Seb's Awesome Website

I need to solve the biggest problem every startup faces: Getting Leads.

Specifically, I needed leads for VIBE, the product I built with my co-founder. It’s an AI tool aimed at business coaches to help them measure team alignment.

VIBE isn't ready to be sold as a self-serve dashboard just yet. Instead, we're going to work with coaches 1on1:

They send us the info (company details, contacts, etc.)
We run VIBE on that data and send back the deliverables

The software is solid, but we needed to get it in front of the right people.

So, I ran an experiment. Here is exactly how I built the list, the stack I used, and the one critical mistake that cost me the sales... 😔

The Target: "ICF Quebec"

I didn't want to buy a generic list. I wanted high-quality, local leads.

I went straight to the source: the ICF Quebec website (International Coaching Federation). It’s a directory full of leadership and executive coaches; our exact Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Instead of manually copying emails, I scraped the directory using Apify. This gave me a clean, targeted list of coaches who are actively investing in their professional presence.

The Stack: Reach Inbox vs. Instantly

I’m a fan of Instantly.ai, but their lowest plan is restrictive when you're just testing the waters.

I decided to try a competitor: Reach Inbox.

Verdict: It’s actually quite solid. It definitely does the job.
It lacks some of the premium features & polish of Instantly
The lower-tier plan is more generous than Instantly' lowest plan

The Results: A 9% Reply Rate

Next, I loaded the scraped list, into EmailListVerify to remove bad emails.

Then, wrote a 3-step sequence focusing on their pain points (measuring team vision/alignment), and hit send.

The results were surprisingly good:

Reply Rate: ~9%
Interested Leads: 10-12 people

For a cold campaign, getting nearly 1 in 10 people to reply is a massive win. It proved that the offer resonated and the list quality was high.

The Big Mistake: Speed to Lead

Here is where I messed up big time.

I had the leads. I had the interest. But I was too slow.

I didn't reply to the interested leads fast enough. In the world of cold outreach, interest has a half-life of minutes, not days. By the time I got back to them, the momentum was gone.

We lost most of those 12 leads simply because of operational drag. I was too distracted (school, trip to Africa, other clients, etc.)

I am not making this mistake again. Next time I run cold email campaigns, I'm keeping my phone on me at all time with notifications enabled.

Bonus: The LinkedIn Experiment

I also dipped my toes into LinkedIn Sales Navigator. I heard it was free for the first month, so I grabbed the trial and started manual messaging.

Result: I got into a few conversations and booked one solid Zoom call.
The prospect loved the product but didn't have a current team to test it with. However, she’s a warm lead for the future.

Doing manual outreach on LinkedIn is more annoying than setting up a cold email campaign and clicking "Launch". I wonder if there's a way to automate LinkedIn DMs...

The Takeaway

The leads are there. Tools like scraping and cold email work if you target the right niche. But getting the lead is only half the battle. If you're not ready to reply and book the meeting immediately, you're just lighting opportunity on fire.