Findby automates the prospecting work behind selling websites to local businesses.
Findby is a workbench for freelance web designers and small agencies who sell websites to local businesses. AI surfaces local prospects with absent or outdated web presence, generates each one a demonstration site populated with their real photos and details, and drafts a cold email from observations specific to that business. You review, approve, send, and close. Engagements settle in the 500$-to-3000$ range.
One full lead end-to-end on the house. No credit card to start.
The premise
The market for small-business websites is large but fragmented. Millions of independent businesses across the US, UK, and Canada operate without a coherent web presence — a social media page, an abandoned domain, a third-party listing that no longer reflects their operations. Most would buy a website if a credible operator proposed one. The constraint is the prospecting work, not the demand.
Findby restructures that work. We use AI to evaluate regional listings, build a demonstration site for each qualified prospect, and draft the outreach. The operator reviews, approves, and conducts the conversation — the part that depends on judgment, where judgment belongs.
How it works
Four stages, from a region selection to a signed contract.
Discover
Choose a region. Findby reads Google Places across that area, scoring each listing on domain status, social-media currency, review recency, and contact deliverability, and surfaces the businesses most likely to convert. The default weighting favours web presences that are absent, broken, or visibly outdated. Adjustable from settings.
Demonstrate
AI generates a demonstration site for each qualified lead, populated with the prospect’s photos, hours, and operational details from discovery. The site is hosted at a subdomain of newshop.studio composed from the business name, so the URL reads as the prospect’s own rather than as a third-party preview.
Pitch
The cold email is drafted from the same context that surfaced the lead. The opening sentence references a specific observation about that business, not a mail-merge field; the body proposes the demonstration site as the starting point. The operator reviews, sends as written, or rewrites first.
Close
Replies arrive in the operator’s inbox. By the time a reply lands, the prospect has already seen a working demonstration of what they would be buying — a context most cold-email replies lack. Engagements settle in the 500$-to-3000$ range, either for the demonstration site as-built or as the lead-in to ongoing agency work.
What the workbench delivers
The four deliverables.
A demonstration site for each qualified lead
Hosted at a subdomain of newshop.studio composed from the business name. Photos, copy, hours, and operational details come from Google Places, rendered into a designer-grade layout on mobile and desktop. Often the first coherent version of their own business the prospect has seen.
Cold-email drafts written from per-prospect context
Each draft is keyed to a specific observation from the discovery context, not a templated mail-merge field. Two subject variants are tested automatically across the cohort; the winner is selected by open rate. Replies route to the operator’s inbox.
Compliance enforced at the send gate
CAN-SPAM footers attach automatically before send. EU routes are gated behind explicit consent records, in alignment with GDPR. Unsubscribe links resolve to a configurable preference page. Enforced at send time, not reconciled afterwards.
Architecture sized for the solo operator, with room for a team
The default account ships one seat, one verified sending domain, and one sender identity. Seats and domains add as the practice grows. Suppression lists, A/B history, and warm-up state are shared across the team.
Why this works
The structural decisions that separate Findby from the $19-a-month cold-email tools.
A 21-day domain warm-up before any production sending. Mailbox providers calibrate sender reputation gradually; a new domain that arrives at production volume on day one is routed to spam by default. Each domain provisioned through Findby enters a 21-day ramp that climbs from roughly twenty messages per day to the configured target.
Outbound traffic gated by jurisdiction. Recipients with European Union addresses are held by default until an explicit consent record is recorded. The conventional pattern is to send everything and reconcile legal exposure afterwards; refusing the send at the gate is the defensible position.
A demonstration URL that does not advertise the workbench. Each demonstration site is hosted at [business-slug].newshop.studio rather than findby.io/preview/123. The prospect arrives at a URL that reads as theirs, and the conversation does not open with an explanation of who Findby is.
What stays yours
The work that pays the most stays with the operator.
Findby produces the work that looks roughly the same from one prospect to the next — discovery, demonstration sites, drafted outreach, the deliverability infrastructure. Each of these scales poorly by hand and well by automation.
What stays with the operator is the work that does not look the same twice: reading the room, judging which prospect is ready, deciding what to say next, recognising when to walk. That work is the relationship, and the relationship is the deal.
Take one lead through the full pipeline, then decide.
One full lead on the house. No credit card to start.