I built our outbound list for under $400

I was about to head out on a walk and saw my son on the family MacBook, playing chess. I asked him which app he was using.

“The one that was already on here.”

I told him I couldn’t remember where I got that app and whether it had a way for us to play each other on different computers, so I’d take a look when I got back.

He’s 10. Actually, it was his 11th birthday.

When I got back from my walk 1.5 hours later, there was an invite waiting on my computer.

It was a live two-player chess game. Difficulty levels if you’d rather play the computer. A setting to preview your moves, or not. A chat window so we could talk trash to each other.

It was like any other app you’d buy from the app store right now. Or would’ve paid for years ago and installed on your computer. He built it, published it, and sent me the link to play while I was out on a walk, without asking a single question.

It made me think about what the state of tech is right now. But not for long. I made my move on the board and got to work for the day.

The work I got back to was day two of building a list of MSPs to go outbound on in Q1.

I did exactly what I coach our clients to do when they’re going outbound: define a tight ideal client profile (ICP). For us, that’s not just “MSPs,” but MSPs over a certain revenue, with a full-cycle seller or an SDR in the seat who isn’t performing as well as they could (or used to), doing some marketing, with a CRM in place.

With the ICP dialed in, I started building a comprehensive list of MSPs in the U.S. On day one, I had a list of 35k MSPs using a database that works like ZoomInfo, Seamless, or Apollo, except there’s nothing to log into. It’s software with no interface, designed to be accessed and run through Claude or ChatGPT.

Using that database and some general AI searches I automated, I cleaned the list up and enriched it, adding details like direct emails, phone numbers, estimated revenue, websites, LinkedIn profiles, and more.

Then I built an agent to go research every company that cleared the revenue bar. Confirm it’s actually an MSP. Confirm what it could of the contact information. And more importantly, search the web, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed and anywhere else it could find to figure out whether they have a seller or an SDR, and whether they’re doing any marketing.

35,000 down to about 2,000. A targeted, enriched list of MSPs who are likely to be our ICP.

That’s when it really dawned on me.

My son had built fully functioning software in less than a couple hours. I was using new software with no interface at all. And the list I’d just finished would have been a vastly different kind of project a couple of years ago.

What the list I built used to cost: just a few years ago, a $12k/year ZoomInfo subscription to build the raw list. Another $1-3k/year for something like Apollo to enrich it with direct phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles and correct addresses. And $5-10k/year for someone in the Philippines to QA it, verify it and fill in what was missing.

And you’d work on this over the course of months and years.

The targeted list of enriched, researched records for our outbound took 3 days, under $400, one database I never log into, and a Claude subscription.

I know that for most of you, “AI is changing things” is the least surprising sentence you’ll read this week. Some of you are further down this road than I am. Most of you see it happening, accept it, and have probably pulled some of it into your day to day already.

I’m going to state the obvious anyway, because the deeper I get into the guts of this stuff — APIs, CLIs, agents, code I never thought I’d touch — the clearer the actual impact gets.

Some things aren’t going to change. A tight ICP you’re committed to. A list built on high-quality, enriched data. A unique selling point and a creative offer that starts conversations with the right people. Those are the fundamentals of going to market, and they’ll be the fundamentals ten years from now.

AI isn’t changing that.

What’s changing is how you execute them and what it costs. Dramatically.

Which means if you’re selling and marketing the same way, with the same tactics you were five, ten or fifteen years ago, it’s going to keep getting harder. Because all those tactics were written for a condition that’s changed.

The “proactive IT” unique selling point landed when it was new, fresh, and actually unique. Now it’s a standard talking point.

The standard cybersecurity assessment as a lead magnet stood out when nobody had been offered one. Now it’s the same offer every MSP in their inbox is making.

Downloading a raw list from an expensive database and handing it to a caller was common when building a qualified list was expensive and time consuming. Now it’s a handful of days of focused work, some APIs, and a couple subscriptions.

Generic, templated outreach and campaigns without any targeting, personalization, or creativity worked when no one else was doing it. Now people are inundated with marketing from your market, which has become crowded.

And this isn’t just my opinion.

In 2000 there was barely an MSP market to count. By 2016, roughly 40k US firms were built on managed services. By 2022, more than 80k companies in North America were selling some form of it. Even the narrowest count, profitable MSPs serving small business in North America, is around 20k. The owner you’re calling has probably heard the pitch.

Then virtually every outbound channel got harder. On outbound calls, the same number of calls in 2023 got 55% fewer conversations than in 2014. Cold email replies fell 15% in a single year. LinkedIn put in caps on new connection requests. Gmail and Yahoo started filtering bulk senders by rule in 2024, and Apple’s privacy update made open rates meaningless. And since 2021 carriers can tag an outbound number “Spam Likely,” and legitimate numbers on high-volume dialers get tagged right alongside the roughly 50 billion robocalls Americans will receive this year.

The market ain’t what it was 10, 5, even 3 years ago.

Direct mail is the one channel that got better: a 1% response to a cold list in 2015, and 4-5% by 2024. Less so if it’s the same mail you sent in 2015, though. My view is everyone went to cheap, easy, scalable messaging and left the mailboxes emptier than they used to be.

The advice for what used to work was fine when it was written. But when 10-year-olds are whipping up fully functional SaaS products on the fly and both the capabilities and intelligence of the tools are increasing — literally, exponentially — it’s no surprise that the advice on what used to work isn’t going to apply to what’s going to work now. And sure as shit not to what’ll work tomorrow.

And it doesn’t even mean calls, email, LinkedIn, and other channels don’t work. It means what it takes to make it work has changed substantially, and the old playbooks don’t work like they used to.

You already know this. You’d never let a client run their network on a ten-year-old playbook, and you’d never tell them the tools & tactics haven’t changed since then.

While I was QA-ing the list we built in Claude, I kept landing on the same kind of company.

An MSP with AI on the website. AI in the lead magnet. AI in the service descriptions. And in some cases, AI as a service to their clients.

But sales and marketing that looks like nothing changed. Similar website format as everyone else. Hosted the same way it has been for a decade. Similar lead magnet as everyone else. Similar messaging as everyone else.

Hundreds of what looked like the same company, out of a list of 2,000.

That’s what I can see from the outside. What I see from the inside, across the 75-plus MSPs we work with right now, lines up with it: a raw list pulled straight from a database with nothing done to it, the same outreach campaign the rest of the industry is running, no personalization and nothing adjusted for the market they’re after.

Then wondering why the connect rate sucks, why the assessment offer stopped converting and why the inbound is slowing down or less qualified.

I’m saying this as an observation, not as a dig. When the technology changed, these companies changed with it. Their stack, their services, their pitch to clients all got rebuilt. The sales and marketing engine underneath it is still the one that was built for a market with a fraction of the competition, and it’s being run the same way it was ten years ago. That’s the pattern I’m seeing more than any other right now.

And I’m bound and determined to do something about it.

I studied the hundreds of MSPs I’ve personally worked with over the years. What’s working, what isn’t, and what the patterns are.

Across our book of business just over the past two years, the ones getting traction have the principles underneath, whatever tactics they’re running on top.

Side by side across our book, companies with a clear market, a solid list and a unique offer set 5-7x as many new appointments as those without. When outbound isn’t producing, these are the three questions I’d want answered first.

If any of those is a no, tactics won’t matter. Old ones, new ones, AI, no AI. Your odds of getting the right conversations with the right clients are low, because you haven’t built the thing that creates them.

The MSP sending AI-written outreach to an unenriched list with no real ICP is in the same spot as the one mailing the same campaign from a decade ago. Different tools, same mindset, same results.

If all three are a yes and you’re still not getting results, now it’s time to look at tactics and execution.

The filter I’d use on each one: will this still work twelve months from now? That’s what you’re competing with. What I did with our own list took three days. A year from now it’ll be faster, cheaper and better, and the people on the other end of your outreach will be getting more of it.

Principles first. Then strategy, tactics, and execution. Troubleshoot in that order.

As far as our go-to-market strategy for outbound, we’ll do two things.

One is our full-cycle seller is going to run low-volume, hyper-personalized outreach behind a really creative lumpy mailer and an icebreaker people haven’t seen before, built with the campaign builder I made to create campaigns for the full-cycle sellers we manage and coach.

She’ll know exactly who she’s calling, use phone, email, LinkedIn, and other channels behind the direct mail (the one channel doing better than it was 20 years ago).

Second, we’ll have an SDR strategy in place to call an enriched list and offer a diagnostic tool to help understand why your outreach or seller isn’t converting the way they should be, or used to. Clean data, highly skilled SDRs, unique offer people haven’t heard of that leads to conversations.

The whole GTM engine, built for exactly who we are and who we sell to, in a couple months.

But I’m leading with the principles: clear target market, high quality data, something unique to differentiate the call from every other one they’ll receive. Then strategy, then tactics, then execution. The 5-7x gap in appointments is why.

Once it’s live, I’ll publish the numbers. Connect rates, conversations booked, cost per conversation, and whether the mailer earns its postage. The real ones, whichever way they go.

Adios,
Ray

P.S. — The database I used for our list, the one with no interface, was Adam Robinson’s newest company, MoltSets. He launched it in June. We were one of the earliest customers.

On November 1, Adam was killed in the Learjet crash near West Palm Beach, along with his wife Helen, their kids Emma and Charlie, two friends, the kids’ nanny, and both pilots. Nine people.

Adam had a big influence on a lot of us in the entrepreneurial community. A family guy first, who built out in the open, said what he really believed, and was unafraid to push boundaries and challenge how things had always been done. His candor rubbed off on me. Some of it is in this post, and there’s more coming.

You’ll be missed, Adam. RIP, brother.