How to Find Obsidian and Zotero Users to Sell To: A B2B Prospecting Guide (Updated 2026)
Discover the proven way to build a verified list of researchers, academics, and knowledge workers who use Obsidian and Zotero for note‑taking and reference management — and reach them with personalized outreach.
Founder @ Origami
Quick Answer: The fastest way to get a verified list of Obsidian and Zotero users is Origami — an AI‑powered prospecting platform. Describe your ideal user in one prompt (e.g., “researchers at US universities who mention Zotero in their academic profiles”), and the AI agent searches the live web, GitHub, university directories, and forums to find and enrich contacts with work emails and affiliations. No manual list‑building required.
A sales director at an AI‑writing tool recently described a familiar dead end: “I can find large research institutions in ZoomInfo easily, but the actual academics who use Zotero and Obsidian for their daily workflow are invisible. I’m stuck guessing emails and hoping my LinkedIn InMails land.” That gap — between what a static B2B database knows and what a researcher actually does — is where most outbound campaigns stall. If your ICP includes knowledge workers who rely on specific software, you need a prospecting approach that reads the same signals you’d notice yourself if you had infinite time.
Why standard B2B databases miss Obsidian and Zotero users
ZoomInfo, Apollo, and similar platforms are built on company‑centric, job‑title‑driven data. They excel at identifying a VP of Engineering at a Series B startup but rarely flag whether a person uses a specific note‑taking or reference management tool. For a sales rep selling to academics, that’s like trying to prospect restaurant owners by searching for “CEO” — you’ll miss 90% of your target.
Researchers, postdocs, and PhD students often have titles like “Research Fellow” or “Doctoral Candidate” that don’t reveal their tool stack. Even when they’re on LinkedIn, their profile likely won’t mention Zotero or Obsidian because those are workflow tools, not professional credentials. One founder of a literature‑review software company told us: “I need to know if someone actually uses Zotero in their daily pipeline, not just that they work at a university. Most databases give me department names and nothing else.”
Live web sources tell a different story. When an academic shares a Zotero library link on their faculty page, posts about an Obsidian graph view on Mastodon, or lists their tools in a GitHub README, those signals are public — but no static database indexes them. Traditional tools leave sales teams in a guessing game, forcing them to manually scrape directories, cross‑reference forum posts, and then stitch together contact details themselves.
The tech‑stack footprint of an Obsidian/Zotero power user (and where to find it)
Understanding where researchers leave breadcrumbs is the first step to finding them at scale. An Obsidian or Zotero user often leaves a digital trail across these places:
- University personal pages: Faculty and grad student sites frequently list “Research Tools” or “Workflow” sections that mention Zotero, EndNote, or Obsidian.
- GitHub profiles: Many academics in computational fields host research repositories and mention their note‑taking setup in READMEs or dotfiles.
- Zotero public groups and forum posts: The Zotero forums and public group libraries are a goldmine of profiles attached to real names.
- Mastodon, Bluesky, and Reddit: Researchers in humanities and social sciences increasingly share toolkits on these platforms, not LinkedIn.
- Obsidian forum and community showcases: The official Obsidian forum and “Obsidian Roundup” comments contain thousands of users describing their setups.
When we tested this with a prompt inside Origami — “build a list of researchers at R1 US universities who list Zotero and Obsidian in their personal website, GitHub bio, or academic blog” — the AI agent crawled across these sources simultaneously. In under an hour, it returned 200+ prospects with verified email addresses, department affiliations, and a direct link to the page where the tool mention was found. That context gives sales teams an immediate personalization angle no CRM enrichment can produce.
How to build a list of Obsidian and Zotero users without months of manual research
Manual workflows for this task are painful. A typical rep might start with a LinkedIn Sales Navigator search for “research fellow” or “doctoral student,” then switch to Hunter.io to guess emails, and finally open each profile and blog to manually check for tool mentions. One SDR manager we spoke with described it as “a full‑day mission that yields maybe 30 half‑verified names — and half of those emails bounce.”
The alternative is a natural‑language prospecting prompt. Instead of building multi‑step waterfall enrichments in Clay or scraping individual directories, you describe your ICP in plain English. For example:
“Find me researchers at universities in the UK and Europe who use Zotero for reference management and have published at least one paper in the last two years. Include their work email, department, and the source URL where Zotero is mentioned.”
A tool built for live web search interprets that as a set of coordinated actions: crawl university directory pages, match author names against the Zotero registry, verify email addresses against MX records, and return a clean table. No CSV‑export‑reimport dance. No lost half a day.
Our customer success team observed a similar pattern with a sales team selling a writing productivity tool. They went from spending 4 hours per week building manual target lists to launching a sequence of 150 verified contacts within 20 minutes of crafting a single prompt. As one AE put it: “I didn’t have to find my Marcel with the filters — I just typed what I wanted.”
Which prospecting tools actually work for finding researchers?
If you’re at a company that still starts every outbound campaign with “let’s pull a ZoomInfo list,” you’ll need a more nuanced setup. Below is a comparison of the tools sales teams actually use when targeting academic software users.
| Tool | Free Plan | Starting Price | Best For | Main Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Origami | Yes (1,000 credits, no card) | Free, then $29/mo | Living web search for niche ICPs, all‑in‑one prospecting + sequences | Not a CRM — pipeline must be managed elsewhere |
| Apollo | Yes (900 annual credits) | $49/mo (annual) | Basic filtering by job title and company when titles are standard | Static database; rarely captures software‑specific signals for researchers |
| Clay | Yes (500 actions/mo, 100 data credits) | $167/mo (Launch) | Complex enrichment waterfalls for large‑scale personalization | High learning curve; requires building multi‑step workflows manually |
| Lusha | Yes (70 credits/mo) | $0 (free tier) | Quick email/phone enrichment from LinkedIn profiles | Relies on LinkedIn presence; many researchers have incomplete profiles |
| Hunter.io | Yes (50 credits/mo) | $49/mo (Starter) | Domain‑level email discovery for university outreach | No built‑in ICP search or live web crawling for tool mentions |
For a sales team that needs to find the 1,200 postdocs actively using Zotero 7 and Obsidian’s new canvas feature, starting with a live web search tool that understands researcher‑specific signals is the difference between a 5% reply rate and a <1% bounce rate.
What outreach messages convert researchers into demos?
Researchers are drowning in generic cold emails from SaaS vendors. A standard “I see you’re a Research Fellow at Stanford” won’t cut it. The open‑rate goes up significantly when you reference the specific tool they use and why that makes you a good fit.
A powerful sequence structure we’ve seen work repeatedly:
- Email 1 (Day 1): Reference the tool setup you spotted — “I noticed your Zotero library linked on your faculty page — we built a tool that automatically extracts key claims from your Zotero PDFs and generates literature‑review drafts.” Keep it under 80 words.
- LinkedIn connection request (Day 2): Personalize with a mention of their research area, not the tool.
- Email 2 (Day 4): Share a specific example of how another researcher in their field saved 4 hours per week.
- Email 3 (Day 7): Soft break‑up: “Just checking if my first email landed in a busy inbox?”
Inside Origami, you can build and launch this multi‑channel sequence directly from the prospect list — no need for a separate Outreach or Instantly account. The AI agent also suggests subject lines and openers based on the source where it found the tool mention. One customer in academic SaaS told us: “I actually quite like what some of those sequences are from origami, like the actual writing of it and the research on it.”
Start your first list today
Describing your ideal researcher in plain English — “ecology postdocs who blog about Obsidian” or “humanities scholars sharing their Zotero tag taxonomies” — and getting a ready‑to‑email spreadsheet is no longer a pipe dream. The technology to search the living web for these signals already exists and is more intuitive than juggling four tools. Start with the free 1,000 credits in Origami (no credit card required), describe your ICP, and see a verified list of Obsidian and Zotero users appear in minutes. From there, launch your first email‑and‑LinkedIn sequence directly from the platform and finally replace guesswork with pipeline.