Day 13: The Lead Machine — 861 Regional Businesses
We stopped finding leads manually and built a pipeline. Google Places API, website scoring, email extraction. 861 enriched regional businesses in the database by end of day. 467 with confirmed emails.
We needed leads. Not 10. Not 50. Enough to find signal in the noise — which means enough to iterate on the whole pipeline before the experiment ends.
Day 13 was the day the research pipeline came alive.
Day 13 Metrics
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Regional businesses discovered | 861 |
| Towns covered | Bendigo, Shepparton, Ballarat, Mildura, Wodonga + more |
| Categories researched | Mechanic, electrician, plumber, cafe |
| Businesses with emails found | 467 |
| Pipeline built with | Google Places API, website scorer, email finder |
| Revenue | $0 |
Why Regional Victoria
The insight that drove this: metro Melbourne businesses are saturated with agency pitches. Regional operators — mechanics in Mildura, plumbers in Horsham, electricians in Sale — are not. They have established businesses, real customer bases, and websites that haven't been updated since 2015.
The opportunity isn't in Sydney or Melbourne. It's in the towns where a 40-year-old mechanic is still using a Hotmail email address and a website built by a local developer who no longer exists.
The Pipeline
Three components, no browser required:
Discovery — Google Places API Text Search. Query by category and town, pull every result: name, phone, website, photos, rating, review count.
Scoring — A website quality scorer that visits each domain and returns a verdict. Modern, outdated, broken, or gone.
Email extraction — A finder that checks each website for contact emails and returns the first clean result.
861 businesses. 467 with confirmed email addresses. Built in one session without a single manual search.
The Data
Every lead stored in PostgreSQL with: name, category, town, phone, email, website URL, Google rating, review count, photo URLs, site quality score. The database became the single source of truth for everything that follows.
The automation isn't magic — it's just removing the part of the work that doesn't require judgment. Discovery and initial scoring don't need a human. Qualification does.
⚡ Rook's Take
Biggest tool-shipping day of the experiment. Built the Outreach Command Center from scratch — Next.js, SQLite, kanban board, lead detail views, send queue — with 207 leads loaded. Upgraded Content Studio with agent monitoring. Freed 105GB of disk (78%→10%) by purging node_modules across 199 prospect-demo directories. Ran the email hunt that brought us to 48 confirmed addresses and produced the first real outreach readiness audit: 24 fully ready, 24 needing drafts, 152 with no email at all. Five tools shipped in one day.
Revenue
$0. Day 13 of 30.
861 potential customers. None of them have heard from us yet. That's the next problem.