Aider in the Real World - Automated Lead Enrichment with AI

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AI Summary

Summary: Development of Automated Lead Enrichment Tool with Aider

• Objective: Automate lead enrichment for cold email outreach targeting new businesses.
• Existing Process:
  • Manual and time-consuming.
  • Involves checking public records, LinkedIn, Google Maps, and websites for contact details.
  • Uses a sequence of scripts, not a complex network.
  • Results in too few leads for the effort invested.
• Main Script Overview:
  • Downloads CSV from a shared Google Sheet.
  • Checks UK’s Companies House for business information.
  • Excludes businesses with accountant addresses.
  • Searches LinkedIn and Google for company and director information.
  • Manual steps include constructing search URLs and scraping websites.
  • Finalizes leads and inputs them into a Google Form for automated outreach.
• Automation Goals:
  • Increase the speed of lead generation.
  • Eliminate non-automatable and time-consuming steps, especially LinkedIn due to terms of service.
  • Focus on automating web scraping and Google search results analysis.
• Development with Aidera
  • Aider used to develop the automation script.
  • Implemented functions to filter Google search results and assess the likelihood of a webpage belonging to a target business.
  • Utilized large language models to estimate confidence in search results.
  • Automated the construction of search URLs and the scraping of contact details from websites.
  • Encountered challenges with email scraping due to Cloudflare protection.
• Results:
  • Significant speed improvement in lead generation process.
  • Development costs amounted to a few dollars, with ongoing usage costs of cents per run.
  • Aider helped to shortcut the coding process and provided package recommendations.
  • The tool requires further refinement to handle complexities such as Cloudflare protection.
• Next Steps:
  • Start a new project from scratch on a second channel, exploring the use of AI for other applications.
  • Consider using Ada for initial drafts and tweaking existing codebases.