Coldlytics: Human-Researched Lead Lists ft. Matt McQuinn

Coldlytics kept coming up inside the Seven Figure Agency community. I coach the HighLevel side of that group, and when multiple seven-figure agency owners say their best leads all come from the same place, that gets my attention. I brought co-founder Matt McQuinn on the show to find out what they are doing differently.

His background explains the product. Before Coldlytics, Matt was a director in two seven-figure agencies, running a team that sourced over 200,000 emails a month for lead gen campaigns. List sourcing was the biggest pain point his team reported, and he met his co-founder Richard Francis while both were trying to solve it.

The Three Ways Everyone Builds a List

Matt breaks list building into three traditional options, and each one has a catch:

1. Scrape the web yourself. Doable, but the cleanup is on you. A scraper cannot easily tell a plumbing service business from a plumbing wholesaler.
2. Hire an overseas freelancer. Cheaper hands, but communication gets hard and results depend on how well they understood the brief.
3. Buy a database. You are buying the same list everyone else is buying, and everyone pitches the same people. The big databases also lag on newer businesses.

Coldlytics is the middle ground. AI and scraping identify candidate companies, a North American team verifies they actually match what you asked for, and human researchers hunt down the emails. The researchers are paid on valid email addresses found, so their incentive lines up with what you actually want. Your list comes back as a Google Sheet within 24 hours on business days.

How a Task Works

You sign in and walk through a task wizard:

• How many leads you want, and how many contacts per company
• Seniority level, usually owner, founder, or director
• Data sources, including the Google Maps strategy below
• Advanced filters: exclude businesses already advertising on Facebook or Google, or filter by revenue, head count, and company age
• A plain-English note describing who you want, like "plumbing business owners in Allentown, Pennsylvania"

A real person then scrapes down matching companies, checks their websites, and passes them to the researchers who find the contact info.

The Google Maps Strategy

This was my favorite part of the interview. Any business that is a going concern has a Google Business Profile, because Google creates one automatically. That makes Google the best starting inventory of local businesses, including the newest ones that have not shown up in the big B2B databases yet.

In practice: run a Maps search like plumbers in Allentown, Pennsylvania, copy the link, and paste it into your Coldlytics task. That search becomes your target pool.

Data Points That Double as Sales Intel

Every list includes first and last name, company, job title, email address, and website. From there you can add LinkedIn profile, full address, business phone, and a direct dial for an extra credit.

The Google Business Profile data points are where it gets interesting for anyone selling marketing services:

• Claim status. If a business never claimed its profile, it is not thinking about online marketing yet. A cold SEO pitch will be a tough sell, but "let's claim your front page of the internet" is a natural opener.
• Review count. Nobody piles up reviews by accident. A high count means the business is investing in marketing somewhere.
• Review score. An entry point for the conversation: here is how you compare to the five-star shops in your area, and here is how to close the gap.
• Pixel detection. Coldlytics checks for Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and TikTok pixels. An installed pixel means the business has already raised its hand on advertising.

Direct dial is the only one of these that costs an extra credit, and together they tell you which pitch fits before you write the first line of your Cold Email.

From List to Outreach

The finished sheet downloads as a CSV. Matt says 80 to 90 percent of Coldlytics customers run cold email through platforms like Instantly, Woodpecker, Lemlist, or Replyify, and the other 10 to 20 percent do cold calling. If you are on HighLevel, the CSV imports straight into your contacts.

Email Warm-Up

I asked Matt who he recommends for the actual sending. His two picks: Replyify, where he has personally sent over two million cold emails and the founder hangs out in the support chat, and Lemwarm inside the Lemlist platform. He added an honest caveat: the way Google treats warm-up keeps changing, so what worked when we recorded may have shifted by the time you watch. Verify current practice before you scale. More on the fundamentals in Email Marketing.

Pricing

As of our recording, Coldlytics runs on credits, and Matt compares them to the phone-minute packs you used to buy. One credit equals one valid email contact. The Light plan was $99 for 100 credits, about a dollar per lead, and the Pro plan brought that down to 59 cents per lead. Unused credits roll over to the next month. There was also a $7 trial with 25 lead credits over seven days, activated inside the platform right after signup. Pricing changes, so treat these as the numbers from the interview and check their site for what is current.

If you do sign up, the registration form asks how you heard about them. I would love it if you put The Marketing Show.

Matt's Parting Advice

The hardest part of outbound is getting started. Everybody wants to research everything and get it perfect on the first try, and then they never actually send. Matt's analogy: it is like trying to learn to ride a bike by reading a book. You have to get on the bike and fall off. Send the handful of emails, make the mistakes, and adjust.

Honest Notes

• At roughly a dollar per lead on the entry plan, this costs more per contact than bulk database exports. You are paying for accuracy and freshness. Josh Nelson compared Coldlytics data against other sources he had used and found it more abundant and more accurate, but decide based on which failure hurts more for you: a smaller list or a burned sender reputation.
• Lists take up to 24 hours on business days. It is not an instant export.
• I have not run my own campaigns on Coldlytics data yet. This recommendation comes from watching agency owners in the Seven Figure Agency community report their results over and over, which is exactly what got Matt on the show.

Try It

Head to coldlytics.com to create an account and activate the trial from inside the platform.

See Also

• Cold Email — where these lists go to work
• Whitelabel Suite — a different data source worth comparing for your niche
• LocalFalcon — find local businesses with poor visibility, then use them as your prospect pool
• Seven Figure Agency — the community where Coldlytics kept earning the recommendation