I built a tool to fix my own agency's biggest time-sink
A few months ago, some friends and I ran a small local marketing agency. No ad budget, so everything was cold outreach .I did most of the lead research (outreach wasn't my thing — I'm pretty socially anxious for someone who ran an agency built on cold calls). Turns out research was the actual slow part — checking websites, Google profiles, hunting for real contacts, one tab at a time .So I built Clinqu to automate it. Still early, still rough in places .If you do outbound to local businesses, I'd love your honest feedback.
This resonates. I built something similar out of my own agency work — not lead research in my case, but I kept losing track of which client automations had quietly broken because I was checking three different tools instead of one. Same root pattern as what you're describing: the unglamorous manual-checking step is the actual time-sink, not the work itself. Rough edges and all, shipping the thing that fixes your own daily pain beats polishing something theoretical. Good luck with it.
Been mostly doing this through cold outreach and a few subreddits so far — still figuring out where the right people actually hang out. If you've got thoughts on where agency folks doing this kind of work spend time online, genuinely curious.
I like that the product came from repeatedly experiencing the bottleneck yourself rather than trying to automate everything at once.
I'll be curious to see which part of the research workflow users end up relying on most. That's often where the real value of a product reveals itself.
Love to see using the products you build. It shows real backing and commitment, and usually equals a real passion for the project
Appreciate that.
Research being the bottleneck instead of outreach itself is a pattern I hear a lot from agency founders. The tab by tab checking eats the exact hours that should go into actually talking to prospects. Curious how much time per lead this cuts down for you now that it is automated.
Rough estimate — manual research was running 10-15 min per lead when I was doing it by hand for my own agency. Using Clinqu myself, that's down about 40-50% so far, and the audit output has been solid enough for me to actually build outreach from directly.
Forty to fifty percent off ten to fifteen minutes per lead is a real number, not a vanity metric. That is the kind of problem that quietly eats a founder's week without ever showing up as one big line item. Curious whether that saved time is turning into more outreach volume or just time back for you personally.