Building an Agency Lead Gen Pipeline from Scratch

A founder on r/founder spent the weekend doing cold calls instead of coding. Google Maps, manual research, 6 hours for 30-40 leads. The uncomfortable truth is that prospecting never fully goes away, but you can compress those 6 hours into 30 minutes of reviewing pre-qualified leads. The pipeline: search, evaluate, score, deliver.

Step 1: Search for businesses

Query Google for businesses in your target niche and city. The search results tell you what exists. Directory-only results (Yelp, Yellow Pages) signal businesses without their own website -- high opportunity for a web agency.

import requests, os

H = {'x-api-key': os.environ['SCAVIO_API_KEY']}

def find_leads(niche: str, city: str) -> list:
    resp = requests.post('https://api.scavio.dev/api/v1/search',
        headers=H, json={'platform': 'google', 'query': f'{niche} {city}'},
        timeout=10)
    return [{'name': r['title'], 'url': r.get('link', ''),
             'has_own_site': 'yelp.com' not in r.get('link', '')}
            for r in resp.json().get('organic', [])[:10]]

Step 2: Score by opportunity

A business on Yelp with no website scores higher than one with a professional site. A business with few Google reviews scores higher than one with 500. The scoring rubric quantifies the gap between their current online presence and what your agency offers. Bigger gap equals bigger opportunity.

Step 3: Enrich for personalization

Generic cold emails convert at 2%. Personalized ones convert at 15-20%. The enrichment step finds something specific about each business: their review count, their competitors, their Google Business profile status. Reference this in the outreach so the email feels researched, not mass-sent.

Step 4: Deliver to outreach tool

Export the top-scored leads to your cold email tool (Instantly, Smartlead, or manual email). Include the research summary so whoever writes the email has context. The pipeline does the research; a human does the relationship building.

Scale math

5 niches times 10 cities equals 50 searches for discovery. 10 leads per search equals 500 candidates. Score and filter to the top 50. Enrich 50 leads with 2 searches each equals 100 enrichment queries. Total: 150 API calls per day, $0.75 per day, $22.50 per month. Compare to 6 hours of manual work every Saturday.