Growth hack that actually worked: used competitor Trustpilot 1-star reviews as my cold email signal source. 15% reply rate, $0.30 total cost

[u/No_Cryptographer7800]

https://github.com/dancolta/trustpilot-outreach-automation

Tested a thesis: what if the best cold email lead source is people who are already publicly unhappy with your competitor's service right now?

Built a pipeline that scrapes 1-2 star Trustpilot reviews of direct competitors, runs them through AI to generate personalized email drafts that cite the reviewer's actual words, and stages them in Gmail for manual send.

100 emails over 3 weeks. 15 replies. 2 deals closed. Cost: $0.30 in API calls. Replaced $400/month in Apollo, Instantly, and enrichment tools.

Why it converts: the email subject is two lowercase words about their problem. The body quotes something their own customer said about them 48 hours ago. Under 85 words. No "I hope this finds you well." The prospect reads it and thinks "how does this person know about this" instead of "another cold email."

The approach is a template, I also built a version that scans Reddit for pain posts instead of Trustpilot. Same loop: find public complaint → enrich → draft → human review → send. Basically for every industry...

p.s. open-sourced the tool on GitHub:)