I Got Tired of Spending Hours Hunting Leads - So I Built My Own System
Built a GDPR-compliant lead sourcing system using Baltic business registries to replace manual prospecting. One click now gathers ~250 companies and saves hours of daily work.
For the past months I’ve been trying to find leads across multiple industries.
I used everything. Apollo, AI chats, prompt engineering, manual searching, filtering, rerunning queries.
And yes, it worked.
But it worked the way a leaking bucket works. You can carry water, but every trip is exhausting.
Every session looked like this:
Search companies
Extract contacts
AI loses context
Rewrite prompts
Repeat
Realize half the data isn’t usable in Baltic markets
Hours gone. Every day.
The worst part was realizing the big platforms simply do not understand small and specific regional markets.
So eventually I stopped trying to optimize the workflow.
I removed the workflow.
I built a tool only for myself.
The First Wall Was Legal, Not Technical
Before writing anything, I had to answer one uncomfortable question:
How do you gather leads in Europe without violating GDPR?
Most scraping tools quietly ignore this problem. That works until it suddenly doesn’t.
So I went the opposite direction and only used official sources. Government business registries.
This is where things got interesting.
Lithuania is very automation friendly
Estonia is extremely developer friendly
Latvia is complicated and inconsistent and I am still researching better access
But all three countries provide structured public company data in some form.
That means no scraped personal profiles
No guessing emails from LinkedIn
No grey zone enrichment
Only legitimate business information companies publish themselves.
What I Actually Needed
I didn’t need ten thousand leads.
I needed context I could act on:
Company name
Industry
Public contact information
Enough to understand why I should contact them and what problem I can realistically solve.
That single constraint simplified everything.
The System
The goal was simple.
One click. Leads ready. Continue working.
No dashboards
No SaaS dependency
No vendor lock in
I wanted full control over my own data on my own machine.
So the stack became local automation workflows, self hosted infrastructure and a configurable CRM integration.
Everything runs locally on my Mac.
If a platform shuts down, nothing breaks.
If internet works, the system works.
Designing the Logic
Instead of immediately coding, I spent time challenging my own assumptions.
I used AI not to write blindly but to argue with me.
Every step had to justify its existence. Otherwise it was removed.
The final workflow became a chain of small predictable steps instead of one fragile script.
Result. Repeatable and debuggable.
Development Reality
I hadn’t written real code in a while and honestly it felt great watching logic come alive again.
It was not smooth.
Outdated dependencies
Syntax errors
Random breakages
But every failure had context and context can be solved.
After several revisions and about a day of focused work, the system worked.
What It Does Today
With one button press or a scheduled run
about 250 companies are collected automatically each time.
Is it perfect? No.
Some leads are irrelevant
Some industries need better classification
But it saves multiple hours every day and that was the entire point.
This is not a revolutionary product.
It is simply the tool I needed badly enough to stop tolerating the problem.
Why I’m Sharing This
If you work in smaller European markets you have probably noticed this.
Big platforms optimize for scale.
Local businesses operate on specificity.
That gap creates daily manual work.
I built this to remove mine and I am now expanding it, including an automatic follow up workflow connected to the output. I will write about that separately.
If this sounds like your weekly frustration, you probably do not need another database.
You need a system built for your market.