Finding my own clients: 445 local businesses audited, 43 sites mocked, five pitches sent

A map listing without a website usually means nobody added one, not that the business has no site. So leadpipe treats it as unknown, never as a pitch. A site that blocks automated checks is marked blocked, not down. Leads whose site really looks broken wait in the queue until I've checked them by hand. Telling an owner their site is down when it isn't would end the conversation before it starts.

Each strong lead gets a one-page site written from what their own site says, in their logo and main brand color, with stock photography for their industry. A bar across the top says plainly that it's a concept, not their live site, and it's hidden from search engines.

Getting the branding right took a few rounds. The first color picks included the default blues WordPress, Wix and web browsers use, and two of the logos turned out to be a Facebook icon and an oil-company partner badge. Both now have blocklists. I also check every stock photo by eye before a concept site can use it, after one free photo library returned explicit public-domain art for "chiropractor."

Emails go out through Resend from a separate subdomain, so a cold email can never hurt the address my clients use. They're plain text with no tracking. My first test landed in Gmail's Promotions tab, because of a header that's only required of bulk senders. Removing it moved the next one to Primary. A warmup caps new mail at five a day, then twelve, then twenty-five.

Claude writes the middle of each email. Code adds the greeting, signature, postal address and opt-out, so the parts the law requires never depend on a model. Nothing leaves until I type send. A separate review before launch found nine bugs, including one where a typo in a flag could have sent the real queue when I meant to send a test. Each one is now pinned by a test.