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Matt Kallaway
Matt Kallaway

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I built a tool that writes cold email openers from any URL - here's what I learned

#showdev

Cold outreach is a grind. The part that always slowed me down was writing that first line in an email - the one that actually references something specific about the company so it doesn't look like a template blast.

I spent way too long doing this manually: open their website, read for 2-3 minutes, write something. Multiply that by 50 prospects and you've burned half your day before sending anything.

So I built Icebreakr. You paste in a company's website URL and it generates 5 personalized opening lines by analyzing what's actually on their site.

How it works

  1. You drop in a URL (company website or LinkedIn)
  2. It fetches the page, grabs the title and meta description
  3. Passes that context to gpt-4o-mini with a prompt tuned for cold email tone
  4. Returns 5 openers you can pick from or riff on

Simple stack: Next.js 14, Tailwind, OpenAI API, Stripe for payments.

Example output

For linear.app it generated:

  • "I noticed Linear's focus on integrating AI into product development and thought it aligns well with current industry needs."
  • "Your approach to streamlining product planning with AI is impressive and highlighted in your recent updates."

Not every result is perfect, but they're usually a solid starting point that saves time even when you need to tweak them.

What I've learned

The outputs are better when the site has a clear meta description. Sites with no meta description fall back to just the page title, which limits the specificity.

LinkedIn URLs are tricky because they block scraping - I'm handling that by falling back to the domain info when scraping fails.

The hardest part wasn't the AI integration - it was making the free tier actually useful (5 per day) without giving away so much that no one upgrades.

Try it

It's live at https://icebreakr-six.vercel.app - free tier is 5 lookups per day, no signup required. Pro is $19/mo for unlimited.

Would love feedback, especially from people who do outreach regularly. Are the openers specific enough? Too generic? What would actually make you pay for something like this?

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