Case study
Prospecting automation / Deployed workflow
Local Business Lead Finder
A deployed n8n system that discovers local businesses, audits their digital presence, and turns deterministic evidence into review-ready prospect lists.
- Role
- Creator · Workflow architecture
- Year
- 2026
- State
- Deployed on Render
System / distributed
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Project snapshot
The condition
Challenge
Finding relevant local prospects manually is slow, while typical lead tools introduce paid data sources, opaque scoring, or automated outreach before a person has reviewed the evidence.
The response
Architecture
A 19-node workflow loads enabled niche-and-location searches from Google Sheets, queries OpenStreetMap through Overpass, removes existing place IDs, and branches on website availability. Reachable sites receive mobile PageSpeed audits before a transparent 0–100 score and priority band are appended to the lead sheet.
What shaped it
Key decisions
Free, open discovery
OpenStreetMap and Overpass replace billing-gated places APIs, with town-level queries and a 60-result cap to respect the shared service.
Evidence before priority
Website reachability, HTTPS, mobile performance, and SEO feed explicit scoring rules capped at 100, so every priority band can be explained.
Failure-tolerant collection
Empty searches, DNS failures, timeouts, blocked requests, and PageSpeed errors remain data states instead of terminating the wider run.
How it feels
Experience
A user controls the search surface from a spreadsheet, runs the workflow manually or on a daily schedule, and receives one normalized row per new business. Each prospect carries website status, performance, accessibility, SEO, priority, and plain-language reasons for review before any outreach.
What resolved
Outcome
A live Render deployment built on n8n 2.32 and PostgreSQL, with a reproducible Docker setup, a 25-field lead schema, fault-tolerant external calls, and no automated email or paid business-discovery API.
- 19-node workflow
- Deterministic 0–100 scoring
System composition
Technology, deliberately chosen.
- n8n 2.32
- PostgreSQL
- OpenStreetMap
- Overpass API
- PageSpeed Insights
- Google Sheets