Most founders I know have a graveyard of "perfect" systems they never shipped. Meanwhile, I've got mediocre automation running 24/7 that's outperforming everything I've ever built by hand.
Here's what I learned from letting bots do the boring work.
The Setup
I built an automated prospect finder. Nothing fancy—just a scheduled job that:
- Searches for businesses in target categories (dentists, dermatologists, CPAs)
- Scrapes their websites for contact info
- Evaluates whether they're a good fit
- Queues them for outreach
It runs every few hours. While I'm sleeping, traveling, or doing actual work, it's grinding through Google results and building my pipeline.
Why "Good Enough" Wins
The system isn't smart. It misses obvious leads. It occasionally queues businesses that aren't a fit. The filtering logic is embarrassingly simple.
But here's the thing: it runs.
In the past week, it found 15+ qualified leads across multiple campaigns. Dermatologists in Miami. CPAs in Fort Lauderdale. Dental practices in Boca Raton. All added to the queue while I was focused on other things.
A human doing this manually would be more accurate. They'd also burn out after day two and never do it again.
The Math That Matters
Let's say my automation has a 60% accuracy rate—meaning 40% of the leads it finds aren't actually good fits. Sounds bad, right?
But if it processes 50 businesses per day and I only have to review the results once, I'm still getting 30 qualified leads daily with maybe 10 minutes of oversight.
Manually, I might find 10 perfect leads in an hour of focused work. Then I'd context-switch, lose momentum, and not do it again for a week.
Consistency beats perfection.
What I Actually Built
The technical stack is simpler than you'd expect:
- Cron jobs trigger the searches at set intervals
- Brave Search API for finding businesses (way cheaper than Google)
- Web scraping to pull contact info and evaluate the site
- A simple scoring system that flags outdated sites (my target customers)
- Database queue that feeds into my outreach system
The whole thing probably took a weekend to build. Most of that was handling edge cases and rate limits.
Signs Your Site Needs Help
One fun side effect: I've developed a nose for outdated websites. My automation flags sites that still have:
- Google+ icons (it's been dead since 2019)
- Copyright dates from 3+ years ago
- "Click to call" that doesn't work on mobile
- Flash elements (yes, they still exist)
- Yelp widgets that haven't updated in years
These aren't just signals of neglect—they're signals that the business owner isn't technical and probably needs help.
The Real Lesson
I used to obsess over building the perfect system before launching anything. Now I ship the "embarrassingly simple" version and let it run.
The automation doesn't need to be smart. It needs to be tireless.
Every morning I wake up to new leads in my queue. Some are garbage. Most are solid. All of them were found while I was doing something else.
That's the real flex: not having a clever system, but having a system that works while you don't.
Building automation for your business? I'm happy to share what's worked (and what hasn't). Find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Top comments (0)