Outreach is a B2B lead generation and outreach tool. You type an industry keyword, choose a region, and it collects matching businesses with their email addresses, phone numbers and Instagram handles. Then you send emails from your own email account.
That description fits a lot of people on paper. In practice, it fits some much better than others. This post describes the five kinds of sellers we (Outreach) built it for, with a concrete scenario for each, and ends with the situations where another tool would serve you better.
The scenarios are examples to show how the tool is used, not customer stories. If you want the step-by-step walkthrough instead, read how to build a B2B lead list and send cold emails from one keyword.
What kind of business is Outreach built for?
Anyone who sells to other businesses and has to find those businesses themselves. If your next customer is a shop, a clinic, a restaurant, a studio or a distributor — and you don't already have their contact details — Outreach is built for you.
The common thread is the work that comes before selling. Someone has to find the businesses, visit their websites, copy the email and phone number into a spreadsheet, check the addresses, and only then write the first message. Done by hand, that takes about 1–2 minutes per business, so a list of 300 businesses costs 5–10 hours before a single email goes out. Outreach does that part for you and hands you a list you can send to right away.
Is Outreach a good fit for a solo founder without a sales team?
Yes — this is the person we had in mind first. A founder who sells to businesses usually does sales in the gaps between everything else, and the gaps are too short for hours of list-building.
Picture a founder who has built booking software for hair salons. She knows exactly who her customer is: independent salons in two or three cities. What she doesn't have is a list, or a spare week to build one.
With Outreach, she creates one project, types "hair salon" with each city, sets Email to Required so every business on the list has an address, and starts collecting. While it runs, she writes one short email that names the salon automatically. The next morning she sends it from her own email account. Outreach sends one email, waits about 10 minutes, and sends the next, so she can get on with her day.
When salons don't reply, the "Automatic follow-up emails" menu sends a second, shorter message after the number of days she sets, and only to salons that haven't replied. For more on how solo founders can build lists, see 4 ways to find B2B contacts as a solo founder.
How can a manufacturer or wholesaler find new stockists?
Search by the type of shop that should carry your product, in the regions you can deliver to, and require the contact detail you plan to use. Outreach turns "who could stock this?" into a list of real shops with contact details.
Take a small coffee roaster that wholesales beans. The best stockists are independent cafés, bakeries and specialty food shops within its delivery area. The roaster creates a project with three keywords — "independent café", "bakery café", "specialty food shop" — and picks the regions it delivers to.
A few things make this easier:
- Several keywords per project. Shops describe themselves in different ways, and each name finds different shops. The Collect tab shows the selected country, region, keywords and target in a “Here’s what we’ll look for” box before collection starts.
- A target for each search. You can add a second search for another region or business type with its own target, so one popular search doesn't crowd out the rest.
- Filtering that isn't your job. News articles, list sites, government offices and associations are removed, so your list is shops, not pages about shops.
- Excel download if a sales rep wants to work the list by phone. Phone numbers are collected alongside emails when you choose them.
How can a brand expanding abroad find its first buyers?
Pick the country and the state or region, type what your buyers are called in that market, and Outreach keeps only businesses whose location is confirmed. You can collect businesses in 193 countries.
Imagine a Korean skincare brand that wants its first stockists in Germany. It picks Germany, then one state, and adds keywords such as "Kosmetikstudio" and "Naturkosmetik". Outreach collects matching businesses and saves only those it can confirm are in that state, so the list doesn't fill up with businesses from the other end of the country.
There's also a “Only Korean-owned businesses” option, which appears once the country is abroad. It's for sellers whose first customers abroad are Korean-owned shops, restaurants and offices — often the easiest first door into a new market because the conversation can happen in Korean. We used this for a real project that collected 305 Korean-owned businesses in the US; the details are in how to build a list of Korean-owned businesses in the US. The full overseas walkthrough is in how to find overseas buyers by country and region.
Can you use Outreach to find partner businesses?
Yes. Collect each candidate's email and Instagram handle together, then send your partnership proposal by email. For shops that show their products on Instagram, the handle helps you judge fit before you write.
Say a handmade candle brand wants to be stocked by gift shops and concept stores. Many of those shops show their products on Instagram. The brand creates a project for "gift shop" and "concept store" in its target cities, sets Email to Required and Instagram handle to Get if available, collects, and then sends its stocking proposal by email from the Send tab.
Can an agency build lead lists for its clients?
Yes. Keep each client in its own project, run collections with that client's keywords and regions, and download the result to Excel. The cost line shows the maximum number of businesses before each run, which makes it easy to scope a client's job.
A marketing agency that offers lead generation to small B2B clients might run a project for a flooring installer one week and an accounting firm the next. Each project keeps its own keywords, contact settings, results and send history, so client lists never mix.
Agencies can hand over the spreadsheet, or run the outreach themselves from the same project: write the message, send from a connected email account, and use the project's results view to report how many businesses were collected, how many were emailed, and how many replied.
How does pricing work if you only need a small list?
Tokens are used per contact detail found, and the free plan gives you tokens every month. That makes a small first list cheap, and you can start on the free plan without paying anything.
| What | Tokens |
|---|---|
| Each contact detail found (email, phone number or Instagram handle) | Used for each one |
| Details a business doesn't have | Not used |
| Each email sent | Used for each email |
| A send that isn't delivered | Tokens refunded |
| New account | Free tokens |
So a business with an email and a phone number uses tokens for two details. Before collection starts, a cost line shows the maximum number of businesses — for example, up to 200 — and tells you that tokens are used for the info you receive. The real cost is usually lower, because missing details aren't charged.
When you need more, you move up to a bigger plan or buy extra tokens. The plans are Basic at $14, Pro at $35 (about 3x Basic) and Max at $105 (about 12x Basic) a month, or 20% off if you pay for a year. Extra tokens come in three amounts — $100 for $90, $250 for $200 and $1,000 for $700 — and the more you buy, the bigger the discount. Extra tokens never expire; tokens you get each month from a plan don't roll over, and the monthly tokens are used first.
When is Outreach not the right tool?
When your customers are consumers or when you need a named executive's personal email address at a large company. It's better to know that before you sign up.
- You sell to consumers, not businesses. Outreach finds businesses and the contact details they publish. It doesn't find individual people.
- You need a specific decision-maker's personal address. Outreach collects the contact details a business puts on its own website and profiles, which is often a general inbox. That's ideal for small and mid-sized businesses where the owner reads that inbox, and less useful for reaching one named executive at a large enterprise.
- You need thousands of emails out today. Outreach sends from your own mail account, one email at a time and about 10 minutes apart by default, to protect that account. It's built for steady one-to-one outreach, not same-day mass mailing.
- Your target businesses rarely publish contact details. Some kinds of local businesses take bookings only by phone and list no email. Setting Email to Required will then give you a short list. Collecting phone numbers instead, or targeting a different kind of business, works better. Outreach supports English and Korean. Our step-by-step walkthrough explains the full workflow in English.
How do you try it?
Create a free account, run one small project with your free tokens, and look at the list before you spend anything. A single keyword, a single region and a target of about 30 businesses is enough to see what Outreach finds in your industry.
- Sign up for free.
- Create a project and type one keyword.
- Choose which contact details you need, and check the cost line.
- Start collecting, then look through the results table.
If you plan to send email, check two things before your first send: that your sending domain is set up correctly with our free checker for sender settings, and that the addresses you already have are real with our free email checker. Both work without an account and are available in English.
