The origin story
I work in B2B sales. The job is cold outreach — ~100 calls a day to small businesses, mostly local. After a few months of this, I realized something obvious: the calls weren't the hard part. The pre-call research was.
Every dial I made, I'd ideally want to know in advance: does this business have a website? Is it any good? Do they have reviews? Are they running ads? Have they been around? Are they growing?
All of this is publicly available. None of it was easy to pull at scale. The tools that did exist — Apollo, ZoomInfo, Clay — were built for selling SaaS to other tech companies, not for selling services to local Main Street businesses. They either didn't have the data, didn't have the local context, or cost $200+/mo for features I didn't need.
So I built what I wanted: type a ZIP code, get every local business in that area, scored 0-99 for outreach quality based on signals I could observe about their site, reviews, whether they run ads, and contact reachability. Under 60 seconds, sorted, ready to call.
Who it's for
ZipLead is for anyone who sells a service or product to local businesses. That's a much bigger audience than just sales reps:
- Web designers, SEO agencies, PPC managers, social media marketers
- Bookkeepers, accountants, commercial insurance agents
- MSPs and IT consultants
- Photographers, videographers, copywriters
- POS resellers, business consultants
- SaaS vendors selling to SMBs
- And yes — sales reps doing what I do every day
Anyone who needs to find local businesses to pitch — and wants the data to do it intelligently — is the target user.
The pricing
I priced ZipLead to be approachable for the freelancer doing their first 10 clients, not for the enterprise sales org with a $50k/yr tool budget:
- Scout (free, forever): 5 searches per month, full prospect scoring, basic info.
- Operator ($59/mo): 100 searches + 100 enrichment credits + SMTP-verified emails + pipeline CRM.
- Command ($179/mo): 200 searches + 500 enrichment credits + API + webhooks.
No annual contracts. No setup fees. Cancel any time from your dashboard.
What's coming
ZipLead is in active build. The roadmap is shaped by what users actually request, not what would look good in a deck. Things on the near-term list:
- More refined scoring per vertical (so a "good lead for a roofer" weights differently than "good lead for a copywriter")
- White-label prospect reports — your branding on the exports you hand to clients
- Team seats for agencies running multiple reps
- Deeper CRM integrations beyond today's HubSpot/Close/CSV export
How to reach me
Reply to any email from ZipLead (welcome email, receipts, etc) and it comes straight to my inbox. I read every one. If you have a feature request, a complaint, or you want to walk through how to use the tool for your specific service — let's talk.
Or email me directly at hello@ziplead.ai.
The honest deal
ZipLead is a small bootstrap project, not a venture-backed unicorn-in-the-making. It's profitable from day one or it doesn't continue. That's a constraint I'm proud of — it means every feature has to actually be useful, and every customer has to get real value.
If you try it and it doesn't fit your workflow, that's totally fine. There's a free tier so you can find out without spending a dollar. And if it does fit — you'll have an unfair advantage over everyone else still scraping Google Maps by hand at 11pm.