay. They didn't fill out an opt-in form, but they chose not to leave, which is functionally the same thing. I call this opt-out marketing. You give people a clear, easy way to say no, and the ones who don't say no are now opted in.

Then your next email has the offer.

For the guy I was coaching, that offer would be straightforward: here's why your CRM is costing you more than it should, here's what switching looks like, and a single call is enough to figure out if we're a fit. Send that to 50,000 warm followers who've been seeing his name in their feed for years, and some percentage of them are going to want to talk.

The Infrastructure Side

Once you've got the list, you need somewhere to send from. I've been using AWeber for this for years. I send around a million emails a month and it costs me about $750 a month. Try doing that with Mailchimp - their pricing model falls apart at any kind of scale. The only cheaper option is fully custom infrastructure, but then you're managing your own servers, and if something goes wrong you can burn your domain. Not worth saving a few hundred dollars a month.

For the cold outbound side - separate from the warm LinkedIn list - the setup is a bit different. You want custom SMTP, you want your sending domains warmed up before you launch any campaigns, and you want to be running that through something like Smartlead or Instantly rather than your main business email. Keep your warm list and your cold outbound completely separated. Different domains, different infrastructure.

The guy I was coaching was already warming up his inboxes, which is exactly right. That part takes a couple of weeks. The LinkedIn scrape and email list setup takes an afternoon. So you do the scrape first, get the warm list running, and let the cold outbound infrastructure bake in the background.

The Cold Outbound Layer: Find People Who Already Have the Problem

The LinkedIn follower scrape gets you warm leads - people who know you. For a business competing in a known software category, cold outbound to people with a specific, identifiable problem is where you find the volume.

In his case, the angle I liked was Zoho. He was trying to position himself against Salesforce - it's the name prospects bring up first. But Salesforce has such a gravitational pull in certain enterprise environments that competing with it directly is an uphill fight. Zoho is different. Zoho is competing with Salesforce the same way he is - on price, on flexibility, on "we're not the evil empire." The companies using Zoho are already predisposed to consider alternatives. And Zoho has weaknesses you can exploit.

The tactic: go to BuiltWith, filter for companies running Zoho, and build your prospect list from that. These are companies who've already opted for an alternative to Salesforce. They already believe the "you don't need the $100K/year enterprise option" argument. You're showing them there's a better version of the decision they already made.

From there, you enrich those leads - pull names, titles, verified emails - and build your cold email campaign around a direct comparison. A tool like Clay is useful here for enrichment and personalization at scale. For raw lead data and email lookup, check ScraperCity's B2B database - it pulls verified contacts across industries and layers well alongside BuiltWith. If you want a deeper breakdown of how to layer these sources, the Best Lead Strategy Guide covers the full approach.

The cold email itself should go head-to-head. Here's what Zoho doesn't do that you need. Their contracts work against you. Here's the one feature that's missing. Build a landing page that does the same thing - a full comparison, feature by feature, contract term by contract term. Run all your traffic there. Make it easy for a Zoho user to click through and immediately understand why they should be talking to you.

I also told him to create a separate domain for this - a URL built around the comparison. Something like "zohomigration.com" or whatever makes the positioning clear from the URL alone. Then your cold email signatures, your LinkedIn bio, your contact info - all of it points to that one funnel. One message, one offer, pointed at a single destination.

Growing the List Ongoing: The Giveaway Play

The follower scrape is a one-time event. You do it, you get the list, you send the emails.

I've been tracking my own LinkedIn account closely for months. My posts were getting terrible reach. LinkedIn works this way now. Your follower count means almost nothing to the algorithm by default. The platform wants to see engagement before it distributes your content broadly. So a post with no early engagement gets shown to fewer people, which means less engagement, which means less distribution. It's a spiral.

The fastest way to break the spiral is a giveaway.

Pick something your audience would pay for. A follow-up sequence, a framework, or a script. Something short that solves one specific problem. Make it available free in exchange for a comment on your post. Something like: "I built the ultimate follow-up sequence for [your specific audience]. If you want it, drop [emoji] in the comments and I'll send it over."

I ran this recently and gained over 1,200 LinkedIn followers from a single giveaway post. After that, my daily new follower count jumped to 40 to 50 per day organically. The algorithm learned that my content gets engagement, so it started showing my content to more people. After the giveaway, every post performed better - the distribution had improved, the content hadn't changed.

The comments on that post are a lead list.

After 24 hours, I run all those commenters through Expandi. It pulls their LinkedIn profiles and email addresses. I load those onto a separate sub-list in AWeber first - send them the giveaway they asked for, confirm the email is valid and active - and then move the good ones to my main list. Out of a hundred commenters, I might end up with 90 warm subscribers on my main list - people who asked to hear from you, with essentially zero spam complaints. Do that consistently and you're growing your list by hundreds of engaged people per month without spending anything on ads. The follow-up templates work for this kind of giveaway.

The giveaway is also how you find out what your audience cares about. If you run a giveaway about "how to migrate from Zoho in 30 days" and it gets 400 comments, migration is the pain point. If one about "CRM reporting best practices" gets 12 comments, that topic isn't working. Let the market tell you what to say. Then build your cold email offer around the thing that already worked.

Content: When to Start and How to Do It

On the coaching call, he asked when he should start creating content to build authority. My answer was: not yet.

At the start, what you need is cash flow and meetings. Warm calls, cold email, and events are what get you there. Content is a long game. Cold outbound is a short game. You need short-game wins first, because short-game wins give you the material for long-game content.

Here's what happens when you start making warm calls and running outbound: you have conversations. Someone says something frustrating. Someone asks a question you hadn't considered. A prospect's pricing pushback reveals a misconception about your product. That stuff is gold for content. You now have something to say that comes from experience instead of from hypotheticals.

When you do start posting, I write three different hooks for every post before I decide which one to use, and I spend up to three hours on it - writing it, reading it out loud, cutting the parts that don't earn their place, rewriting the opener. Publishing the first draft is the default. Post without editing and it disappears.

Ask yourself: would this post go viral? Would it? If your gut says no, keep working on it. The posts that perform are the ones where you can point to a specific moment, a specific number, a specific thing that happened. "We pitched against Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and two other CRMs - and won. Here's what made the difference." That's a post. "5 reasons your CRM is important" is not a post.

Use AI as an Editor

Use AI to edit your writing.

The pattern I use: I write the raw thing myself - even if it's rough, even if it's three sentences - and then I ask ChatGPT something like: "I wrote this. Tell me why you wouldn't buy it." Then it points out the weaknesses. I fix what it flags and run it again. What comes out the other side doesn't look like AI-generated content, because the original insight was mine. The AI just helped me edit it.

The opposite approach - opening ChatGPT and asking it to write a LinkedIn post about your CRM business - gives you something that sounds exactly like every other LinkedIn post about CRM businesses. "In today's enterprise software market, organizations are increasingly turning to..."

Posts reference customers, outcomes, and moments. If you helped a manufacturer eliminate double-data-entry across their dealer network, say that. If you migrated a company off a CRM they'd been trapped in for eight years, say that. The moment you can attach a specific result to a specific situation, the post stops being generic.

Your LinkedIn Profile Is a Landing Page

Your LinkedIn headline is a landing page. It's the first thing someone sees after they click your name from a cold email, or from a post comment, or from a connection request. If it says "Founder & CEO," you've wasted that moment.

Your headline should do the same work as your landing page. If you're going head-to-head with Zoho, your headline should say that. Something like: "We build custom CRMs that out-perform Zoho - without the lock-in." Or whatever sets you apart. Make it immediately clear who you're for and what you're claiming.

Every element of your presence - headline, about section, contact links - should push toward one funnel. One comparison. One offer. When your cold email, your LinkedIn profile, and your landing page all make the same case against the same competitor, the argument carries from one to the next. People click through, they see the same message they just read in the email, and the conversation moves faster.

What to Do in the Next 48 Hours

Do these three things.

• Run the Expandi followers scrape and download the CSV. Get those email addresses out of LinkedIn and into a spreadsheet you control.
• Import to AWeber and send the opt-out email. One email, one paragraph. "I'm going to be sending regular emails about [what you do]. If that's not for you, unsubscribe below." Now you have a list.
• Send your offer. Don't overthink it. One clear email about the problem you solve and the result you deliver. Link to a page that makes the next step obvious.

If you want to keep growing the list after that, add the giveaway play. Take a comparison guide, a migration checklist, or a follow-up sequence - post it, collect the commenters, run them through Expandi, and add the good emails to your list. Repeat every few weeks.

If you've been posting on LinkedIn and building a following, the list is one afternoon away. The work is already done. You just haven't extracted it yet.