Before you build a single tool, you need two answers. Without them, everything else is a waste of time.
Before you can find prospects, you need to know who you're looking for. This means getting specific — not "small businesses" but "marketing agencies with 1–10 employees in the US." The more specific you are, the better everything else works.
Without a clear answer, your list will be random and your outreach will be generic. Generic outreach gets ignored. You don't need everyone — you need the right people. A thousand perfectly targeted prospects is more valuable than a hundred thousand random ones.
Those two sentences are enough to build an entire outreach system around.
Write one sentence that says exactly what you do, for exactly who, with an implied result. Not "we do marketing." Something like: "We write email sequences that book demos for B2B SaaS companies." If you can't write this sentence, do that work first — it's outside the scope of any tool.
Who is the specific person who buys what you sell? Not "the company" — the human. Their title, their department, the company size where they're the decision-maker. For professional services: founders and owners at small firms. For enterprise software: VPs and Directors at mid-size companies. Get specific.
What makes a company findable? Industry (SIC code, NAICS code, keyword)? Geography (US only, specific metro)? Size (employee count, revenue)? These characteristics become your search filters. If you can't define them clearly, you can't build a list.
Before building any tools, manually find 20 companies that fit your criteria. Look them up on LinkedIn. Find the actual person you'd contact. Could you write a personalized one-line opener to each of them? If not, your niche is still too broad.
Once you've done steps 1–4, write your niche as a single sentence. This becomes your search strategy, your list criteria, your outreach angle, and your message. Everything downstream flows from it.
This system runs scripts while you sleep. Enrichment alone can take 8–12 hours. If your machine sleeps, your work stops — and half the time it won't cleanly resume where it left off. Before you run anything overnight, you need to configure Windows so the machine stays fully awake: screen can sleep, but the CPU and disk must not. This is trickier than it sounds — Windows has power settings, sleep timers, hard drive sleep settings, and screensaver settings that can all independently interrupt your scripts. Get this right before Stage 2 or you'll lose hours of work to a sleep interrupt.
The full Claude Code prompt for this is in the DIVE tab below. It takes about 5 minutes and only needs to be done once.
If you're stuck, work through these in order:
Enrichment and contact-finding scripts run for many hours. Windows will interrupt them unless you configure it correctly. This is one of the first real friction points — do it once before Stage 2.
Not every niche can be turned into an automated list. Check yours against these: