How I generated 2500+ organic leads on Linkedin on autopilot

It was just another morning—until it wasn’t.

The day before, I had casually posted a giveaway on LinkedIn. I shared a set of marketing spreadsheet utilities I had built back when I ran my own agency. Thought a few marketers might find them helpful.

Next morning?

2,500+ comments, 700+ likes, 300+ connection requests.

My inbox exploded. CMOs, founders, freelancers, even marketing students — all asking for access, offering collaboration, or just dropping a thank you.

That’s when I realized:

Marketing doesn’t need a product. It needs a problem.

And if you solve it right, the product follows.

The technique was simple:Ask people to comment.More comments, more reach. Classic LinkedIn virality loop.

So I told people to drop their email in the comments to receive the marketing utilities.Honestly, I was sceptical. Who shares their email publicly in 2024?

But turns out—when the value is clear, people don’t mind the risk.

And they flooded the comments section.

Over the next week:

• My inbox was overflowing

• Profile views hit an all-time high

• I had marketers from Fortune 500s and indie founders both downloading the toolkit

What started as an experiment turned into a mini case study on:👉 Lead magnets without landing pages👉 The power of intent over gated content👉 What happens when you actually solve a pain point

Sometimes, the best distribution channel is hiding in plain sight. You just need to ask.

But here’s the catch:I had promised to personally email the utilities to everyone who commented.

Only problem?Not all comments had clean email addresses.Some were just:

“Please send it to me”“Interested!”“This is gold 🔥”And many did include emails, but in all shapes and formats — some with line breaks, extra text, emojis.

My first instinct? Hack it.

Attempt 1: Write a JS scraper

I fired up the browser console to run a quick JavaScript loop. But LinkedIn loads only 10 comments at a time, and with 2500+ comments, it would’ve needed 250+ manual scrolls.

Hard pass.

Attempt 2: PhantomBuster

I used PhantomBuster — a brilliant automation tool — and ran their LinkedIn Comment Exporter Phantom. It scraped:

• All comments

• Names and LinkedIn profiles

• Timestamps... neatly into a spreadsheet.

Data Cleanup in Sheets

Even with the CSV in hand, the real challenge was extracting emails from unstructured text.

So I did 3 things:

1. Remove line breaks using Google Sheets’ Find & Replace:Find: \r\n|\n|\r → Replace with: (space)

2. Use this monster formula to extract emails from comments:

excel

CopyEdit

=TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(G5), " ", REPT(" ", 200)), (LEN(LEFT(G5, SEARCH("@", G5))) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(LEFT(G5, SEARCH("@", G5)), " ", ""))) * 200 + 1, 200))

📌 What it does:

• Adds 200 spaces between each word

• Locates the @ symbol to find the email

• Uses MID to extract a 200-character chunk around the @

• Then TRIMs it to get a clean email

• Manually verified edge cases — some folks dropped “email [at] domain dot com” styles, which required good old-fashioned Ctrl+F and hand cleanup.

In the end, I had:✅ A clean, verified email list✅ Everyone got their promised sheet✅ And I got a 10x lesson in data ops & viral mechanics

Living up to the promise

Once I had cleaned and verified the email list, it was time to do what I’d promised — send the utilities to everyone.

Challenge:I couldn’t risk mass emails from a new tool landing in spam. Plus, I wanted to track opens and make the emails feel personal, not like a generic blast.

Solution:

I turned to Mailtrack — a free Gmail extension that:

• Tracks email opens

• Works within Gmail, so deliverability is high

• Allows small batch sends (200 at a time)

Here’s what I did:

• Split the emails into batches of 200

• Used my personal Gmail ID to send from (authentic sender = higher open rate)

• Made the subject line casual and helpful

• Kept the body short, warm, and non-salesy

The copy went like this:

Subject: As promised – the marketing spreadsheet utilities 🚀

Hi [First Name],

Thanks for commenting on my LinkedIn post!As promised, here’s the folder with the utilities I mentioned:👉 [Google Drive link]

These are templates I built while running my agency. Feel free to tweak them, break them, or just reply back if you want help using them.

Hope this helps you as much as it helped our clients.

Cheers,Ankit

P.S. If you do end up using one, I’d love to hear how it went!

Open rates? Over 70% on the first batch.Replies? Flooded with thank-yous and questions.LinkedIn DMs? Still catching up.

It reminded me that value + consistency is a combo people always respond to.

Coming up: how I used this momentum to build a small but hyper-engaged marketing community — without spending a single rupee.

Want me to share that too? Drop me a 👋.

To make the email feel even more familiar, I attached a screenshot of the original LinkedIn post. That way, recipients would instantly recall where this was coming from. I also added a gentle nudge, asking them to reply if they had questions or feedback.

At the bottom, I dropped a link to my blog and invited them to subscribe. Surprisingly, most people did. The tools hit the mark, and with zero spend, I saw the kind of traction most campaigns dream of.

Content is king

This post went live on a Saturday at 5 PM IST. I had just 4,000 connections, no fanbase, and didn’t follow any of the so-called LinkedIn success formulas. But it worked. Because the content was genuinely useful.

I had spent hours building those utilities for my own agency use, tweaking them across projects to save time and effort. Sharing them wasn’t a growth hack, it was just a moment of generosity. But it turned out to be the most impactful growth moment on my LinkedIn.

Lesson?If it’s useful for you, it’s probably useful for someone else. Just hit publish.