{"id":70,"date":"2015-02-26T14:56:03","date_gmt":"2015-02-26T13:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodpecker.co\/blog\/?p=70"},"modified":"2025-01-21T10:29:24","modified_gmt":"2025-01-21T09:29:24","slug":"how-we-found-our-prospects-email-addresses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodpecker.co\/blog\/how-we-found-our-prospects-email-addresses\/","title":{"rendered":"How to find your first prospects\u2019 email addresses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finally, your new business is about to kick off. Your website is live. All you need now are\u2026 the customers.<\/p>\n

You could wait for them to find your website on Google, but that takes time, and time is money. You can try to attract them with ads, but that\u2019s a pricy option when you\u2019re a bootstrapped startup. You can also make use of one of the very few free things in business – emails – and directly reach out to the people who you\u2019d like to be your clients.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the option we went for when we were developing our first company that gave rise to Woodpecker. In this blog post, I\u2019d like to tell you a story of how we found our first prospects\u2019 email addresses.<\/p>\n

Where did we start?<\/h2>\n

When we decided to pivot, the first thing on our to-do list was to find a place where we would acquire our new prospects and their email addresses. Obviously, the easiest way out would be hiring another company to build our prospect base for us.\u00a0Unfortunately, that was not an option for a bootstrapping start-up at a very initial stage of development. We had to get our prospects’ email addresses on our own.<\/p>\n

We had a clearly defined prospect persona we wanted to start with: an independent personal\u00a0fitness\u00a0trainer working with their clients one-on-one (defining the persona isn\u2019t an easy task, too \u2013 we\u2019re more than aware of that, but that\u2019s a topic for another time).<\/p>\n

The next step was to find a place gathering fitness professionals like those who we wanted to invite for interviews and testing of our software.<\/p>\n

We were happy enough to find two such major health-and-fitness organizations\u2019 portals, one in the UK (nrpt.co.uk<\/a>) and one in the US (ideafit.com<\/a>), plus a few minor portals for local personal trainers as well. But that was just a start.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\"nrpt-screen\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\"ideafit-screen\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Portals like those do not make the trainers\u2019 email addresses available to the public. They do, however, provide links to the trainers\u2019 websites. Bingo! Each website provides some contact information \u2013 most of the websites provide email addresses.<\/p>\n

How we got the email addresses<\/strong><\/h2>\n

And that\u2019s where the laborious part began. I went through hundreds of websites one by one, looking for emails of the right people. Looking back now, I must admit two things:<\/p>\n

First, and obvious \u2013 it took hours and hours (we were doing this\u00a0at the time when prospect list building tools<\/a> were not as numerous and popular as they are nowadays).<\/p>\n

Second \u2013 it gave me hours and hours of experience with our prospects\u2019 group and created opportunities to see who they are, understand their mindset, discover their priorities, and learn their language.<\/p>\n

In the end, it was easier to write the email I wanted to send them. I could imagine exactly who I am reaching out to.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\"will_bruce_site\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What if the email on the website isn\u2019t the email to the right person?<\/h2>\n

Ok, so we were lucky because we managed to reach our prospects\u2019 websites<\/span> from a single place. Additionally, our prospects were usually single-person businesses \u2013 so when I sent my emails, I knew they were going to reach the right person in the company.<\/p>\n

And what if you\u2019re aiming at a group of prospects that is not gathered into a single place? What if you aim at people who work in greater companies?<\/p>\n

Well, you still need to get to the company\u2019s website and find the right person in there. As Iris Shoor points out in her great article<\/a>, it is crucial to reach out to a specific person, not a company in general. \u201cHi there\u201d cold emails do not get high response rates.<\/p>\n

If you need the email address to the right person in a company (and it is not public) you might want to check out the article by Bryan Harris<\/a>, who gives a step-by-step instruction on how to acquire the contact to the exact person you need.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s in it for you?<\/h2>\n

To make your emails really encouraging and effective, you need to get to know your prospects.\u00a0You need to define your <\/span>Ideal Customer Profile<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n