C17 Lab

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Clay

Certified Enterprise Partner

Smartlead

Instantly.ai

Square

Head | Channel & Product Partnerships

SIXT

Director

Booking.com

Head | Portfolio Acquisition

CEO at Morning Leads | We make it unreasonable for prospects to ignore you • Top Certified Clay & Smartlead Agency •

To make an ungodly amount of money, you’ve got to grow your business. 

You can only grow your business in two ways.

1. Get more customers

2. Make them worth more

To get more customers, you need to get more leads.

Getting leads is simpler and easier than you think.

1. Make really good stuff ➜ Your offer

2. Give it away for free ➜ Your lead magnet

In short, you want to increase someone’s conviction that they will receive value in the future if they respond to the message you send.

All things being equal, when you double your leads, you double your business.

C17 Lab’s whole mission is to get prospects to show interest in what you sell and double your business.

Enzo Carasso 🧲

My accountant hates when I do this, but I let certain clients run campaigns a little bit longer so they can see the ROI before clearing invoices.


Why? When you know your system works, you can afford to prove it first.

Outbound is the hardest acquisition channel - and that's precisely why it's valuable. When done right, it gives you the ability to turn your top of funnel on and off at will.

Here's the reality: prospects exist on a spectrum of awareness and trust.

𝟏 = Most Informed | 𝟓 = Least Informed

𝟏. Brand/Content: They know you. They booked a call knowing what you sell and what problem you solve.
𝟐. Warm Intro: Someone vouched for you. They booked a call because they trust the referral.
𝟑. Warm Outreach: You know them, they know you. Familiarity exists.
𝟒. Paid Media - They discovered you through enough ads exposure. They booked a call because of your offer/lead magnet caught their attention.
𝟓. Cold Outbound - They've never heard of you before receiving your 75-word message in their inbox. They booked a call because of the offer you made.

Cold outbound sits at #5. The furthest point from a sale. The longest cycle. The most friction.

But in their first 57 days, we booked 84 meetings and our client closed 2 deals. 82%+ qualification rate. 77.38% show rate. 4.5 leads per day.

The difference? An offer designed specifically for cold audiences.

Most companies try to sell the same way to cold prospects as they do to warm. It doesn't work like that.

When you design for uninformed buyers with outbound in mind, you accept that sales cycles will be longer. Prospects need more proof, more hand-holding, more work.

But if that's the price for controllable pipeline? It's worth it every time.

Founder @ C17 Lab | We Engineer Unstoppable Pipelines | c17.ai

🦾Eric Nowoslawski

Growth Engine X

Founder

Certified Expert

REITIUM

Advisor

Gated

Advisor to an exciting Startup called Gated. Gated challenges unknown senders to donate to charity in order to reach you - so everything in your inbox is worth your attention.

It's like a postage stamp for email. 

As a huge email sender, I'm most excited for the ability of our messages to cut through the noise, prove to our prospects that we are being intentional and we want to solve their problems, instead of relying on fancy copywriting and sending 10s of thousands of emails.

Gateway Regional Chamber of Commerce

Vice President

Help Chamber Members grow their business
Facilitated Connecting Members through observed Synergies
Public Policy Research and Advocacy
Negotiate discounts on behalf of the Chamber
Engaged with Local Municipalities in Economic Development and Business Policy

The Gateway Regional Chamber of Commerce is the largest business association in the New York Metropolitan Area with about 1,200 members. We hold approximately 150 events per year from large 600-person dinners to small 10-person breakfasts, and everything in between, with a great emphasis on networking and business promotion.

The Gateway Chamber has a long history dating back to 1911 when it was founded as the Elizabeth Chamber of Commerce by John D. Rockefeller and other New Jersey industrialists.

Today, the Gateway Chamber serves as an umbrella organization for a number of regional and local chambers and networking groups including: the Union County Chamber of Commerce; the Central Jersey Chamber of Commerce; the Route 22 Chamber of Commerce; the Kenilworth Chamber of Commerce; the Roselle Park Chamber of Commerce; the Clark Chamber of Commerce; the Linden Chamber of Commerce, the Somerset Hills Business Network; the Black Business Alliance; the Gateway Warehouse Association; the Gateway Hospitality Alliance; and The Irish Business Association. When you join the Gateway Chamber you automatically become a member of ALL these groups at no additional cost.

The Gateway Chamber is a strong advocate for its members. It works at the federal, state and local levels on both legislative and regulatory issues.

We consider it to be core to our mission to help our members grow their businesses, and as a result our retention rate has averaged 95% over the last five years. 

Members of the Gateway Chamber run the gamut from large corporations like Merck, Comcast, Verizon and Continental Airlines, to small and medium-sized business, to a very active home-based business group.

Director of Special Projects

CCFGiving

Operations Associate

Eastern National Academy

Instructed, refined, and improved skills for gymnasts of all levels
• Earned a 100% retention rate for all Recreational classes 3 months after starting
• Created Ninja Warrior Program that retained 180% of students over 9 months
• Manage employees and planning for Birthday parties and special events

Men's Gymnastics Coach

I am a direct response outbound lead generation expert. And by that jumble of words, I mean that I leverage cold email to build predictable revenue pipelines for my clients. 

I leverage over 20 databases to merge Firmographic, Technographic, and Persona data to build highly targeted playbooks with my clients. 

I believe we need to arm sales teams with the knowledge of their total Target Addressable Market and teach them how to score that Market for which companies have the most pain and need their solution. 

The best way to do this is to look at public indicators such as open jobs data, employee growth/attrition, social media growth, web traffic, new product launches, employee sentiment, individual employee tech investment, company tech stacks, etc.

With this data, not only are you only messaging with people that you know have a problem that you can solve, you also are armed  with powerful messaging that cuts through the noise. 

I teach sales teams to embrace technology and multiply what is possible per employee.

Instantly.ai just released something I've even gone as far to build for myself. But it's way more powerful because of their scale.

They just released their upgraded email verification enrichment for catch all/risky email addresses. 

This is huge for a company like them to be doing because they are using their scale to be able to verify the email addresses with real sending instead of an SMTP check or other methods of catch all verification. 

Now users will be able to check if anyone else on the platform has sent an email to the email address you uploaded and see if it went through successfully in the past. 

Allowing you to contact people that usually don't get as many emails because platforms have a tough time with catch all verification. 

We tried to build this based on our own sending data too but it just didn't have the scale necessary to be useful. With the amount of emails Instantly sends on a daily basis, it's incredibly valuable data for those serious about keeping their bounce rates down. 

I don't think this was publicly announced either but I've noticed that if you upload a lead list, they are automatically taking out leads that have a history of bouncing 100% of the time and I haven't even been charged for that. 

Very interesting development for them to keep pushing features for the cold email community.

Founder Growth Engine X | Clay Enterprise Partner

I've been completely wrong about AI prompting, and it's cost me thousands of dollars and it might be costing you money too. 

For months, I've been telling my team (and all of you) to structure prompts like this:

1. Tell the AI what you want it to do
2. Give it the data to analyze and reference
3. Provide examples of good outputs

I didn't realize that this approach wastes tokens. Especially when you're running outbound campaigns at scale.

I know this may seem obvious to technical people out there but I didn't even consider making a change. 

I had a call with my enterprise rep from OpenAI last week and they asked me why I wasn't using cached inputs based on my use case. 

I didn't even consider it because we use the Clay OpenAI integration.

Cached inputs save 50% on input tokens for GPT-4o mini, and 90% on GPT-4 when the input stays the same.

For those of us using AI for outbound messaging, this is exactly what we're doing. Running the same prompt structure over and over with different prospect data.

But the prompt needs to stay the same for as long as possible for the inputs to cache.

My old approach was mixing up the prompt by putting variable data (company descriptions, prospect info) in the middle.

The correct way:

Put everything that changes at the very bottom of your prompt.

Keep the instructions, examples, and framework identical at the top.

Only vary the prospect-specific data at the end.

I met with Jeff Barg on the Clay team directly about this and you shouldn't have to change all your integrations. The prompt will cache automatically with how they have the integration set up. 

This might seem obvious to technical people, but this is the ignorance debt you pay when you're not technical.

I'm sorry I made the wrong suggestion for so long.

If you're running AI-powered outbound campaigns and not using cached inputs correctly, you're burning money.

Here's everything I built with Cursor over Thanksgiving weekend. Some things were done in one prompt, some things took me a whole day. 

1. Automated our entire company/contact workflow
One form → Companies to Supabase → Contacts on-demand → Campaign auto-refill at 2am

2. Overhauled analytics

We already had pretty good analytics, but everything would run at midnight, and I wouldn't get snapshots during the day. So, I built this. 

- Snapshots of sending at 12pm, 3pm, 6pm EST
- Warnings if anything looks wrong
- Faster action on issues

3. Built our own email lookup API

One endpoint: first name + last name + domain
Checks our database cache first
Then LeadMagic → Prospeo.io → MillionVerifier guess → No duplicate paying for emails

4. Souped up our Google Maps scraper
- Now finds contacts mid-scrape
- Maps + contact data in one run

5. Automated campaign setup
- Settings done automatically
- Reads copywriting
- Suggests how to structure the Clay table

6. Batch API + cached inputs for scoring
- 50% off a request so we can make the prompts longer with more detail.
- 90% off GPT-5 token costs when you use a cached input on top of the batch API discount. 
- Company scoring at scale

7.  AI Lead Categorization 

- Uses the Smartlead API to pull all unassigned category leads. 
- We use the same prompt with GPT-5 Nano, GPT-40 Mini, and GPT-4.1 Nano. As long as they all agree on what category it automatically uploads the category. 

And now we only have to manually categorize what it doesn't agree on. This was a way harder issue than I thought, which is why I kind of hammered it with the three APIs, and we only have to filter 30-50 replies a day manually.

8. Bulk Contact Enrichment Flow for our biggest senders. 

We have 6 customers sending 50k+ emails per day (1 sending 120k emails per day) that just need a ton of data. 

I'm right this second processing 14M leads to be enriched, qualified, and distributed to the right campaigns. 

Can't wait to see what I can get done this week in Cursor.

Made this video explaining how you can use Cursor to scrape Google Maps and stop messing with custom coding it yourself. Here's the overall guideline to get this done below. 

Why Scrape Google Maps?

LinkedIn isn’t enough: Some businesses, especially local ones, lack a LinkedIn presence.

Google Maps is universal: Almost every legitimate business is listed here.

This method is ideal for local businesses or industries with limited LinkedIn activity.

Tools You'll Need:
Cursor: An AI-powered coding assistant and development environment.

Google Maps Extractor API:
RapidAPI version: Affordable and reliable.
Serper.dev, Outscraper, or similar APIs are also compatible.

CSV of ZIP codes or locations: Optional, but useful for targeted searching.

Clay or CRM: For storing and using your scraped data in email workflows.

Step-by-Step Instructions
1. Get Your API Access Set Up
Visit RapidAPI.com's Google Maps Extractor page (or your preferred API provider).

Subscribe to a suitable plan (e.g., $100/mo for 500,000 requests).

Copy your API key from the provider.

Note: One API request = 1 Google Maps page of results.

2. Open Cursor and Start a Project

Launch Cursor and create a new workspace.
Use natural language prompts like:
"Help me set up a workflow to search Google Maps for businesses in a CSV of ZIP codes. Use the RapidAPI Google Maps Extractor endpoint."
Cursor will write the necessary code for you (this might be Python, JavaScript, etc.).

3. Teach Cursor the API Endpoint
In Cursor, paste in the API documentation from RapidAPI (e.g., the search or locate endpoint).

Show it the input parameters and expected response format.

This improves Cursor’s ability to generate valid code.

4. Build Your Scraping Workflow
Provide prompts like:
"Loop through this list of ZIP codes, perform a Google Maps search for 'restaurants', and save the business name, address, category, and phone number to a CSV."

Modify as needed: e.g., "Go 3–5 pages deep" or "also fetch review data".

Let Cursor adjust the code and test locally within the tool.

5. Once you’ve scraped your data:

Export it into a clean CSV.
Import it into Clay to find owner email and contact information.

Here's how we custom coded a process to make sure all of our cold email campaigns are full of leads and get warnings when they aren't.

For years, it was the same manual process: download CSVs, upload into Clay, repeat.

So we built a system using Cursor, Supabase, Clay, and Railway.

Here are the inputs:

- Campaign ID
- Link to TAM list
- Webhook to Clay

Supabase stores:
- Campaign record
- Job record
- Scraped contacts

Cursor handles the scraping:
- Scrapes all contacts from the provided link
- Stores them in Supabase

The nightly worker (runs on Railway at 2AM ET):

Checks all campaigns + jobs.

Decides how many leads to send to Clay webhook.

Batch size options: 500 / 5,000 / 50,000 per day. really anything that you want

Tracks whether each contact was processed or used before.

Clay staging → processing:

Staging in Clay ensures the contact has never been used for that client.

Approved contacts move to the processing table (cleaning + enrichment).

Auto-delete on the Clay table keeps the system running autonomously.

Smartlead:

Leads flow into active campaigns automatically.

The alerts:

Supabase sends a Slack message when all contacts are processed: "All contacts processed" warning.

This tells us it's time to add more leads or the campaign will run dry.

Optionally for you, we use ClickUp analytics to verify leads are being added.

The outcome: we never have to manually upload CSVs again, and we get proactive warnings before campaigns run out of leads.

How are you currently managing lead intake for your cold email campaigns?

I was just thinking about how far we have come since AI. Here's a list of data points that used to be cutting edge and are now so easy with AI. 

When I first started my agency, one of the things we were asked to do was score a company for any signs of GDPR or SOC II compliance. That used to be a crap ton of google search operators (that each cost .01 per call). 

Now you can use a website markdown like Firecrawl to get what you need and score it with AI.

I had another customer that wanted to know 

1) if a company offered phone support and if so
2) what times were they available. 

Again, a google search nightmare and running tons of if/then formulas to parse out the times that they were available on the phone. 

Now you can easily just ask Claygent to get this information for you from the homepage. 

We also had someone that wanted to take a screenshot of an ecom companies sustainability page and put it in the email. 

Wow so many problems. Finding the page, taking the screenshot, saving the screenshot, finding screenshots that had pop ups and deleting them, etc. 

Now browser automation companies can take care of all that. I'd still find the page with Claygent to get down on that compute time and then have Browserbase navigate to the page, make sure there are no pop ups and then take a screenshot. 

What's possible for sales and marketing teams is just getting crazier and crazier with all the new AI tools.

taplio

The Battle

Enzo Carasso 🧲

🦾Eric Nowoslawski

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taplio

The Battle

Enzo Carasso 🧲

🦾Eric Nowoslawski

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Enzo Carasso 🧲's LinkedIn Performance

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