I built a Google Maps lead generation tool in 6 weeks - here's what I learned
Six weeks ago, I had an idea. Sales teams and freelancers were spending hours manually copying and pasting business data from Google Maps. Every existing tool either required API setup or charged per record. Neither worked for the average person who just needs a list of plumbers in Manchester or restaurants in New York.
So I built ProspectPin.
It pulls every matching business from Google Maps, visits each website to extract email addresses, and returns a clean CSV in about 4 minutes. No API keys, no documentation, no complexity.
What I built:
Google Maps search with email extraction
AI-powered sales insights on every lead
Lead status tracking and notes
Smart badges to qualify leads instantly
CSV export is ready for any CRM
Stack: Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, Clerk, Apify, Vercel
What I learned shipping solo: Getting the first version live is 20% of the work. The other 80% is payments, auth, webhooks, rate limiting, RLS policies, and a hundred small things nobody talks about.
The product is live at prospectpin.com with a free trial. Would love feedback from the IH community - especially from anyone doing cold outreach or B2B prospecting.
What tools are you currently using to build prospect lists?
Congrats on shipping in 6 weeks — that’s real discipline. Your “hidden 80%” breakdown hit home.
The part I’d personally double-check on this stack is the intersection between Stripe, Clerk, and Supabase RLS: auth state after upgrades, webhook idempotency, and whether user-scoped rows stay isolated after plan/status changes.
That “other 80%” is exactly the part most launch posts skip. Nice work getting through it and still shipping.
Really solid execution here, especially getting from idea to a usable pipeline in 6 weeks. The “no API keys, no setup” angle is a bigger differentiator than it sounds; most non-technical users drop off right at that friction point.
What stood out to me is that you didn’t stop at scraping—you pushed into enrichment (emails + AI insights). That’s where these tools start compounding value instead of being just another data export utility.
Have you considered adding intent signals or lightweight scoring beyond static “AI insights”? Even simple heuristics like website tech stack, update frequency, or review velocity could make this much more actionable.
Also +1 on your point about the “hidden 80%.” In my experience building AI-heavy tools, orchestration (auth, billing, rate limits) ends up being the real product.
Overall, this feels like a strong foundation. If you lean further into “actionable leads” rather than just “more leads,” this could move from a utility into something people rely on daily.
This is useful, but I’d be careful not to position ProspectPin as just “Google Maps lead scraping.”
A lot of people technically want leads, but what they actually need is a usable first outreach list they can act on today.
That changes the product from a data tool into a prospecting workflow: find businesses, qualify who is worth contacting, understand the angle, then export into a message-ready list.
The CSV is useful, but the sharper value may be reducing the messy step between “I found 200 businesses” and “I know who to contact first and what to say.”
Small hint: I’d make the first-use promise less about extraction speed and more about getting from local search to outreach-ready prospects without setup.
Drop your email and I’ll send over a tighter first-user/outreach angle instead of crowding the thread.