Overview
Lead Generator is an internal application I built to streamline prospecting for freelance web development work.
It combines business discovery, website assessment, contact research, lead management and AI-assisted outreach in a single workflow rather than requiring prospects to be researched and assessed manually across several different tools.
Why I Built It
Finding potential clients manually involves a surprising amount of repetitive work: discovering businesses, finding their websites, checking the quality of those sites, locating contact information, reviewing the business and then writing an appropriate first-contact email.
I built Lead Generator to consolidate that process and automate the parts that didn't require human judgement.
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 external services including the Google Places API for business discovery and data, and the OpenAI API for analysing prospect information and generating contextual outreach drafts.
Website auditing is handled within the Rails application itself. Ruby-based auditing tools inspect each prospect's website and collect technical and content signals used to assess the site and identify potential issues.
The application brings the results of these different processes together into a single prospect record, allowing business research, website assessment, contact information, outreach and lead status to 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