Every week I get asked some version of the same question: “Where do I find leads that are actually worth reaching out to?”
Not just any leads. Warm ones. People who already care about the problem you solve. People who won’t look at your message and wonder how you got their details.
The answer is sitting in plain sight on LinkedIn.
The thing about LinkedIn groups
LinkedIn groups have a bad reputation. And honestly, most of the time they deserve it. Spam posts, low-effort engagement, people who haven’t logged in since 2019.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that every person who joined a group about AI automation, RevOps, or no-code tooling made a deliberate decision to do so. They didn’t stumble in by accident. They searched for it, found it, and clicked join.
That’s a self-selection signal. And self-selection signals are rare.
Compare that to a cold contact list you bought from a data provider. Those people have no idea who you are. They’ve expressed no interest in anything adjacent to your product. You’re interrupting them based on a job title, a company size, and a guess.
Group members are different. They already raised their hand.
The problem nobody solved
LinkedIn gives you basically no way to do anything useful with group membership data.
You can browse members one by one. You can maybe click into a few profiles and manually copy things into a spreadsheet. But there’s no export button. No API access. No clean way to take that pre-qualified audience and turn it into something you can actually work with.
So most people, even people who know this opportunity exists, just don’t act on it. The friction is too high.
What I built
This week I put together a Needle workflow that removes that friction entirely.
It scrapes every member of any LinkedIn group and exports them automatically into a Google Sheet. For each member you get:
Full name
LinkedIn profile URL
Headline
Join date
No code required. Setup takes about 3 minutes. Once it’s running, it paginates through the entire group on its own, working in batches until every member is captured.
Here’s how it works:
Step 1. Go to the LinkedIn group you want to target. Open your browser’s developer tools and navigate to the Network tab.
Step 2. Click “See all members.” Watch for the API request that loads the member list. Copy it as a fetch request.
Step 3. Paste that fetch request into the Needle workflow template. It uses this to authenticate your session and replicate the request across all pages.
Step 4. Connect a Google Sheet, hit run, and watch it fill up.
I tested this on the Automation Hub group, 669 members, all interested in AI and workflow automation. The sheet was full in minutes. Clean, structured, ready to use.
How to actually use this
Having the list is just the start.
Direct outreach. You have their profile URL and headline. You know the context they came from. That’s enough to write a genuinely relevant first message, not a templated blast, but something specific that references the group. That specificity alone puts you in a different category from most cold outreach.
LinkedIn ad targeting. Upload the profile URLs as a custom audience and run ads directly to group members. You’re advertising to people who already demonstrated interest in your category.
Sequenced follow-up. Combine this with a Needle outreach workflow and you have a full pipeline. Scrape the group, enrich the leads, run a sequence, track replies, all connected.
Research. What do these people do? What companies are they from? What do their headlines tell you about how they see themselves? That’s market research you can’t easily buy.
The bigger pattern
The most valuable automation is rarely the complicated stuff.
It’s the simple thing that removes friction from something you already know you should be doing.
Most founders and sales teams know they should be doing more targeted outreach. They know LinkedIn groups are an underused channel. They just don’t do it because the manual version is painful enough to skip.
Automation doesn’t change the strategy. It just makes the obvious thing easy enough to actually happen.
The strategy was already there. The workflow just removes the excuse.
What LinkedIn group would you target? Reply and let me know. Some of the best workflow ideas I have built started as a reply to one of these posts.
Until next week.
Jan, Needle
https://needle.app/workflow-templates/scrape-linkedin-group-members
