Type an industry or topic. The workflow uses Perplexity AI to find 15 matching companies with verified domains, Hunter.io to extract up to 3 real contact emails per company, deduplicates everything, and logs clean, enriched leads into Google Sheets — ready for outreach.
Lead sourcing is the most time-consuming part of outbound, and the part most likely to be done badly. Reps use the same Apollo filters everyone else uses and end up targeting the same companies with the same messaging.
This workflow uses Perplexity's live web intelligence to find relevant companies in any niche, including emerging or underserved markets, and pairs it with Hunter.io's email verification to ensure you're only reaching real inboxes. The result is a constantly refreshable, highly targeted lead list that costs a fraction of traditional database subscriptions.
The workflow accepts a natural language prompt. e.g. "B2B SaaS companies in the UK focused on HR tech with under 200 employees". This can come from an n8n chat trigger, a Telegram bot command, or a Google Sheet cell. The prompt is passed directly to Perplexity.
Using OpenRouter to access Perplexity's Sonar model, the workflow requests 15 companies that match the prompt, including their domain names. Perplexity uses live web search, so results reflect the current landscape, not a database snapshot from 2022.
Before enrichment, each domain is checked against the existing Google Sheet. Domains already in the database are filtered out. No wasted API calls on companies you've already targeted. New domains only move forward.
For each new domain, Hunter.io returns up to 3 verified personal email addresses: actual named contacts, not generic info@ addresses. If Hunter finds nothing, an AI fallback node attempts to locate publicly listed contact information before marking the domain as unfindable.
Leads are processed in safe batches of 10 to protect API rate limits. Valid, enriched leads are written to Google Sheets with status "Enriched". Each row includes company name, domain, contact name, verified email, and the source prompt used to find them. The sheet becomes a living, filterable lead database.
Sign up at openrouter.ai. Add your API key to n8n. Select the Perplexity Sonar model. OpenRouter gives you access to multiple AI providers from one key, making it easy to swap models later.
Create a Hunter.io account (free tier gives 25 searches/month; paid plans from $49/month). Copy your API key into the n8n HTTP Request node configured for the Hunter.io domain search endpoint.
Create a sheet with columns: Prompt Used, Company Name, Domain, Contact Name, Email, Status, Date Added. Share with the n8n service account. The workflow reads from and writes to this sheet automatically.
Create a bot via @BotFather, grab the token and your chat ID. Connect to n8n's Telegram trigger node. You can then generate a new lead batch by sending a message to your own bot from anywhere.
Run with a specific niche prompt and verify: Perplexity returns 15 real companies with valid domains, Hunter finds emails for at least 8–10 of them, dedup logic correctly skips any already in your sheet, and all data writes cleanly.
I'll build and configure this pipeline for your specific ICP and outreach stack.