The project
About Lead Finder
Lead Finder is The Shopify Workshop's own lead generation tool. We built it to find our next clients — small businesses whose websites are holding them back — and we build versions of it for businesses that sell to other businesses.
The brief
Find companies that genuinely need a better website, prove it with evidence rather than guesswork, reach the person who decides, and stay within UK and Australian email law — on free data sources, with a person approving every email that goes out.
How we built the Lead Finder lead generation CRM
- Searches that keep finding new companies: Saved searches by country, industry, company size and city pull companies from Hunter's Discover database, skip any already found and rotate cities between runs, with live progress on screen.
- Evidence, not guesswork: Each company is checked on its own website and at Companies House — status, accounts size and directors — and given a qualified, needs-review or rejected verdict with the reasons listed.
- An automatic website audit: Google PageSpeed lab and real-visitor data, platform and theme age, out-of-date WordPress or jQuery, missing HTTPS, expiring certificates and an old copyright year — every finding linked to its evidence.
- The right person, ranked: Hunter's people and company profile, confirmed against the website and the register of directors, ranked 1st, 2nd and 3rd by how likely each one decides on a website, with verified addresses.
- Scored, so the best leads come first: A 100-point score across company fit, website opportunity, evidence quality, commercial suitability and decision-maker, shown factor by factor.
- Outreach with guard-rails: Emails drafted from each lead's own audit and sent only when a person presses Send. Follow-ups stop on a reply, every email carries an unsubscribe link, and checks for UK PECR and the Australian Spam Act run before anything goes.
Inside the lead generation CRM
All companies, people and email addresses in these screens are sample data.
Leads, best first. Priority, score, outreach stage, the contact and the reason each company is a lead.
A saved search and its last run: companies found, duplicates skipped and the verdicts.
The website audit. Every finding with its evidence, plus PageSpeed, real-visitor speed and platform details.
Contacts ranked 1st, 2nd and 3rd, with where each was found and whether the address is verified. Drag to change the order.
The 100-point score, factor by factor, so it's clear why a lead is Priority A.
A first email written from the audit. Every rule is checked before the Send button works.
On the dashboard: drafts ready to send, follow-ups waiting, today's sends against the daily limit, and replies.
Key features of the lead generation CRM
- Saved lead searches with live progress and city rotation
- Companies House matching by company number or name
- PageSpeed, Chrome real-user data and HTML checks in one audit
- Hunter Discover, Domain Search, Company Enrichment and Email Verifier
- Contacts ranked 1st, 2nd and 3rd, in an order you can change
- Email drafts built only from what the audit found
- Send through your own mailbox, one email at a time
- Follow-up drafts that cancel on a reply, unsubscribe or bounce
- Signed unsubscribe links and a do-not-email list
- Credit tracking with a reserve, so free API plans last the month
- A dashboard panel for the day's outreach
The outcome
Lead Finder runs inside our own admin, turning a saved search into audited, scored leads with a named decision-maker and a draft email ready to review. Every claim in an email traces back to a check the tool made. It's built from separate parts — discovery, qualification, audit, contacts, scoring and outreach — so we can fit it to another business's market, data sources and sales process, inside their own website or CMS — see our CRM development, web application development and API integration services.
