Inspiration
What it does
Why We Built This Finding customers is exhausting. Most small business owners spend hours every day just looking for people to sell to, Googling around, scrolling LinkedIn, and calling numbers that don't work anymore. All that time spent resulted in just two or three names. We wanted to make that easier. So we built SmartLead.
What It Does You specify what you sell and who you are trying to reach. It finds real local businesses that match, scores them on how likely they are to buy, and tells you how to reach each one. What used to take hours takes about three seconds.
How We Built It We use a real map database to find businesses, then let an AI score them and write the outreach plan. We learned pretty quickly not to ask the AI to find the businesses themselves. The first time we tried that, it invented fake companies with fake addresses, confident as ever, completely made up. So now the map handles the facts, and the AI does the thinking.
What Went Wrong At some point, almost everything. The UI went through four complete redesigns. The first looked like a video game. The second looked like a tech ad. We kept chasing "cool" until we realized it just meant "easy to use" and "easy to look at." We also made sure the app never fully breaks; even if an API goes down or the AI is slow, there's always a backup. When you're showing something to people, "it's just not working right now" isn't an option.
What's Next The next step involves integrating leads into existing tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, and email. Making it work on your phone. Helping teams share and track leads together.
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