Starting a Side Hustle? Here’s the 1st Thing You Should Do to Generate Leads

I launched my side hustle in 2021. In less than 2 years I’ve built a membership group, Marketing for Justice, into an online business that regularly generates $4K/mo. (I’m documenting my journey on Medium so please consider subscribing for the latest updates).

I’ve made a LOT of mistakes, but one thing I actually did right, immediately at launch, has dramatically changed the trajectory of my side hustle for the better:

I scraped emails from LinkedIn.

That’s it. Definitely not rocket science, but a game-changer when it comes to accelerating your path to revenue and profitability.

Let me break down exactly why scraping emails from LinkedIn is so important for getting your side hustle off the ground — fast.

Roughly 90% of the qualified leads I’ve generated for my side hustle have come from email scraping on LinkedIn.

Why Scrape Emails from LinkedIn to Launch Your Side Hustle

Like many side hustles, my business relies almost exclusively on cold emailing for generating leads.

But success in cold emailing is dependent on many factors, and one of the biggest is the quantity and quality of your prospect contacts.

IMHO, you’ve really got just a couple ways to reliably build a list of potentially qualified prospects for your cold email campaign:

1. Use an email finder like Snov.io, Reply, or Email Hunter to manually grab email addresses from online profiles or based on domain names
2. Hire a freelancer on Fiverr to scrape emails from LinkedIn (or another social media site or directory)

Why Outsource Email Scraping?

#1 works, but it’s slow. Not the kind of thing you want to be spending your time on, especially when you’re holding down a 9–5. #2 is fast, cheap, and highly scalable. For just $50–100, you can easily hire an offshore freelancer and get 500–1,000 (sometimes more) email addresses for prospects that you qualify based on searchable criteria.

For Marketing for Justice, I’m targeting in-house marketers at small to mid-size law firms in the U.S. These are folks with titles like Marketing Director, Marketing Manager, Marketing Coordinator, Digital Marketing Manager, etc. You get the idea. I’m not interested in marketers at firms with 200+ employees.

All of these criteria can be set up as filters on LinkedIn.

Once you’ve provided the criteria to your freelancer on Fiverr (Upwork is another good source, but generally more expensive), they get to work scraping email addresses for prospects that fit the parameters.

Generally it takes 2–3 days per 500–1,000 email addresses, or you can pay a few bucks more for faster turnaround.

What Do You Do With the Scraped Email Addresses?

Once you’ve got your prospect list, you can load it into your preferred cold email outreach software (I’ve tried almost every one under the sun and find Reply to be the most effective — more on that in a future post) and start the campaign. Of course, you can also do manual, one-off cold email outreach to prospects, but who has time for that?

With a fine-tuned cold email campaign in place, targeting highly qualified prospects you’ve obtained through email scraping, you’re well on your way to generating your side hustle’s first leads and revenue!

Interested in Building a Profitable Side Hustle?

I’m documenting all my processes for building a $4K/mo. side hustle on ~4 hours per week, and I’ll soon be digging into how to set up high-performing, automated cold email campaigns (follow me on Medium so you don’t miss out).

I’d also love to connect on LinkedIn and swap tips and tips related to entrepreneurship, side hustles, and membership sites. Hope to see you there!