How I find clients who need my service right now, on autopilot

Most cold outreach fails because of timing.

At any given moment, a small slice of your market is actively posting on LinkedIn saying they need exactly what you offer:

• "Can anyone recommend a video editor?"
• "We're hiring a freelance video editor for a contract project"
• Someone who just liked a post about cold email deliverability
• A VP of Sales who just changed jobs and is now at a 50-person startup

Those people are ready to buy. They're just waiting for someone to show up.

The problem: finding those posts manually is a full-time job. Reach out a day late and it's gone.

So I built a system that does it automatically:

• Findymail monitors LinkedIn posts in real time
• Filters leads that match your exact criteria
• Enriches them with verified email addresses
• Triggers an automated email via n8n the moment a match comes in

This is how I set it up.

The tool: Findymail Signals

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Findymail is a B2B data provider: email finder, phone numbers, company enrichment. The feature I use for this is called Signals. It monitors LinkedIn posts in real time and surfaces leads when someone fitting my criteria posts about needing what I sell.

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Step 1: Choose your signal type

Go to Signals in the sidebar and click Create Monitor.

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4 options:

• Keyword Mention - monitors LinkedIn posts for specific keywords
• New Hire - detects when someone joins a new company
• Job Title Change - detects when someone changes role at the same company
• Topic Engagement - detects who's engaging with specific B2B social posts

For finding people actively looking to hire: select Keyword Mention.

Step 2: Set your keywords and AI scoring

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The first time I set this up I used keywords that were too broad and got a feed full of junk. Two things to get right here:

Keywords

• Think about what someone actually types when asking their network for help, not job listing language
• For video editing: "video editor" + "contract"
• All keywords must appear together in the post (AND logic)
• Before locking in, spend 5 minutes manually searching LinkedIn to make sure real posts use those words

AI Scoring

This is what separates useful signals from noise. Describe exactly what makes a post relevant or not:

The AI scores every post out of 5 with a two-lines explanation. I only look at 4s and 5s.

Step 3: Set audience filters

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Even with tight keywords and good AI scoring, I was still getting leads from companies that were completely wrong for me. The audience filters fix that.

Company

• Industry
• Company size
• Country

Contact

• Job title keywords
• Seniority level

For video editing I use: company size 1-500, seniority Manager or above. A lot of LinkedIn hiring posts come from junior employees or recruiters, not the actual decision maker. That seniority filter matters more than people think.

Step 4: Set up enrichment

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Before this, I'd find a good lead and spend 20 minutes hunting down their email with other tools. Half the time I'd end up with an address that bounced.

• Select Email + Phone
• Findymail automatically finds and verifies contact details for every matched lead
• Emails come back already verified, no separate validation tool needed
• Assign leads to a contact list to keep things clean across multiple monitors

Step 5: Delivery

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If starting out: skip this and check the feed manually each morning. That works fine.

If you want it fully automated: paste your n8n webhook URL here. Every new signal gets sent to it instantly as JSON. The next section covers how to set that up.

What the feed looks like

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Once the monitor is live the Feed tab fills up. Each signal shows:

• The LinkedIn post with matching keywords highlighted
• Author name, job title, company
• Company details: industry, size, country
• AI relevance score out of 5 with a one-line reason
• Verified email address when available

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In a test monitor for "video editor" and "contract," 40 signals came in over two days. Filtering to 4s and 5s cut it down to the ones actually worth reaching out to.

A post asking for a video editor today is a dead lead by next week. Someone else already replied. I check the feed in the morning and reach out the same day.

The autopilot layer: n8n

I ran the manual version for about a week first. It worked but took 20-30 minutes a day and I'd sometimes miss a lead because I checked too late. So I wired up the automation. Now emails go out the moment a signal comes in, whether I'm at my desk or not.

The tool: n8n. No-code automation, free to self-host.

1 Create a webhook in n8n

Add a Webhook node to a new workflow. Copy the URL it gives you.

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2 Paste the webhook URL into Findymail

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Go back to your monitor's Delivery step and paste the URL. Every new signal will now be sent to n8n as JSON with all the lead data: name, company, email, post text, AI score.

3 Add a Gmail node

Connect a Gmail node to the webhook:

• To: email address from the signal payload
• Subject: something referencing their post, e.g. "your post"
• Message: short and direct

The email doesn't need to be clever. The signal does most of the work. Something like:

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4 Activate the workflow

Turn it on. Every new signal triggers an email automatically.

Before you set it and forget it

• Check the first batch of outgoing emails to make sure the tone is right
• Review AI scoring after a few days and adjust if you're seeing too many irrelevant results
• Revisit keywords and filters after the first week once you can see what's actually converting

The system works because the roles are clean. Findymail finds who to talk to and why you should reach out right now. n8n handles the volume. I handle the conversations that go somewhere.

Hope this helps!