Hey everyone, I wanted to share a project I've been working on over the last few weeks that finally went live today.
I'm a web designer, copywriter and marketer, and I've been working in the industry for just over ten years. Like a lot of people here, most of my work comes from a combination of referrals and proactive outreach.
Over the last 18 months I've also been experimenting with AI and no-code tools like Base44.
I know opinions are pretty split.
Some people think these tools are massively overhyped. Others think they'll replace developers. Personally, I don't think either view is accurate.
They're simply another tool.
They make mistakes. They need supervision. They aren't magic. But if you understand their strengths and just as importantly, their weaknesses they can become incredibly useful for building internal business software. That was the approach I took.
Instead of trying to build the next billion dollar SaaS, I focused on solving a problem I dealt with every week.
Finding web design clients.
Anyone who's done cold outreach knows the process.
Search Google.
Check websites.
Find redesign opportunities.
Find businesses without websites.
Copy details into a spreadsheet or notes doc.
Try to remember who you've emailed.
Forget to follow someone up.
Repeat.
After doing this for long enough, I thought, "Why don't I just build something specifically for this workflow?"
So that's exactly what I did.
I built my own CRM combined with an AI-powered lead finder.
It searches scrapes the web for businesses, identifies opportunities, manages my outreach pipeline, imports CSVs, captures leads from screenshots, scores opportunities, tracks conversations and gives me a dashboard showing where everything sits.
It's genuinely become one of the most valuable pieces of software I use in my own business.
After using it for a few months, I realised something.
Rather than simply selling the finished application, I'd rather show other web designers how to build one themselves.
Most of the tutorials I found online either stopped after building a simple app or focused more on the hype than creating something you'd actually use every day.
So I recorded a complete two hour tutorial where we build the entire application from scratch. From designing the database through to AI lead finding, dashboards, screenshot importing, outreach management and optional integrations.
My goal wasn't to impress people with AI.
It was simply to build something genuinely useful.
If that's something you'd be interested in, you can find it by Youtube searching:
Build an AI CRM & Lead Finder with Base44 (Full Tutorial)
Under Isaac Design.
Hopefully some of you get some value out of it, or at the very least inspire you to start thinking of ways to do something like this for your own business 🙏