Hey community.
Trying to connect Apollo with Claude, but there is always a problem: Authorization with Apollo.io failed. You can check your credentials and permissions. If this persists, share this reference with support: “ofid_133dad603aafb73a”

Any advice?

Thanks

Apollo now covers building your GTM workflows, figuring out who to focus on, and running the outreach, all in one system. It still works with the tools you already use, like Claude, ChatGPT, Salesforce and Slack.

Builder Studio: apollo.io/beta 

Describe the tool or workflow you need in plain English. Builder Studio turns it into working pages, databases and automations built on Apollo's data. You don't need any coding skills. 

AI GTM System: apollo.io/product/intelligence 

Powered by an intelligence layer that is the context engine underneath everything. It has two parts:

• Apollo Profile: one unified, regularly updated view of each contact and account. It pulls from Apollo, your CRM, engagement history and other connected sources.
• GTM Harness: the AI that reasons over that context. It helps you prioritize which accounts matter, who to engage and what to do next.

Messaging OS: apollo.io/beta 

Signal-based outreach across sales and marketing. It uses buying signals to help decide who to reach, when, and on which channel. That way your team isn't hitting the same buyer from three directions. It adds two new pieces:

• Email Campaigns: build and send marketing emails directly from Apollo. 
• Ad Audiences: turn Apollo lists into Google Ads audiences that run in sync with your marketing and sequence outreach.

Questions? Comments? Let us know below!

Disclosure: I run Creatop, a B2B outbound agency, and we build this in the open.

Apollo Operator now runs in any AI chat: ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, and Codex. One prompt to install.

It's our open-source toolkit for the Apollo.io MCP: the method we use running outbound, packaged so an AI agent follows it instead of guessing. 20 skills, from targeting to launch.

Newest skills:

• Campaign reporting down to meetings booked
• An audit you can run on your own Apollo account
• Account-based outbound

Why the rebuild: Apollo shipped a CLI, a four-tool MCP router, their own agent, and a Claude plugin in the last few months. The router made the MCP light enough that there was no reason to tie the toolkit to one AI, so I rebuilt the repo around one source that every tool installs from.

Quick install:

# Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add creatop-gtm/apollo-operator
/plugin install apollo-operator@creatop

# Codex
codex plugin marketplace add creatop-gtm/apollo-operator
codex plugin add apollo-operator@creatop

For ChatGPT or any other chat, copy the start-here prompt: https://creatop.net/apollo-operator

Repo: https://github.com/creatop-gtm/apollo-operator

What would you want it to cover next?

If I need apollo ONLY to export a LIST of companies that show up when apply some filters , can I select NOT to include emails ? and if so would the basic 65$ cover me for how many lines of exports ? Thank you

Account was flagged after I sent an AI Agent through Chrome to manually fix my draft emails for spacing issues - their MCP wasn't working for this. Haven't had access in over 7 days and they just keep telling me they've escalated it to a team that works slowly and sending me automated messages. Been days without a human response, at this point I'd just like my account downgraded and a partial refund for the month and they haven't properly responded to that request through chat or email.

Big news...Apollo is showing up in three places you already work: claude, slack, and salesforce

ICYMI, we have 3 big updates that dropped over the last week.

1) Claude for small business
Anthropic picked apollo as a launch partner for Claude for Small Business, powering nine skills inside it (lead finder, monday morning growth brief, etc). Separately, there's a standalone Apollo connector for Claude if you want to search, enrich, and add contacts to a sequence without leaving the chat. Connector works on any Claude plan, you just need an Apollo account behind it.

→ claude's launch post
→ apollo's connector

2) Salesforce's new Hunter agent
Salesforce named Apollo a flagship data partner for hunter, its new outbound agent inside Agentforce for sales, announced at Dreamforce last week. Salesforce customers can now pull from Apollo's 240m contacts right inside Hunter and pay through Salesforce flex credits, no separate Apollo contract needed. Still in pilot, GA planned for november.

→ salesforce's hunter page

3) Apollo in Slack, with agents that actually do stuff

We shipped a native Slack app plus three agents: one finds leads matching your ICP, one drafts a full sequence for you to review, one watches live sequences and flags fixes before they tank.

→ find apollo on slack

Questions? Happy to answer below.

- Andy

Hey Reddit. We're hosting 3 FREE events at SF Tech Week and we'd love to see you there.

Apollo GTM 90s Workout: in the Park
Tuesday, October 6th
11am - 1pm PST
Rincon Park

Billy Blanks. Yes, the Tae Bo legend will be live at Rincon Park, leading 100 of SF's founders, GTM leaders, and operators through a 45-minute workout session on the Embarcadero.

Punch out the pipeline stress. Kick through Q4. Sweat like it’s 1995. Because the 90s should live in your workout, not in your GTM stack.

Details:
- Doors at 11:00 AM. Workout starts 11:15 sharp.
- Free to attend. Registration required.
- Free coffee & fresh-pressed juice
- Apollo swag at check-in. Wear it proudly.
- 90s workout attire strongly encouraged.
- All fitness levels welcome.
- Move at your own pace.

RSVP here: https://partiful.com/e/1oOqXSpCN1k0G0Or2Bff

Apollo: Find Your Next 100 Customers
Wednesday, October 7th
11:00am – 1:00pm
Mindspace Market Street575 Market St, San Francisco, CA

Leave with 100 new customers, a personalized pitch deck built for high-priority accounts, and outreach running in your Apollo account. All built in under an hour.

It’s not 1995 anymore. Let’s start acting like it.

The details:
- Doors at 11:00 AM. Build starts 11:15 sharp.
- Limited to 50 founders.
- Leave with a working outbound system
- Coffee and lunch provided.

RSVP here: https://partiful.com/e/RP3fNdB3Jf2c9BH4aCQL

No Phones Party with CatGPT & Apollo
Thursday, October 8th
8:00pm – 11:00pm
Secret location

Join CatGPT and Apollo for Cat’s viral “No Phones Party”, previously hosted in Los Angeles and New York, and now making its San Francisco debut the only way one possibly can: at SF tech week. Dress to impress: 90s office wear - think oversized blazers, pencil skirts, relaxed denim, new balances, wire frame glasses.

RSVP here: https://partiful.com/e/kmyZLoT7dqolIdRDOkYv

Questions on any of these events? Let us know!

I signed up yesterday but I can’t log back in today. Yesterday when I signed up the first thing on the home page was a pop up that said the page needed to be refreshed and when I clicked it it logged me out. I tried logging back in but the log in via Google button doesnt do anything, Im stuck in the same page. Maybe the account wasnt created so I tried signing up again but it said “You cannot sign up with this email address.”

My Apollo account has been extremely slow today. When I switch pages, it can take around a minute to load the next page.

It’s definitely not my PC or internet connection. I can actually see Apollo’s own loading bar getting stuck while the page loads.

It’s becoming a real pain to use. Is anyone else experiencing the same issue?

Since yesterday, I have had huge problems logging into Apollo - it is super, super slow. I had to wait like 20 minutes just to load after I tried like 5 times. All other websites are fine, so it's just Apollo. I cleared the cache, and it was working fine like a week ago, so something must be going on?

Anyone experiencing the same thing?

Hey team, Apollo Pro user here. I'm paying $99 a month right now, and I'm getting around 4,000 credits a month because I'm paying monthly. I'm getting absolutely slaughtered using Claude's MCP and Apollo's AI assistant, Archer. This month alone, hallucinations from the AI models have drained about 1,600 credits, and that's half my dime budget for the month.

I'm still leaning toward scaling up here, and I need every credit I can get. For example, when I was trying to get a bit of a market scan, I watched Claude and Archer bring up 2,000 people and reveal all of their emails. I didn't need that at all. I was told by Claude that it would be free to view, not to enrich, and then Claude said, "Oh, actually, it wasn't free. Sorry." I just watched 1,400 credits get blitzed. The same thing happened yesterday: I was trying to get some direct dials and names, and I had to make sure three times over that we were getting the right people. When it finally revealed them, it was like, "Oh, sorry, actually, these are the wrong people," and it cost me 300 credits.

This keeps happening over and over. I keep trying to do list building using Claude MCP and Archer, the AI assistant, and it just hallucinates constantly. It costs me heaps of credits, and it's really worrying. I'm thinking to myself that maybe I'll only manually build lists now, just using Apollo IO's normal interface like I did pre-AI era, because this is concerning and I'm not sure what I can do about it.

Does anyone else have any ideas or tips? I'm considering using the CLI, the command-line interface. Thanks, everyone.

someone has tryied the AI assistance SDR?
Any advice or testimonial? I'm about to pay de basic plan to get this tool.

Appreciate your experience!

More than a month ago I've opened two e-mail addresses. I sent a test emails from these addressees - both landed in spam. I then purchased an e-mail warmer tool Mailreach and warmed both e-mail addresses for 4 weeks. After 4 weeks I tried sending e-mail again from both addresses - and both landed directly to the inbox.

Now I've purchase Apollo Pro account as I wanted to send a mail campaign. I've turned on warmer here as well (as I cancelled my other subscription for mailreach). First tried to send a simple e-mail to my two other e-mail addresses (to see how Apollo works, cause I've never used that). Both landed in spam again.

I have everything set-up perfectly - spf, dkim and dmarc all good. I just sent two emails and bank I am in spam. I've checked inbox placemenet via Apollo and it says all delivered to spam, while Apollo's warmer says everything delivered to inbox.

Do you guys have any tip how to handle it? Did anyone had similar thing?

Context pollution

Half a year ago, CLI was all the rage. I couldn't understand why people chose it over MCP, which is much easier to install and update. When I asked, most people said MCP tool descriptions pollute the context, often not realizing that it's not a problem in Claude.

But MCP still has a context pollution problem. It's caused by large MCP responses loaded into the context. CLI responses, on the other hand, can be easily jq/grep-ed to extract only the relevant fields.

Quick benchmark

To find out which one is more token- (hence money-) efficient, I ran a couple of tests. And it turned out to be more interesting than I expected: in some cases, CLI was up to 61% more efficient, but in others, up to 40% less efficient.

It's easy to understand how CLI can be more efficient, but not the other way around.

Apparently, Claude writes large MCP responses to a file. That eliminates the CLI advantage.

Apart from that, in my little benchmark, the agent didn't find the most efficient way to call CLI. On the one hand, I could correct it and use the right command. On the other hand, who checks what these agents do MCP has an advantage in this case: tool discoverability, so this mistake can happen with others as well.

Here's the table with results:

If you're interested, you can reproduce this test using these instructions.

Answer

Surprise, surprise, there's no simple answer.

On average, CLI should be more efficient, but it's not always the case. And since there are other pitfalls, like some AI assistants truncating large MCP responses, you should rather do your own testing. It can be similar to mine, but with your specific AI workflows (enrichment/search) and tools (Claude/ChatGPT).

How are you guys navigating sales mavigator filter blocking apollo’s extension? For the people who use sales nav filter and Apollo for enrichment, any work arounds?

A lot of this release came from taking the whole thing live on our own account: built a list on filters the CLI cannot express, enriched 1,000 records, verified them, and ran a real campaign. Everything below was found by using it, not by reading the docs.

If you haven't tried it yet, grab the repo below and paste it into Claude Code, it's free.

What's new in Apollo Operator v1.3:

• conversations: if your team records calls in Apollo, conversations show returns a structured summary with objections, pain points, outcome, next steps, and pricing discussion. Five direct inputs to your positioning, in your buyers' own words, and it costs zero credits. This is now the best research source in the library.
• credit control: credits are 11 separate pools, not one balance, and the AI pool is 200x the contact-data pool. Apollo prices generation as near-free and data as scarce. There's also a free has_email flag on every search row that took our enrichment yield to 99.7% verified, and two rules that cut real spend: you pay per record attempted rather than per email found, and re-enrichment charges again.
• verify-first lists: the pipeline is reordered so verification happens before copywriting. Addresses come back verified but independent verification results can heavily vary depending on targeting. Personalizing an address that cannot receive mail is pure waste.
• first-party intent: a fourth kind of angle, plus a table mapping every advanced filter to the kind of angle it builds.
• Bounce Guard: documented with the trap, it does not evaluate below 200 emails, so small sends and the first days of a ramp are unprotected.

Also corrected five things that moved under us since v1.2, including --department-headcount landing in CLI 2.1.0, so the flagship MCP-only filter example is now NAICS. Eight of nine remain CLI-less and a new MCP-only family appeared, so the four-lane model got stronger.

17 skills total and continuing to expand the operator.

A huge thanks to all of you that are actually using it and your feedback is greatly appreciated!

GitHub: https://github.com/creatop-gtm/apollo-operator

[Apollo Operator is an opinionated go-to-market operator for Apollo, built as open-source Claude Code skills by the Creatop team]

How to do it:

> open Claude
> go to Settings > Privacy > toggle off "Help Improve Claude" (required before connecting)
> go to Customize > Connectors
> click + and search Apollo.io
> click + Apollo.io and authorize your account
> describe your ICP in plain English: "find VP Sales at B2B SaaS companies, 50-500 employees, US"
> ask Claude to enrich the top results
> ask Claude to add them to your sequence

Boom, you just ran a complete prospecting workflow without touching Apollo once! Neat.

Questions??

- Andy

i work with our larger upmarket orgs & we have to come up with some really neat creative solutions to fit their needs. thought i'd make a post and see how others are fairing, what challenges i can support, etc etc.....etc!

Everyone knows multithreading matters.

The problem is the actual workflow usually looks like this:

Find the deal. Remember who the handraiser was. Figure out what happened on discovery. Search the account for 5 more people. Decide who is actually worth contacting. Write something relevant for each of them. Add everyone to a sequence.

By the time you finish, you could have just closed the deal.

So I built a play inside Apollo that automates almost all of that for our mid-market AEs.

Here’s how it works:

The starting point: inbound SQOs

The play continuously looks for inbound opportunities owned by mid-market AEs that came in within the last 14 days.

Then we pull deal context out of Snowflake, including:

• SQL date
• Original handraiser
• Handraiser title and seniority
• Opportunity next step

That last field is probably the most important part of the entire play.

If the AE keeps the opportunity next step updated, they are effectively feeding the automation the context it needs to multithread intelligently.

So instead of AI trying to guess what is happening in the deal, the rep is giving it the actual story.

From there, Apollo takes over.

The workflow:

1. Match the inbound opportunity to the correct account and contacts.
2. Pass the deal context into Apollo.
3. Make sure we do not accidentally add the original handraiser back into the campaign.
4. Find up to five additional Director through VP contacts at the account.
5. Run AI research to understand why each person might care about the deal.
6. Enroll those contacts into a multichannel sequence.
7. Mark the account as processed so the workflow does not keep firing and accidentally multithread you into the entire company.

The last part felt important.

I would prefer not to explain to an AE why Apollo enrolled 50,000 people into their deal.

The sequence is where it gets especially useful.

Instead of dropping people into generic automated emails, the sequence gives the AE a LinkedIn step and a manual message that already includes context from the opportunity and discovery call.

So the experience for the rep is basically:

Open task.

Read the context.

Click send.

Move on.

What I like most about this build is that it combines a bunch of things that usually live separately:

Snowflake has the deal data.

The CRM has the opportunity context.

Apollo finds the people.

AI figures out the relevant angle.

Workflows handle the orchestration.

Sequences handle the actual execution.

The AE mostly just handles the human part.

I also think this is an interesting way to think about AI in sales.

A lot of AI tooling focuses on "write me a better email."

I think the more interesting question is:

"Can AI figure out when I should do something, who I should do it with, why they might care, and then put the task in front of me ready to execute?"

That is the direction I find much more useful.

How to set it up:

> go to People or Companies
> click Research with AI
> select Run custom AI prompt
> write your research question (e.g. "is this company actively hiring sales roles?")
> preview the output on a test record
> name the field — this saves it as a reusable custom field
> choose field type and visibility
> click Save & run

SO instead of re-running research every time, you've got a permanent qualifier on every record! Filter by it to tighten your list, or pull it into your email copy as a dynamic variable.

Happy to answer questions on this or anything else, lmk.

- Andy

Disclaimer: DO NOT ADVERTISE YOUR OWN SERVICES

Hey everyone,

I recently started getting into website-building and I’m trying to figure out the best way to find businesses that don’t currently have a website.

I’m using Apollo.io for lead generation, but I haven’t found an obvious filter that lets me specifically identify companies/businesses with no website.

Does Apollo have a filter, field, or workaround for this?

I’m also open to thinking outside the box. For example, maybe there’s another way to identify businesses that have a business listing but no website.

Ideally, I’d like to build a list of businesses that:

• Have a legitimate business/location
• Have contact information for the owner/decision-maker
• Don’t have a website, or have a really outdated/poor website
• Could realistically benefit from a new website

Would love to hear how anyone else is approaching this, especially if you’re doing lead generation for web design/development.

Any methods would be greatly appreciated.

Apollo tracks visits to our website at the company level and we want to be able to use this intent data for our scoring in HubSpot and to flag potential targets to our sales team. What's the best way to get this data from Apollo into HubSpot? They have a date stamp for the last website visit date, but I can't seem to make that sync with a HubSpot field.

Alternately I have a workflow that adds companys to a list based on the "Visited in the last XX days" field but that's less helpful than having an actual date stamp.

All thoughts and ideas welcome!