The Personalized Cold Email Automation

Back in June, a founder hired me to find and reach out to angel investors & VCs through cold email.

(p.s. if you're feeling generous, leave a tip!)

I scraped Sales Navigator & Crunchbase, built a simple automation in Make & after 3 weeks it booked him 5 calls & got him over $400K in funding.

Word got around.

A month later an engineering-staffing firm asked if I could do the same thing... but this time sending personalized emails to thousands of Fortune 5000 VPs who need to hire software engineers by the dozen.

I didn't want to pay for mailchimp or instantly AI because I figured it would be valuable to know how to create this without using another platform. So I spent a weekend in n8n building the entire stack from outreach to deep personalization... all for a tiny amount of SaaS fees and total control of the logic.

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Here's how the automation works:

1. Lead list – I pull verified emails from Apollo (you can use anything for this, I just pay for Apollo because it makes it easy to find decision makers with just a CSV of companies).
2. Database – I store all the leads in Notion with columns: First Name, Email, Job Title, Company, Keywords, Email Stage. You could use Google Sheets, AirTable, or any database platform.
3. n8n flow
   • Search Notion for rows where Email Stage = 1.
   • GPT generates a personalized hook using the lead’s company, role, and keywords.
   • Function node injects that line into a base HTML template.
   • Mailgun is the email service provider that sends the email from whatever domain I want
   • It then auto-updates the Notion database to set the Email Stage = 2 (“1st Email Sent”) and adds a timestamp.
   • The follow-up branch waits 3 or 7 days, checks stage, then sends follow-ups 2, 3, 4 the same way!