The prompt I use to turn "no website found" into an email opening that doesn't sound like a mail-merge
I do freelance web design and small-agency work on the side — video, social, copy, strategy — and after enough of these pitches I landed on a simple thesis: the easiest lead to convert isn't a business with a site that might want a redesign. It's a business with no site at all, or one that's broken, or one that's clearly been abandoned. Which means the whole pitch lives or dies on how specifically you name the gap. I built a small tool to find these businesses: it pulls local businesses by category and town from OpenStreetMap's free public map data, then actively checks whether each one has a real working website instead of trusting whatever OpenStreetMap has on file. That catches both directions of error — a business OpenStreetMap doesn't know has a site, and a domain that's registered but dead. It scores each business 0-100 on how convertible the gap looks, labels it HOT/WARM/COLD, and generates a short dossier plus a draft email for each one. But the piece of this worth sharing on its own, whether or not you ever build the scanning part, is the writing step. Once you have three plain facts about a business — its category, its town, and what the check actually found about its website — the job is turning that into a first paragraph that reads like you looked at that specific business, not a template with the name swapped in. That's what the prompt below does. The prompt doesn't care where those three facts came from — you can type them in by hand. The steps below are how I use it, and the prompt itself is the reusable part.