Lead-gen autopilot
The lead-gen autopilot turns a Company into a small sales and marketing team. It searches free, public sources for people and businesses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH) who need what you sell, and collects them in a spreadsheet. It drafts first messages, follow-ups, posts and bid plans. Nothing is sent without your approval, one message at a time.
You’ll find it under Company → ▶️ Run it → 🎯 Leads. Each sub-tab is described on the Company leads screen.
The team it sets up
⚙ Setup asks what you sell, who an ideal lead is, your search phrases (German and English), regions, OpenStreetMap business categories, Mastodon hashtags, and your signature. You can start from an example: Software / app agency, Craft business (Handwerk) or Consulting / coaching. The signature is your name, company and postal address. It’s used in e-mails and letters, and doubles as your legal notice (Impressum).
Setup then creates the workers, their schedules and a starting set of sources:
| Worker | What it does | Schedule |
|---|---|---|
| 🔎 Lead Researcher | Searches free, open sources and fills the spreadsheet | every 2 h, 06:00–22:00 |
| ✍️ Outreach Copywriter | Drafts first messages and due follow-ups | every 2 h, 07:30–21:30 |
| 📣 Content Marketer | Drafts 3 posts a week, and a newsletter in the first week of each month | Mondays 09:00 |
The Content Marketer is only added if you list content platforms, such as linkedin, blog. Running
Setup again updates everything and duplicates nothing.
Where does the hunting run 24/7? Pick a paired VPS runner so hunting doesn’t stop when your laptop sleeps. The workers and routines sync to that machine, and leads and drafts sync back for your review. Keep auto-sync on. See Fleet & Sync.
Where leads come from
Only free, public sources are used. There are no paid APIs.
| Source | What it finds |
|---|---|
| Job board (Bundesagentur Jobsuche) | companies hiring for what you sell, with address |
| News (Google News) | funding, expansion, relaunch triggers |
| Portal feeds (RSS/Atom you add) | job and project portals, regional news, IHK feeds |
| Hacker News | posts |
| GitHub | issues |
| StackExchange | questions |
| Mastodon | hashtags |
| OpenStreetMap | businesses, with postal address |
| TED | EU public tenders for DE, AT and CH |
| SearXNG | search results, only if you run your own instance |
| Company websites | contact details from their legal notice (Impressum) page |
The app fetches every source itself. The researcher only qualifies what comes back, so it can’t “crawl” a source the wrong way, and each run is recorded even if the model forgets to report it.
The researcher never logs in (so no LinkedIn or XING profiles), never bypasses a CAPTCHA, and never invents contact details.
The learning source registry
After every run, the researcher records what each source yielded. The registry learns from that:
- productive sources are revisited every 12 hours;
- after 3 empty runs, a source goes on probation and is retried every 3 days;
- after 6 empty runs, it’s retired and re-checked once a month.
Approving and sending
The copywriter only drafts for leads you’ve approved in the spreadsheet. Every draft then waits in the 📨 Outbox for your approval. You can approve there, or from your phone with the phone console.
| Draft | What approving does |
|---|---|
| Sends it through the Company’s e-mail channel, or queues it (see warm-up). | |
| ✉️ Letter | Opens a print-ready DIN 5008 letter. Print and post it, then click 📮 Mark posted. |
| 📣 Post | Copies the text. Publish it yourself, then click ✓ Mark published. Nothing is posted for you. |
| 🏛 Bid plan | Records your decision to bid on a tender (see below). |
Warm-up
A new mailbox that suddenly sends a lot of cold e-mail lands in spam. So each Company’s daily limit ramps up. The default is 10 a day, plus 5 each day, up to 50.
- Approved e-mail beyond today’s limit waits in the Queued list.
- Queued e-mail goes out on weekdays between 08:00 and 18:00, from the machine where you approved it.
- 📊 Pipeline → 📬 Sending health shows today’s count against the limit, lets you change the warm-up, and checks your sending domain’s SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX records.
Tenders and bid plans
Public tenders from TED become tender leads. You win them by bidding, not by outreach, so they work differently:
- The spreadsheet shows the days left until the submission deadline, “due today” or “closed”.
- Instead of a message, a 🏛 Bid plan is drafted for your review. It links to the tender notice.
- ✓ Go — we bid approves the bid, and ✕ No bid turns it down.
- Approved bids move to Bids, letters & posts in progress. There you can 📄 Open tender and, once you’ve submitted it yourself, click ✓ Bid submitted.
- 📊 Pipeline counts open tenders and how many close within 14 days. Lead statuses include bidding, won and lost.
askTheodor never submits a bid for you.
Sequences: follow-ups
- When a first message goes out, the lead joins the Company’s outreach sequence.
- When the next step is due, the copywriter drafts it in the same thread. You approve it like any other message.
- The sequence stops when the lead replies, bounces or asks not to be contacted.
Setup creates two sequences: “Erstkontakt + 2 Follow-ups” (day 0, then +4 days, then +7 days) and “Willkommen”, a welcome flow for signups. Under 🔁 Sequences you can edit each step’s delay, channel (e-mail or letter) and brief, and see who is on which step.
The reply classifier
Replies are read from the Company’s e-mail inbox over IMAP, so set up IMAP in the e-mail channel. Every answer from a lead is classified:
| Category | What happens |
|---|---|
| 🔥 interested / 💬 reply | The sequence stops, the lead becomes replied, and you’re notified. |
| ⏳ not now | The sequence stops, with a reminder in 90 days. |
| 🏖 out of office | The follow-up moves back a week. |
| 🚫 unsubscribe | The lead becomes unsubscribed and is never contacted again. |
| ↩️ bounce | The lead becomes bounced and is never contacted again. |
Leads never get an automatic answer. You reply yourself, or ask a worker to draft the reply.
Marketing events and campaigns
- Signups, purchases and forms. Under 📊 Pipeline, the Company has an event URL. Your website, a
Stripe webhook or a form tool can post
event=signup,purchaseorformto it. The person becomes a lead and joins the flows listening for that event. Their welcome e-mails are drafted for your approval. - 📰 Campaigns. A newsletter or announcement to a segment, chosen by lead status and tags. You
approve it once, and each copy then joins the queue under the warm-up limit. Unsubscribed and bounced
contacts are always left out.
{{name}}is replaced with each contact’s name. - Other mail services. Brevo, Postmark, Mailjet and similar services offer SMTP relays. Put their SMTP settings in the e-mail channel.
Rules the system enforces
- No paid search or data APIs, and no CAPTCHA bypassing.
- Every outgoing message is approved individually. A campaign is approved once, as one message.
- Nobody who unsubscribed or bounced is contacted again, and leads never get an automatic reply.
- When the kill-switch is on (pause in the app or from your phone), nothing unattended runs, including the send queue.
🎓 Learn it hands-on: Hunt leads across DACH on autopilot
Terms in this page
- Lead: a person or business that might need what you sell, collected in the spreadsheet.
- Tender lead: a public tender, won by submitting a bid rather than by outreach.
- Bid plan: the draft prepared for a tender. Approving it records your decision to bid.
- Outbox: where drafts wait for your approval.
- Warm-up: a daily sending limit that grows slowly, so a new mailbox isn’t treated as spam.
- Sequence: a planned series of follow-ups that stops when the lead replies.
- Reply classifier: sorts each answer from a lead into a category and acts on the sequence.
- Source registry: the record of what each source yielded, used to decide how often to revisit it.
- Impressum: the legal notice German-speaking businesses must publish. Your signature doubles as one.
- TED: Tenders Electronic Daily, the EU’s public tender journal.
- SPF / DKIM / DMARC: DNS records that prove your e-mail really comes from your domain.