My $1 LinkedIn outreach cheatcode

Hey everyone,

If you’re new here, welcome to Thoughts by Adel, where I brain dump interesting stuff I’ve been working on or thinking about over the last week.

If you haven't read my previous blog yet, I attempted to create a fully automated workflow for sending personalized LinkedIn connection requests to hiring managers. My only issue from that workflow is the cost. The tool I used: PhantomBuster, is only free for 14 days, and $56 per month after.

In this blog, I created a new workflow that you can implement without breaking your bank.

The Big Picture

Look, PhantomBuster is actually amazing. You can't really find an all-in-one LinkedIn automation tool as good as it.

Which is why I had no choice but to split the workflow into two separate tasks.

1. Scraping the hiring managers from LinkedIn using Bardeen AI.

2. Personalizing the LinkedIn connection request using Relevance AI.

But wait, where's the part where we auto send those connection requests? Unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn't have a public API that supports this action. PhantomBuster really is the only good tool out there that had a workaround.

For this reason, I decided to leave it out from our workflow. I figured, this might be good enough for a majority of job searchers. A good chunk of outreach work is thinking about what message to send anyway.

Scraping Task

Alright, let's start with scraping. I decided to use Bardeen AI for this.

Bardeen is a powerful browser extension designed to help you create automation tools, making it easy to automate tasks directly within a web page.

In our case, we use it to scrape the profile URLs of hiring managers from our active browser tab. It only involves searching for your prospects on LinkedIn, and then triggering the scraping action through the browser extension.

Pretty neat, right? You'll also be surprised at how easy it is to build.

Bardeen offers a ready-made template for scraping LinkedIn profiles directly from the search results page. It requires no modifications, and it is available for free!

All you have to do is configure where it should output the profile URLs. In our case, we want it to be accessible through a CSV file, hence, why we see the "Convert" action."

Writing Task

Now, let's move on to the writing task. I decided to use Relevance AI for this.

Relevance AI is a platform that lets you create AI tools with built-in integrations to other applications. It's a bit similar to Zapier or Make.com, except it has a lot more integrations with other AI tools. Plus, it has support for user inputs, something Zapier and Make.com lack.

In our specific use case, we use Relevance AI to do four actions:

1. Fetch data from your own LinkedIn profile.

2. Fetch data from your prospect's LinkedIn profile.

3. Find similarities between your and your prospect's profile.

4. Write the personalized connection request using those similarities.

When you use what I built as a standalone tool, this is what it looks like:

And of course, you can run this in bulk! Remember the CSV file we downloaded from Bardeen? Let's use it in this tool.

And here’s some of the output:

Building it is also straight-forward. You can access my specific workflow here, and feel free to clone it!

Here are a couple of gotchas to keep in mind from the template above:

1. After fetching the LinkedIn profile, we run some JavaScript code. Why? Because fetching a profile brings in a ton of data we don't need. Unlike Zapier or Make.com, Relevance AI doesn’t have an easy way to filter out unnecessary fields. So, we use this nifty piece of code to do the filtering for us!

2. Notice we've got two separate LLM actions. The first one finds similarities between you and your prospect. The other one writes personalized connection requests using those similarities. Sure, we could've combined these into one prompt, but it's way easier for the LLM to tackle one task at a time.

3. LLMs need an OpenAI API Key. While Relevance AI is free, using LLMs in our workflow isn’t! This means you'll incur some costs from your OpenAI developer account. But don’t worry! Even with the latest GPT-4o model, your bill won’t surpass $1 even after generating 100 connection request messages.

Retrospective

Alright, let’s wrap this up. Is this tool perfect? Definitely not. Unlike PhantomBuster, we can’t auto-send LinkedIn requests, which is a bit of a bummer. Plus, the process is somewhat manual—you’ll need to download the CSV from one tool and upload it to another. But hey, I definitely think this setup is more than good enough for the average job searcher.

Despite its quirks, I’d definitely use this tool again when I’m job hunting. It’s cost-effective, and with a bit of manual work, it gets the job done. Hope this helps you out!

That’s all for this week…but one more thing. If you’re enjoying this, can you do me a favor and forward it to a friend? Thanks.