AI Summary
5 min readMarketing Agents That Actually Get You Customers
Cody Schneider opens with a blunt assessment: "Cold email is getting decimated. Reply rates are down. Everything is down. Actually, every marketing channel is down right now." The reason is AI slop flooding the zone, turning formerly productive channels into red oceans. But Schneider has built a system that bypasses the noise entirely—and he's willing to show exactly how it works.
The Signal Strategy: Finding People Who Raise Their Hands
The core insight is deceptively simple. Instead of targeting people based on firmographics (company size, title, industry) or demographics, you target them based on behavioral signals—specifically, their engagement with content your ideal customer would naturally consume. When someone likes or comments on a LinkedIn post about AI marketing tools, they are effectively hand-raising: "I am interested in this topic right now."
Schneider's method: find 10 to 20 influencers or business accounts within your niche whose content your target customers would engage with. "There's a handful of outliers within any niche, and everybody is engaging with those handful of outliers," he says. "If you just monitor those outliers, you're actually going to get 80% surface area coverage for that entire industry." You don't need more than that—the marginal return on adding more sources drops off quickly.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction & Promise** - Greg and Cody set up the episode: marketing agents are the new coding agents, and Cody will teach how to build two end-to-end agents to get customers on autopilot.
- 2 (02:31) **Agent #1 Overview: LinkedIn Engagement Monitoring** - Cody explains the high-level strategy for the first agent: monitoring LinkedIn posts of influencers and extracting engagers for cold outbound.
- 3 (04:33) **Step 1: Finding the Right Influencers** - How to identify which LinkedIn creators to monitor for your target audience.
- 4 (08:52) **Step 2: Using Apify to Extract Engagers** - Cody demonstrates how to use Apify's LinkedIn scraping actors to pull all engagers from a specific post.
- 5 (12:55) **What Makes This an Agent vs. Automation** - Cody clarifies the blurry line between marketing agents and simple automations.
- 6 (15:43) **Step 3: Waterfall Enrichment to Find Emails & Phones** - How to take LinkedIn profiles and find contact information using multiple tools.
- 7 (17:11) **Legality of Email Finding & Cold Outreach** - A brief discussion on compliance and what's legal in the United States.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
I bring Cody Schneider back on the show to build two marketing agents end to end, live. The first one monitors LinkedIn posts from creators in your category, scrapes everyone who engages, waterfalls those profiles into emails and phone numbers, and then runs cold email and LinkedIn DMs with an agent managing the replies. The second one turns internal conversations, sales calls, and podcast transcripts into a daily organic LinkedIn content engine across an entire team. Cody names every tool in the stack, shares the real infrastructure costs, and shows the actual terminal commands he runs in Claude Code. By the end you have two systems you can go set up today for your startup.
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
02:27 – Agent Number One: Cold Outbound Agent
04:26 – Finding Creators in Your Category on LinkedIn
09:09 – Apify Explained and the API Maestro Actors
10:59 – Extracting Engagers Live in Claude Code
12:59 – Agent Versus Automation
15:45 – Waterfall Enrichment: GitLeads, Apollo, Origami
17:13 – Compliance, Data Brokers, and What Stays Legal
21:40 – Waterfall Enrichment: Million Verifier and LeadMagic
25:38 – The Cold Outbound Infrastructure
28:33 – Software Factories and Marketing as Code
31:41 – Agent Number Two: The Organic LinkedIn Engine
39:34 – Earned Media Math at $22 CPM
42:31 – Closing Thoughts
Key Points
- LinkedIn engagement is a hand raise, so it beats firmographics as a targeting signal.
- Ten to twenty source accounts give you roughly 80% surface area coverage of an industry.
- Waterfall enrichment moves cheapest to most expensive: GitLeads, then Apollo, then Origami or Prospeo.
- Roughly $200 a month covers sending software plus inboxes for about 10,000 cold emails.
- An agent here is plain code on a cron job with an LLM attached where judgment is needed.
- Organic content works best when it starts from real human source material like calls, Slack, and transcripts.
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