Overview
Lead Generator is an internal application I built to make prospecting for freelance web development work less manual.
It brings business discovery, website assessment, contact research, lead management and AI assisted outreach into one workflow instead of spreading the process across several separate tools.
Why I Built It
Finding potential clients involves a lot of repetitive work: discovering businesses, finding their websites, checking those sites, locating contact details, reviewing the business and writing a relevant first contact email.
I built Lead Generator to handle the repetitive parts while leaving the actual judgement about whether a lead is worth pursuing to me.
Application Workflow
The application can:
- discover businesses and retrieve business information
- collect and assess business websites
- retrieve Google business information and reviews
- maintain prospect and lead records
- assist with website auditing
- generate contextual outreach drafts using an LLM
- track prospects through a lightweight CRM workflow
Technical Implementation
Lead Generator is a Rails application with a Hotwire, Turbo and Stimulus frontend.
It integrates with the Google Places API for business discovery and data, and the OpenAI API for analysing prospect information and generating contextual outreach drafts.
Website auditing runs inside the Rails application. Ruby based auditing tools inspect each prospect's site and collect technical and content signals used to identify potential issues.
The results are stored against a single prospect record, so business research, website assessment, contact information, outreach and lead status can all be managed from the same interface.
Project Details
- Role
- Sole developer
- Project type
- Internal business application
- Development
- Initial build approximately 2 weeks, subsequently extended as needed
- Status
- Private internal tool