How I Built LeadBlitz — and Why I Use It for My Own Outreach

LeadBlitz started because I was watching YouTube videos about how freelance web designers find clients. The advice was always the same: search Google Maps for a business type in a specific area, look at their websites, find the ones that need work, and pitch them a redesign.

It's good advice. It also takes hours. Searching, clicking, evaluating, composing emails — one lead at a time. I thought: why not automate the whole thing?

So I built LeadBlitz. And then something interesting happened — I started using it for my own outreach campaigns that had nothing to do with web design.

What LeadBlitz Was Built For

The core workflow is designed for freelance web designers and small agencies:

1. Search by niche and location — type "restaurants in Bristol" or "dentists in Manchester" and LeadBlitz pulls ~20 businesses from Google Places
2. Automatic website analysis — the tool scrapes each business's website and builds a technographic profile. What platform are they on? Is it mobile-friendly? How old does it look? Is there SSL?
3. AI-generated audit reports — two reports per lead. An internal one for the designer (here's what's wrong with the site) and a client-facing one for the pitch (here's how we'd improve it). Both downloadable as professional PDFs
4. Outreach — send personalised emails with the audit report attached, or SMS via the user's own Twilio account
5. Pipeline tracking — track every lead through stages, log email and SMS history, manage follow-ups

For a web designer, this turns a full day's prospecting into about 20 minutes. Search, review the reports, hit send.

How I Actually Use It

Here's where it gets interesting. I built LeadBlitz for web designers, but the outreach engine underneath is completely industry-agnostic. And I had my own outreach to do.

I run SH Applications — an automation and custom app development business. I needed to reach potential clients across different industries. So I started using LeadBlitz for exactly that.

Mass Email Campaigns

The workflow I use is different from the web designer flow. Instead of searching Google Maps, I import prospects via CSV — thousands at a time, up to 10,000 rows per import. The CSV just needs a business name and email. Website URL is optional.

From there, LeadBlitz does what it does best:

• Auto email scraping — if I have website URLs but no emails, the tool scrapes them automatically. It checks the homepage first, then /contact, /about, and other common pages. About 25% of small business websites have scrapable email addresses
• Batch enrichment — a single click runs email discovery across every lead that's missing one, with a progress bar and parallel workers
• AI personalisation — using OpenAI, each email can be uniquely tailored to the recipient. Not mail merge with {first_name} — genuinely different copy based on what we know about the business
• Rate-limited sending — I can set send speeds (100/day, 500/day, or unlimited) depending on which email provider I'm using. The system sleeps between sends and shows estimated days to completion
• "Email all filtered" campaigns — filter leads by import batch, pipeline stage, or whether they have an email, then send to every matching lead across all pages with one click

I've sent thousands of emails through LeadBlitz for my own business development. It's the tool I reach for because I built it to solve exactly this problem — and because I can modify it whenever I need a new feature.

Eating My Own Cooking

There's a principle in software that says the best products are built by people who use them. I'm both the developer and a power user. When I hit a limitation, I fix it. When I need a new feature, I build it.

The CSV import used to require a website URL column. I removed that requirement because my own campaigns often only had names and emails. The "Email without report" button exists because I needed to send outreach that wasn't about website audits. Rate limiting was added because I was sending large volumes through SendGrid and needed to stay within plan limits.

Every one of those features came from real usage, not a product roadmap meeting.

Two Tools in One

LeadBlitz is really two things:

1. A web design prospecting tool — search Google Maps, audit websites, pitch redesigns with professional PDF reports. This is the core product for freelancers and agencies
2. A general-purpose outreach platform — import any CSV of prospects, enrich with emails, write AI-personalised campaigns, send at scale with rate limiting and tracking

The second use case emerged organically. The bones were already there — email sending, pipeline management, filtering, bulk actions. It just needed flexibility in how leads got into the system and what you could do without a website audit attached.

The Tech Behind It

For anyone curious about the stack:

• Backend: FastAPI (Python), SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL
• Frontend: HTMX, vanilla JavaScript, custom CSS
• PDF reports: ReportLab — fully branded, professional layouts
• Email: SMTP, Gmail, SendGrid — user picks their provider
• AI: OpenAI for email personalisation and report generation
• Lead search: Google Places API
• Email discovery: Custom web scraping + Hunter.io
• SMS: Twilio (users connect their own account)

The whole thing runs on a single Render instance. No microservices, no Kubernetes, no over-engineering. Just a FastAPI app that does its job.

What This Means for You

If you're a freelance web designer or agency, LeadBlitz does the prospecting legwork for you. Search for businesses, get AI-generated audit reports, send pitched emails with professional PDFs attached. It's the workflow from those YouTube videos, automated.

If you're any business that needs outreach at scale, the same tool handles CSV imports, email enrichment, AI personalisation, and rate-limited sending. I use it for exactly this, every week.

And if you need a custom tool built for your specific workflow — something that doesn't exist yet, or that you're currently doing manually — that's what SH Applications does. LeadBlitz is proof that we build real software that solves real problems.