We built our own lead gen agentbefore we sold it to anyone else.

Discovery

Every weekday at 6:45AM, the agent runs 6 to 8 searches across the web looking for buying signals. Not brand mentions. Signals. Things like a law firm posting a Head of AI job, a hospital announcing an AI transformation initiative, or a manufacturer quoted in trade press talking about operational bottlenecks.

Each result gets scored against a litmus test before it moves forward: what does this company sell? If it is an AI company or a startup raising money to build AI, it gets rejected. The pipeline is only interested in businesses buying or adopting AI to improve an existing operation, not companies building AI as their product.

Results that pass are written to a staging file. The agent does not touch HubSpot, email, or anything external at this stage. Discovery is read-only.

Enrichment

At 7:00AM, a second agent reads the staging file and enriches each lead. High-priority signals, the ones with a named decision maker visible in the press, clear pain, and evidence of budget, go to Apollo first. The agent searches for the COO, VP of Operations, CTO, or Head of AI at that company and pulls back a verified email.

Medium signals go to Hunter for a domain search. This surfaces whoever is most contactable at that organization without burning Apollo credits on a weaker signal.

Credits are capped daily to stay within free tier limits. Apollo gets four lookups per day, Hunter gets three. If a lead cannot be enriched today, it waits. There is no point sending an email to a generic info@ address.

CRM

Every verified contact gets pushed to HubSpot automatically. A contact record is created with the email, title, and company. A deal is opened in the pipeline at the first stage. A note is attached to the contact with the buying signal, the source URL, and a suggested outreach angle: one sentence explaining why this person, at this company, at this moment.

The outreach draft is generated at this stage too, based on the signal and the contact details. The agent writes a short, plain email, not a template, not a sequence. One email that references something real about why we reached out.

Outreach

The draft lands in a Signal message. One tap to send, one tap to skip. This is the only point in the pipeline that requires human input, and it takes about 30 seconds per lead. The email does not go out until someone approves it.

When it sends, it goes through Resend with tracking enabled. Every send is logged with a unique message ID tied to the HubSpot contact record. The sender is info@montebelle.com, a verified domain, not a free inbox.

The emails are short. They reference a specific signal. They say what we do. They ask one question. No pitch decks, no feature lists, no "I wanted to reach out."

Tracking

Every morning at 9:30AM, a metrics agent polls Resend for email events and writes them back to HubSpot as notes. Opens, clicks, bounces, all logged against the contact. If someone clicked the link but did not reply, we see that. If an email bounced, the contact is flagged so we do not send again.

We are notified only on events that matter: an open from a warm lead, a click, or a bounce. The system stays silent otherwise. There is no daily report to read, no dashboard to check. The signal reaches us when something worth acting on happens.