Local Leads

We added weekly email reports to Local Leads and it quietly changed our retention more than most features we've shipped.

The product automates local business lead generation and cold email outreach. You set up Autopilot, it runs daily, finds leads, sends emails. Works great. But "it runs without you" also means customers stop thinking about it. They're not logging in because they don't need to. Slowly the product goes invisible. And that's how you lose customers who aren't even unhappy.

The weekly report just tells them what happened: leads found, emails sent, campaigns active. One email a week. Takes thirty seconds to read.

What it actually does: brings the product back into their head on a schedule, gives them a reason to click through and look at new leads, and proves the automation is actually running. Value was always being delivered. Now they see it.

The broader thing I took from this: delivering value and making the customer perceive value aren't the same thing. If your product works in the background, you have to surface what it's doing. Email is the easiest way to do that because you're not asking anyone to form a new habit. You're just showing up somewhere they already look.

Feature took a couple hours to build. Probably one of the highest-leverage things we've done.

Full writeup here: https://open.substack.com/pub/kyleplatt/p/the-small-feature-that-made-customers?r=g4f4i&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

One of the things I wanted to prove early with Local Leads was that it actually works. Not just "here's a demo, trust us," but real proof that the leads it generates convert into real conversations.

So we started using it on ourselves for Local Leads.

Our ICP right now is local service businesses that need more customers. We set an industry, dropped in a starting location, and let AutoPilot run. It finds leads, works through them automatically, and keeps the pipeline moving without us babysitting it.

The pitch? "Hey, we found you using a tool we built. Want to see how it works?"

It's genuinely one of the most natural sales pitches you can make. You're not selling something abstract, you're showing the product in action, in real time, with them as the proof point.

We're still early and I'm not going to oversell the numbers. But the response rate has been noticeably better than cold outreach where you're just describing a product. People get it immediately when you say "I found you using this." There's no explaining to do.

It also forces us to keep the product sharp. If the leads it generates are garbage, we feel it directly. No hiding behind feature lists. Dogfooding in the most literal sense.

If you're building a lead gen tool and not using it to acquire your own customers, that feels like a miss. Made sense to start there.

Local Leads started as an internal tool at our agency. We built it to solve our own problem, finding qualified local business leads fast, and it worked. We've been using it to run outbound for ourselves and clients for a while now, and that proof-of-concept is a big part of how we sell it. "We built this for ourselves, it works, and now you can use it too" is a story people trust.

The problem came when we started putting it in front of the actual target customer.

The product was built by people with sales process knowledge baked in. We knew what email warmup meant. We knew how to set up a cold outreach sequence. We knew how to read a lead list and decide what to do with it. None of that knowledge came with the product when someone else signed up.

Our target isn't a marketing agency. It's small business owners, plumbers, consultants, cleaning companies, coaches, who know their trade but have basically zero formal sales infrastructure. They don't have a warmed-up email domain sitting around. They just want to find leads and talk to them.

So the challenge wasn't "we built the wrong thing." It was "we built the right thing but assumed too much of the person using it." That's a different problem, and the fix is different too.

What actually changed:

The biggest shift was making the email setup not feel like a technical puzzle. We simplified the connection flow and, more importantly, built email warmup guidance directly into the product. Not a help doc buried somewhere. Part of the actual workflow. If your email isn't ready to send cold outreach, we tell you that clearly and show you what to do about it.

From there, we rebuilt how campaigns get created. One click. You find your leads, you launch your campaign. The product handles the rest.

The other big change was Autopilot. We added geographic controls so users can define the cities or regions they want to target, set it up once, and let it run. For a small business owner doing everything themselves, removing that ongoing management overhead matters a lot.

On the trust side, we made the product more transparent about how it actually works. There's a lot of skepticism in the lead gen space, for good reason, so we stopped assuming people would trust us and started earning it by showing them the process clearly before they commit.

What I learned:

The "we built this for ourselves" story is a strength. Don't walk it back. But it also means you've internalized a lot of expertise that your users don't have yet. The job isn't to rebuild the product. It's to close that gap without watering down what makes it good.

Simplifying the UX actually made the product feel more premium, not less. I expected the opposite. Turns out when things just work and you're not left guessing, you trust the product more.

We're still early, but Local Leads is now something I'd hand to a small business owner and feel good about them figuring it out in a single session.

local-leads.ai - local business lead generation with autopilot outreach.

Local leads can now run a full campaign on autopilot. Automatically spreading geographically, finding leads, and contacting them while you focus on other more important work.

Local leads now sends leads straight to your inbox daily as it finds them. The core here is to simplify the lead finding process and make it a quick part of your daily work routine