How to find local business leads for free

You don't need an expensive lead database to prospect local businesses. Everything is already on the map — the trick is turning it into a clean, contactable list.

Use OpenStreetMap as your lead source

OpenStreetMap is a free, open map of the world's physical businesses — cafés, restaurants, salons, gyms, dentists, clinics, shops. Because these places are community-mapped with categories and locations, you can query them by neighbourhood + business type and get a list in seconds. No API fees, no per-lead pricing.

Turn a description into a search

The hard part is usually "what do I even search?" Doorstep lets you describe your ideal customer in a sentence — "independent brunch cafés in central Lisbon" — and it works out the right category and area for you. You can also type any business type directly; uncommon ones are mapped to map categories automatically.

Enrich each lead automatically

A name on a map isn't a lead until you can contact them. Doorstep crawls each business's website and pulls:

• Email addresses and phone numbers
• Instagram and other socials, booking links
• Site-quality signals (no website, no HTTPS, outdated design) — great pitch angles

Then it prioritizes and de-duplicates, so the same business never clutters your list twice.

What this approach is not good for

OpenStreetMap is excellent for local, physical, consumer-facing businesses. It's thin on B2B offices like marketing agencies or SaaS companies — those aren't map-tagged. For those, import a CSV list instead. Knowing this actually sharpens your targeting: if your customers are cafés, salons, gyms and clinics, this is the fastest lead source there is.

From lead to sent email

Once you have leads, your own Claude drafts a personalized cold email for each, you approve them, and they send under warm-up limits. See the deliverability guide and getting started.