Find Leads, how to submit a clean Apollo search URL.

Go to /dashboard/ciela. You'll land on the chat surface, a big input field at the bottom with Ciela's hello message at the top. You don't need to click anything else first.

Tell her what kind of leads you need. The more specific, the less back-and-forth, but you don't have to know Apollo terminology, she translates. Hit Enter to send. Some examples that work cleanly:

• Find me 500 owners of US med spas, verified emails only.
• I need 500 HVAC contractor owners in Texas, 1 to 50 employees.
• Pull 500 personal injury law partners, solo and small firms, US-wide.
• Get me 750 dental practice owners in Florida, exclude hygienists and associates.
• Find 500 founders of AI automation agencies, anywhere in the US.

Don't worry about getting the count exactly right or the filters perfect on the first try. Ciela will propose a filter set and you can tweak it before anything happens.

Ciela replies with the filter set she built, written in plain English. Something like:

If it looks right, say go or submit it and jump to step 4. If something's off, tell her what to change in plain English, no syntax to learn:

• Narrow to California only.
• Add managing partners and founding partners as titles.
• Drop the 21 to 50 size bucket, just solo and 11 to 20.
• Exclude receptionists.
• Bump it to 750 leads.

She'll re-show the breakdown each time you change something. Keep tweaking until it reads right.

When you say go, Ciela calls her draft tool and a card appears in the chat showing the niche, the count, and the credit cost (1 credit per lead). The card has a single primary button labeled Launch on the right side. Ciela also drops a short reply above the card like "Built. Review the count and credits on the card, then hit Launch to spend 500 lead credits and queue the pull."

Nothing is submitted yet. The card sits in pending state until you actually click the Launch button. Until then, no credits deduct and no run is queued.

Click Launch. The card border flips to green and the status reads Live, a toast pops up confirming Launched, and your credits deduct. That green card is the confirmation, there's no second "Submitted" message in the chat. You can close the tab, the run keeps going on our side.

Most requests are ready in 24-48 hours. If the sourcing queue runs longer, open /dashboard/find-leadsto check the run in Your searches. Completed runs show a green checkmark and a View Leads button. Click it to open the Google Sheet, or click Save to list to drop the leads straight into a contact list you can use in a campaign.

Go to app.apollo.io/#/people in a new browser tab. If you don't already have an Apollo account, click Sign Up in the top-right and make one, the free plan is enough for building URLs.

Once you're signed in, double-check the URL in your browser bar reads https://app.apollo.io/#/people. If it reads /#/companies or /#/contacts, click the People tab at the top of the Apollo page to switch.

The left side of the Apollo page is a vertical list of filter headings, things like Job Titles, Management Levels, Location, Industry & Keywords, # Employees, Email Status. Each one is a clickable row that opens its own filter box when you click it.

You're going to click six of them in order. Don't touch any other filters, they either don't move the needle or they tighten your search so much you'll come back empty.

Click Job Titles in the left panel. A search field opens. Type the kind of person you want to reach, for example owner. As you type, Apollo shows you a dropdown of matching titles. Click the one that says just Owner (or whatever cleanest match).

Now type another title in the same field, like founder, and click it from the dropdown too. You can add 1 to 4 title variants this way. For most SMB outreach, just owner and founder is enough.

Click Management Levels. A list of checkboxes opens. For SMB and local services, tick:

• Owner
• Founder
• C-Suite
• Partner

For mid-market deals, also tick VP, Head, and Director. Leave the rest unchecked.

Click Location. Type the country, state, or city you want to target, for example United States. A dropdown shows matching places, click the one labeled United States, Country.

Important: only pick one region per URL. Don't stack US plus UK plus Canada, the ICP and timezone differ enough that mixed pulls produce noisy lists. If you want both, submit two separate Find Leads runs.

Click Industry & Keywords. Two fields appear, an Industry dropdown and a Keywords text field. For most niches the Keywords field gets you a tighter cohort than Apollo's industry tags, so use that.

Type a keyword for your niche, like med spa. Hit Enter. It appears as a chip. Now type the same niche again with a different spelling, like medical spa. Hit Enter. Add a third,medspa. And a fourth, aesthetics.

Click # Employees. A list of size buckets opens. Tick the ones that match the company size of your ideal customer:

• Solo-pro niches (med spa, dental, law): tick 1-10 and 11-20 only.
• Local services with crews (HVAC, roofing, landscaping): also tick 21-50.
• Mid-market: tick 51-200.
• Enterprise: tick 201-500 and up, but expect way lower reply rates from cold outbound.

Click Email Status. Tick Verified. Leave everything else unchecked. Guessed and Unavailable bounce hard and will tank your sender reputation, never pull those.

If your run comes back too small later, you can rerun with Likely to engage also ticked, which roughly doubles volume at the cost of a slightly higher bounce rate. Don't start there though, start clean.

Look at the very top-left of the Apollo results area (above the contact rows). You should see a number like 12,438 people found. This is the size of the pool your filters produced. Use it as a sanity check:

• Under 100: filters too tight, you'll come back almost empty. Loosen one (drop a size bucket, add a keyword variant, widen geo).
• 100 to 50,000: sweet spot, submit.
• Over 100,000: too loose, the leads will be random. Tighten geo (specific state instead of country) or seniority (drop the broader levels).

If the count is still loading ("..." or a spinner where the number should be), wait for it to settle before you copy the URL. Apollo finishes encoding the URL only after the count renders.

This is the step that breaks most often, follow it exactly:

1. Click once anywhere inside your browser's address bar (the long field at the very top of the window with the URL in it).
2. Press Cmd + A on a Mac, or Ctrl + A on Windows. This selects the entire URL, the whole line should highlight blue.
3. Press Cmd + C (Mac) or Ctrl + C (Windows) to copy.

A working URL is long, usually 300 to 1500 characters. If yours is under 100, you didn't copy the whole thing, try again. If it ends in [, =, or &, the page was still loading when you copied, refresh Apollo and try once more.

Open /dashboard/find-leads in a new tab. Click into the field labeled Apollo Search URL. Press Cmd + V (Mac) or Ctrl + V (Windows) to paste. The full URL should fill the field, if it looks short, you copied wrong, redo step 10.

In the Number of leads field below, type how many you want. Start with 500 if it's a niche you haven't targeted before, that's enough volume to tell if the URL is producing the right cohort without spending too many credits.

Click the big Source leads button. You'll see a Submitted toast, the run will appear in Your searches below as Pending, and 500 credits deduct.

Most rows flip to Completed within 24-48 hours and a View Leads button appears. Provider queues can take longer; if a run passes the normal window, keep an eye on the status and we'll email you when the list lands.

Go to app.apollo.io and make an account. The free plan lets you build searches and export a small batch of verified contacts each month, which is plenty to test a niche and get moving today.

You still want a tight, well-filtered list, and that's exactly what Ciela is good at. Follow Path A steps 1 to 3: open Ciela chat, describe the leads you want in plain English, and let her assemble the filters.

When her draft search card appears, don't click Launch. Launch submits the search to the managed queue and spends lead credits, which is the slow path you're trying to skip. Instead click the Preview search link on the card. It opens your exact filtered list inside Apollo in a new tab.

On the Apollo results page, tick the checkbox at the top of the contact list to select the rows. Apollo lets you select the visible page, or select all the way up to your plan's export cap. Then click the Export button above the table and choose Export to CSV.

Keep Email Status set to Verified so Apollo only spends its export credits on contactable rows, that's the same quality bar managed Find Leads holds. Your CSV either downloads right away or lands under Apollo's Exports tab, grab it from there.

Open /dashboard/leads, click New list, give it a name, then drop the Apollo CSV on the next screen. You don't need to clean it first. We map the columns, dedupe by email, fix common typos, and skip disposable inboxes for you automatically.

It reads Apollo's export as-is, and the same importer takes CSVs from Wiza, Clay, or anywhere else, so you're never locked to one source.

The list is live the moment the import finishes. Point an email or LinkedIn campaign at it straight away, or hand it back to Ciela in chat and say "start an email campaign to this list". No queue, no provider wait, you went from idea to a ready list in minutes.