Why I Built LeadFinder, a Lead Generation Tool for Solopreneurs

The problem before the problem

I didn’t set out to build a lead generation tool. I set out to build software for Australian real estate agencies. The problem came before that: how do you find agencies to sell to without knocking on doors? Nobody prospects that way anymore. So before I even looked at what already existed on the market, I decided to build a small search engine to find them myself, pulling from Google Maps and the agencies’ own websites, since real estate agencies tend to list solid contact info publicly.

That search engine is what became LeadFinder.

Client acquisition for freelancers, not just for me

That search engine worked, and it worked because I was solving my own problem: I was one person, prospecting alone, with no budget for a tool built around a sales team. It didn’t take long to realize I wasn’t the only one in that position. Any freelancer or solopreneur doing their own client acquisition hits the same wall: pay for a platform priced for a team of five, or do everything by hand. So I kept building, and what started as a simple tool for myself became a finished product built to help solopreneurs and small businesses prospect.

Ethical lead generation, not a database

A lot of lead generation platforms pull from a shared database, one that often includes people’s personal data collected without their consent. That’s not how LeadFinder works. It searches public business sources fresh, when you search, instead of serving leads out of a database that might be months or years out of date. The trade-off: without access to LinkedIn or social platforms, LeadFinder can’t always dig up a named decision-maker, so some contacts come back generic. That’s deliberate, not a limitation I’m ignoring. What couldn’t be fully solved without stepping outside that ethical line was made up for another way: a lead scoring system now rates each contact, to separate the ones worth trusting from the rest.

Built by shipping it

I’m not a developer. My first alpha testers, developers I found on Reddit, gave me my first cold shower after the first test: broken buttons, obviously AI-written code, mixed languages on some pages. Hard to hear, but genuinely useful and constructive. I fixed those criticisms point by point, and it helped me move forward.

All of this happens around a full-time job, roughly 12 hours a day away from home between commute and work, then 4 to 5 hours a day on LeadFinder for over a month to get here. I’m currently in Australia on a working holiday visa, building this as my shot at making it work here long-term.

Where LeadFinder is today

What used to be a three-line search engine is now a full product with a pipeline: lead scoring, campaign sequencing, click and reply tracking, native HubSpot integration, more on the way. Still a prospecting tool for solo founders at its core, just a more capable one. Beta opens around the end of August.

If you’re chasing b2b leads for small business and need something you can actually trust enough to hit send, LeadFinder is worth five minutes of your time.