TWITTER_ARTICLE

Developer demonstrates automated cold email system using AI and web scraping

2026-02-06 · 20:16 UTC ·shydev69 ·2 min read

Brief

This Twitter thread outlines a three-step automated system for generating personalized cold emails at scale. The author used useotter.app (a startup directory with employee contact info) to pull data on 233 companies in seconds, then employed Firecrawl's API to scrape each company's website and extract clean, structured content about their business. Finally, they fed this company information along with employee contact details into Claude Opus 4.6 via Anthropic's API to generate personalized outreach emails that reference specific company details rather than generic templates. The entire process took 10 minutes and cost less than $11 total, with the author noting they didn't actually send the emails since they're already employed. The thread includes specific cost breakdowns and positioning this as superior to manual web scraping approaches using tools like BeautifulSoup or Selenium.

Why it matters

Developer demonstrates automated cold email system using AI and web scraping:

Key details

  • [stack] useotter.app for startup leads + Firecrawl for website scraping + Claude Opus 4.6 for email generation
  • [scale] Generated personalized emails for 233 startups in 10 minutes total
  • [cost] Total cost under $11 ($8 for AI API calls, $0.19-$2.10 for scraping, free lead generation)
Cleaned source text

title: @shydev69: not generic "dear sir/madam" slop. actual personalised emails that reference wha...

author: shydev69

content_type: twitter_article

published: 2026-02-06T20:16:03+00:00

source_url: https://x.com/shydev69/status/2019867706431090976

word_count: 349

not generic "dear sir/madam" slop. actual personalised emails that reference what their company does

not generic "dear sir/madam" slop. actual personalised emails that reference what their company does and exactly how i can help.

it took me 10 minutes.

here's the exact stack i used and how you can do the same thing.

step 1: get the leads (

useotter.app

my friend satvik (

@tr1ckastley

) built this site called

. it's basically a directory of startups with their team members, roles, and contact emails.

i pulled the startup data using their api. got back company names, descriptions, websites, employee names, their roles, and most importantly, their emails.

233 startups. all with real contact info. took about 3 seconds.

now i had the targets. but sending a cold email that just says "hey i'm a developer hire me" is a guaranteed way to get ignored.

i needed to actually know what each company does.

step 2: scrape every company's website with firecrawl

firecrawl lets you scrape any website and get back clean, structured markdown.

i looped through all 233 company websites and scraped each one:

here's what firecrawl actually returns when you scrape a real startup. i scraped

@goClueso

and got back:

clean, structured, ready to feed into an llm. thanks

@firecrawl

step 3: generate personalized emails with claude opus 4.6

now i had two things:

1. company info

2. employee contact info

time to write the emails. i fed everything into claude opus 4.6 via the anthropic api.

here are real email opus 4.6 generated for after reading their scraped website:

setup smtp and ship them. i'm not doing because i'm already employed but if i was job hunting i would have pressed that send button.

total cost?

: free

firecrawl: $0.19 to $2.10

anthropic api: ~$8 for 500 emails

smtp: free

i've tried scraping websites manually. beautifulsoup, puppeteer, playwright, selenium (i literally built crawlers at my first internship at callprep).

handles all of that in one api call.

if you want to try it yourself:

(you get 10% off your first purchase with that link)

Posted: 2026-02-06T20:16:03.000Z

Engagement: 1592 likes, 0 retweets, 55 replies