grepapi — The Lead Engine That Found Its Own Customers

Last week I pointed my new tool at its own market. I typed one command, and a couple of minutes later it handed me a ranked list of nine B2B prospecting agencies — with phone numbers — plus a handful of people on LinkedIn actively complaining about cold outreach. Then it wrote me a brief for each, and I turned those into opening lines.

The tool is called grepapi, and that little loop — a lead engine finding its own leads — is the whole pitch.

Search Gives You Noise

Try it yourself: search "software companies in your city." You'll get job boards, directories, "Top 50 startups" listicles, and a company registry or two. Almost nothing you can actually call.

The tools that fix this — SerpApi, PhantomBuster, the scraping stacks — are either expensive, fragile, or both. And the proxy-vs-CAPTCHA arms race is not one you win by self-hosting. So most people either pay up or give up.

grepapi takes a different bet.

Fat Client, Thin Server

grepapi never scrapes. You bring the browser. The fetching runs on your machine, with your own session — so there's no proxy bill, no scraping farm, and no ToS liability sitting on my servers. The server only does the parts that are cheap to run and expensive to copy: it plans the search, parses the results, qualifies out the junk, scores what's left, dedupes it, and hands each lead an action.

That split is why the whole thing runs as one tiny binary on a €4 VPS. The client does the heavy, risky work; the server does the brains.

Bring Your Own LLM, Too

Here's the part I'm most opinionated about: grepapi never runs an LLM.

Every lead comes with a brief — the scored context, your positioning, and a precise instruction — and your own agent or LLM writes the actual message. I don't call OpenAI on your behalf and mark it up. Reselling tokens is a cost center, not a business. You're the LLM; I just hand you everything you need to write the outreach.

What You Actually Get

Point it at an ICP and you get a worklist, not a data dump:

grepapi run "éditeur logiciel Grenoble"

→ { "name":"Defacto Technologies", "action":"call", "phone":"04 76 56 65 07" }
  { "name":"Digital League", "source":"linkedin", "action":"comment" }

Real local companies get call — with the phone number. People already posting about your topic on LinkedIn get comment — because whoever is already talking about the problem you solve is your warmest possible lead. Everything is deduped and scored, and each one carries a brief. You work the list — grepapi mark <id> contacted, grepapi leads --new — and next week's run only surfaces what's actually new.

Then I Pointed It at Itself

To test it, I gave grepapi its own ICP: agencies and founders who do outbound. Maps came back with nine real French prospecting shops — ReCom, Growth Canal, Etonam — each with a phone number and a call action. LinkedIn surfaced people mid-thread about cold email.

grepapi generated the briefs. I — the operator, the LLM in the loop — wrote the openers:

"Bonjour — je vois que ReCom monte des campagnes de prospection B2B pour vos clients. Curieux : vos équipes constituent les listes de comptes à appeler à la main, ou avec un outil ?"

That's the demo. The product built its own outbound list and drafted its own cold calls. A GTM engine that feeds itself.

A Whole SaaS in a Tiny Binary

grepapi is built in machin, my language for AI agents. The landing page, the CLI control plane, the scoring, the data graph, Stripe billing — all of it compiles to a single native binary that runs on a cheap VM and idles at near-zero cost.

And it's CLI-only, on purpose. Every command prints JSON on stdout and uses semantic exit codes, so an agent can run the whole loop and branch on failure. No dashboard, no SDK, no protocol to learn. The CLI is the interface.

Try It

Free tier gets you real companies with phone numbers from web and Maps. Pro (€29/mo) adds the LinkedIn engagement graph.

curl -sSL https://grepapi.intrane.fr/install.sh | sh
grepapi signup you@co.com
grepapi icp "your ideal customer"
grepapi run

It's live at grepapi.intrane.fr. Bring your browser. Bring your LLM. I'll bring the leads.