If you are still doing lead gen by hand in 2026, I have a very specific thing to say to you.
Last month, I was on a call with a GTM lead at a 40-person Series A startup.
Smart guy.
Very online.
Had Claude open in one tab and Apollo in another.
He was copying contact data by hand, pasting it into Claude, and asking it to write personalized openers.
I watched him do this for three minutes before I said anything.
“How long does this take you per prospect?”
He said, “Maybe four or five minutes.”
I did not say what I was thinking.
Which was: you are using a Formula 1 car to deliver pizza on foot.
How to run these lead gen tools in Claude
One-time setup (do this once):
Press ⌘ + Space → type Terminal → press Enter
Paste this command and press Enter:
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
Follow the browser login. Done.
Every time you want to run a GitHub repo:
Open Claude Code.
Say: “Run this GitHub repo: [paste link]”
Say: “Here’s the task: [describe what you want]”
Watch. Claude does everything.I. The tools. All five. No fluff.
01 — Auto-Prompt-Creator (by Mitchell Keller)
Here is the problem nobody wants to say out loud:
Sonnet is expensive at scale.
You can afford it for 50 prospects.
Not for 5,000.
Mitchell built a tool that takes a prompt that works well on Sonnet
Optimizes it, until the same quality output comes out of Haiku.
The cheaper model.
The one you can actually run at volume without crying at your invoice.
02 — Spider CLI (by Gilbert Bagaoisan)
The average web scraper costs between $0.002 and $0.01 per page.
Spider CLI costs $0.0001 per scrape.
That is not a typo.
That is a decimal point in a place nobody expected.
Run it locally.
Point it at a prospect’s website.
Pipe the output directly into Claude and ask:
“What is this company’s biggest current pain based on their homepage, careers page, and latest press release?”
It takes 11 seconds.
It used to take a person 20 minutes.
03 — Last30Days (by Matt Van Horn)
Most outbound fails because it has no timing signal.
You are reaching out about a problem the prospect had six months ago. They solved it.
They moved on. You look behind.
Last30Days searches Reddit, X, YouTube, Hacker News, GitHub, Polymarket, and the web.
You now know what your prospect is actively talking about.
What their customers are complaining about.
What their competitors just shipped.
Feed this into Claude.
Ask it to write an opener that references something real from the last 30 days.
Now ask yourself the obvious question:
How is anyone going to ignore that?
04 — AutoClay (by Neo Mohr)
Clay is one of the best GTM tools alive.
It is also a tool you need to open in a browser, navigate through a UI, and click through to run a people search.
AutoClay lets you run Clay people searches from your terminal.
Which means you can chain it.
Note: Clay’s new MCP can handle a lot of this now.
But AutoClay is faster to set up and free.
Start here. Upgrade when you need to.
05 — Rowbound (by Elias Stråvik)
Not everyone is a terminal person.
I understand this. I will not shame you. (!!!)
Rowbound runs Clay-style enrichment waterfalls inside Google Sheets.
You have a column of company names.
Rowbound fills the next ten columns:
employee count, tech stack, funding stage, decision-maker name, LinkedIn URL, last funding date.
Then you hand the enriched sheet to Claude.
And Claude writes the outreach.
II. How to combine all five. Step by step.
Step 1. Build your target list in Google Sheets.
Company name, website URL, target title. That is all you need to start.
Step 2. Run Rowbound on the sheet.
Let it fill in employee count, funding round, decision-maker name and LinkedIn.
Step 3. For your top 50 accounts, run Spider CLI on each website.
You now have the full text of their homepage, careers page, and about page.
Step 4. Run Last30Days on each company name. What have they been talking about this month? What are their customers complaining about on Reddit?
Step 5. Drop all of this into Claude with a prompt that Auto-Prompt-Creator has already optimized for Haiku.
Ask Claude: “Write a 3-sentence cold email opener for this person, referencing something specific from the last 30 days. Be direct. No flattery.”
That is it.
This newsletter grows from your shares. Forward it to one person in who still does research by hand. They will thank you. Or they will be annoyed. Either way, they will stop doing it by hand.
— Div