HeyLead — AI agent for LinkedIn outreach

HeyLead

HeyLead is an AI agent for LinkedIn outreach: it finds the right people, writes to them in the voice of your own LinkedIn posts, follows up, and handles replies. It runs from Claude Code, Cursor, any MCP client or a web dashboard. Sign in on the web, then talk to your AI and say "find me leads."

Use cases

A campaign has one of six goals, and the ICP, the fit check and the messages follow it: Sell a product or service, Find a job, Hire people, Find partners or investors, Find a vendor and Research interviews.

• Sell a product or service: Reach the people who buy what you built.
• Find a job: Reach the people who hire for the role you want.
• Hire people: Reach candidates for a role you are filling. Works with a custom brief.
• Find partners or investors: Reach the people who can sign a partnership or an investment. Works with a custom brief.
• Find a vendor: You are the buyer. Reach the people who sell what you need.
• Research interviews: Reach people to interview, survey or test with. Works with a custom brief.

Hire people, Find partners or investors and Research interviews run on a custom brief until their message sets exist.

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Getting Started

MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets AI assistants use external tools. HeyLead gives your AI the ability to do LinkedIn outreach for you.

You need: Cursor or Claude Code — any MCP-compatible AI editor.

Step 1: Install HeyLead

Claude Code, as a plugin (hosted, nothing to install):

/plugin marketplace add D4umak/linkedin-outreach-mcp

/plugin install heylead@heylead

Then run /mcp, pick heylead and choose Authenticate to sign in to your HeyLead account. The plugin connects the hosted server at https://heylead.dev/mcp and adds skills for starting a campaign, approving waiting messages, answering replies, a weekly review, pausing, and adding a list of people. Its source is in plugins/heylead.

Or run the client locally over stdio. Install the CLI once with uv:

uv tool install heylead

Claude Code:

claude mcp add heylead -- heylead

Cursor: Settings > MCP > "Add new MCP server" > Name: heylead, Command: heylead

Any MCP client:

{

"heylead": { "command": "heylead", "args": [] } }

Update with uv tool upgrade heylead.

Step 2: Set up your account

Option A — Hosted (easiest): take the 90-second quiz or sign in at heylead.dev/dashboard/login. Your quiz personas become a draft campaign. Connect LinkedIn in Settings → Connected accounts, then launch from the dashboard — or copy your setup message from Settings → Integrations → Chat client into your AI chat. Nothing sends before you launch. Hosted users share a professional directory; campaigns and inboxes stay private.

Option B — Self-hosted: run everything against your own accounts. You need two things first:

1. A Unipile account — this is what talks to LinkedIn. Sign up at unipile.com, then put the DSN and API key from the Access Tokens page, then run heylead config set unipile_api_url and heylead secrets set unipile_api_key (it prompts; the key is kept in your OS keychain, never in the config file).
2. An LLM API key — AI calls are billed to you. A free Gemini key is enough to start.

Then open your AI chat and say:

"Set up my HeyLead profile with this Gemini key: YOUR_KEY"

You'll get a LinkedIn authentication link. Open it, connect LinkedIn, then say "finish setup". HeyLead fetches your profile and analyses your writing style.

Step 3: Find leads

"Find me CTOs at fintech startups in New York"

"Send outreach to the campaign" "Check my replies" "How's my outreach doing?"

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How It Works

1. Define your ICP — "Generate an ICP for AI SaaS founders" → RAG-powered personas with pain points, barriers, and LinkedIn targeting
2. Create a campaign — "Find me fintech CTOs" → searches LinkedIn, scores prospects by fit
3. Warm up prospects — Engages with their posts (comments, likes) before reaching out
4. Send personalized invitations — Voice-matched messages that sound like you, not a bot
5. Follow up automatically — Multi-touch sequences after connections are accepted
6. Handle replies — Detects sentiment, advances positive leads toward meetings, answers questions
7. Track outcomes — Won/lost/opted-out tracking with conversion analytics

Sending model: campaigns are created as drafts and only start when you explicitly launch them. Every send passes rate limits, working-hours checks, and a 1st-degree connection guard before it goes out. HeyLead sends from your own LinkedIn account at a human pace: at most 20 invitations a day and 100 a week on a free LinkedIn account (more on Premium or Sales Navigator: a newly connected paid account starts at 20 a day and doubles each week up to its limit), Monday to Friday 08:00 to 22:00 in your time zone, minutes apart. It backs off when LinkedIn pushes back and resumes on its own. You can pause any campaign at any time. Launching is also what commissions cloud sending — in observe mode nothing is commissioned and nothing is sent, from either machine.

Approval mode (hosted): a workspace that has not chosen otherwise holds every opening DM and follow-up until a person approves it, and the approved text is what is sent. Read what is waiting on the dashboard's Approvals page or with inspect(action="waiting"); decide with prospect(action="approve_message") or discard_message. Autopilot sends them unread and is one switch away (Settings → Sending, or scheduler(action="approval_mode", mode="autopilot")). Invitations, InMail and replies are never held.

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Tools

HeyLead gives your AI 22 tools:

Core Workflow

Outreach & Engagement

Campaign Management

Insights & Analytics

Growth & Relationships

Automation & Account

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Key Features

Voice Matching — Analyzes your LinkedIn profile and posts to capture your writing style. Every message sounds like you wrote it.

ICP Generation — RAG-powered pipeline that crawls company context, generates buyer personas with pain points, fears, barriers, and maps them to LinkedIn search parameters.

Autonomous Scheduler — Runs in the background, respects working hours and rate limits. On a hosted account, cloud is the default sender for every campaign. Launching commissions the cloud, so outreach continues with your laptop closed, inside the sending window: invitations, opening DMs, first-touch InMail, follow-ups, engagements, follows, endorsements, email fallbacks, prospect top-ups, auto-replies, inbound, warmup, signal collectors, and post-intel. This machine does not start a local scheduler engine for that work. Move the whole account here with scheduler(action='send_from', host='local'), which turns the cloud scheduler off. Observe still means nobody sends. Direct / self-hosted installs send from this machine only.

Engagement Warm-ups — Automatically engages with prospect posts before sending connection requests, building familiarity.

Pace — HeyLead sends from your own LinkedIn account at a human pace: at most 20 invitations a day and 100 a week on a free LinkedIn account (more on Premium or Sales Navigator: a newly connected paid account starts at 20 a day and doubles each week up to its limit), Monday to Friday 08:00 to 22:00 in your time zone, minutes apart. It backs off when LinkedIn pushes back and resumes on its own. You can pause any campaign at any time.

Outcome Tracking — Mark deals as won/lost, track conversion rates, identify stale leads, measure engagement ROI.

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Pricing

A connected account is a LinkedIn seat or an email mailbox. Free includes one of either.

Invitation limits follow the LinkedIn account (free, Premium or Sal