Everything I read about wholesaling says build a buyers list, dozens of names, email blasts. Everything I read about reverse wholesaling says get one buyer and go find what they want. Those feel like opposite activities and I've spent six months doing neither properly.
Is a buyers list even the point here, or am I supposed to be having actual conversations with three or four people?
Answer
Have the conversations. Four buyers you actually know beats four hundred email addresses, and the reason is that a list of addresses tells you nothing about what any of them wants.
A practical version of the work: find investors who are buying in your area, call them, and ask what they bought most recently, what they paid, what they'd have paid more for, and what they turn down. Write the answers in one document per buyer. That document is the thing you go shopping against. You'll find that after three or four calls you start hearing the same criteria repeated, and that's when you know what to look for.
Where to find them varies, and none of it is exotic. Local investor meetups, the landlord who owns several rentals near you, contractors who work for flippers and can tell you who's active. In states where sale prices are public record you can look up who's buying distressed property repeatedly, though roughly a dozen states don't make prices public at all, so check what your county actually shows before you plan around it.
The reason @lantern's point about advertising matters is worth understanding now rather than later. In a few states, including Illinois and Kentucky, publicly marketing a property you have under contract but don't own can be treated as brokerage without a license, and how that applies to a given ad depends on the state and the facts. Private calls to known buyers avoid the question. Run any public marketing past an attorney licensed where you work first.
Most people spend six months researching and never dial out. The calls are the whole job.
The email blast list and the reverse wholesaling relationship are different tools that got the same name. A 400-name list you bought or scraped is a broadcast channel. Four buyers whose criteria you wrote down and whose last twelve months of purchases you checked is a set of orders. I'd take the four, mostly because the blast approach is the one that runs into advertising rules in some states.