I built ProspectLens to help builders find WHY a business might need their services
Hey everyone, I’m Kulani 👋🏽 A computer science student building my first startup
After learning Make and n8n, I started cold emailing businesses to sell chatbots i got no replies
Looking back, I was offering what I knew how to build without really understanding what each business needed
That experience inspired ProspectLens a Chrome extension that analyzes the business webpage you’re visiting and highlights potential sales opportunities with supporting evidence
The way I describe its focus is:
Apollo helps you find WHO to contact ProspectLens helps you find WHY to start the conversation
I see them as complementary Finding a contact is useful, but I also wanted help understanding what relevant service I could offer that business
ProspectLens helps you investigate opportunities, draft outreach around them, and save or export leads. Its suggestions are starting points for a conversation not proof that a business needs your service
It’s starting with AI Automation, but the bigger vision goes beyond that. I want to support web designers, SEO specialists, paid advertising agencies, and lead generation providers, with opportunity detection tailored to the services they offer. Those additional profiles aren’t available yet
Version 0.1.0 is in early beta, and I’m looking for 3–5 freelancers or agency owners to try it on three websites.
It’s free, includes 10 analyses per month, and requires manual installation in desktop Chrome. Some outreach currently uses a labelled rule based draft
I’d love feedback on this: does the evidence give you a useful reason to approach a business, and what context would you still need before reaching out?
Website: prospectlens.co.za
Replies
The honest answer from the outreach side is that evidence of a problem is not the same as evidence someone is looking for a fix, and that gap is where most cold email dies even with a correct observation attached. What I would want next to the why is a timing signal, something that says the business is dealing with this now rather than has been living with it for two years and stopped noticing. A hiring post for a role that touches the gap, a recent site change that half solved it and stalled, a review that mentions it. Without that, a correct observation reads as a stranger diagnosing them, which gets roughly the same reply rate as a wrong one. Before widening into more service categories I would test whether the evidence changes the reply rate, not just whether it feels accurate to you looking at the page, since those are different questions and only one of them tells you whether to keep building.