AZ PulseLeads — Substack Outreach Lead Generator

Stop scrolling Substack for people to pitch. Type a topic, get a ranked list of relevant writers with their public email and socials — ready to reach out for PR, partnerships, influencer, or recruiting.

AZ PulseLeads is an AZULGANZES TECHNOLOGIES product (Product Factory naming: AZ StackPulse, AZ PulseLeads).

AZ PulseLeads turns a keyword or a list of Substack publications into an outreach lead list: the right authors and publications in your niche, with their public contact info (when published) and a topic-fit score — ready to drop into your outreach.

Ethical use: only public Substack data is used. Use the output only for lawful outreach, honor opt-outs, and comply with applicable privacy law (e.g. GDPR). We never invent contact data.

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Customer problem

PR agencies, marketers, recruiters, and partnership teams need to reach relevant writers — but discovering and qualifying them on Substack is manual, slow, and the contacts are scattered across profiles.

Customer solution

1. You provide a topic (e.g. AI, finance, health) or paste known Substack URLs.
2. AZ PulseLeads discovers relevant Substack publications (search index + seed URLs).
3. It extracts the authors, their public email / socials, and a topic-fit score.
4. You export a clean, contact-ready lead list (CSV / JSON) and pay only for leads that include a public contact.

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Installation

# from this repository
apify login            # uses the token stored by the Apify CLI
apify push            # builds and uploads the Actor to your Apify account

The Actor is also available on the Apify Store as pure_matai~substack-outreach-leads.

Configuration

All configuration is via the Actor input (no code changes). Key fields:

Field	Default	What it does
keywords	(empty)	Topics to discover Substack publications for. Leave empty to use newsletterUrls.
newsletterUrls	(empty)	Known Substack URLs to skip discovery.
maxAuthors	10	Max authors collected per publication.
minRelevance	0.3	Topic-fit threshold (0 = loose, 1 = exact). Leads below are flagged qualified:false.
includeContact	true	Only bill for leads that have a public contact.
proxy	Apify proxy on	Required — Substack blocks datacenter IPs.

Example workflow

{
  "keywords": ["AI", "finance"],
  "maxAuthors": 10,
  "minRelevance": 0.3,
  "includeContact": true,
  "proxy": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

See examples/input_example.json for a ready-to-run input.

Output

Each lead in the dataset contains:

authorName, authorBio, publicEmail, hasEmail, twitter, linkedin, website, sourceName, sourceUrl, audienceSize, relevanceScore, qualified, contactReady.

A "Contact-Ready Leads" dataset view shows only rows with an email or social. See sample_output/ for a real production run.

Pricing

• Pay per reachable lead: billed via the LEAD_DISCOVERED event only for leads that are qualified and have a public contact. You pay for leads you can actually reach, not raw rows.
• Apify also adds a small per-run start fee and per-dataset-item fee.
• Example: 100 writers with contact ≈ $0.08.

Pay-per-event pricing is enabled in the Apify Console (Monetization) for the published Actor. Intended events: apify-actor-start $0.00005, apify-default-dataset-item $0.00050, LEAD_DISCOVERED $0.00030.

Architecture

See docs/architecture.md. The product uses a frozen connector architecture: SEARCH → CONNECTOR → ENRICHMENT → QUALIFICATION → EXPORT. Substack is Connector #1 (fully implemented, reusing the proven AZ StackPulse engine); Medium, GitHub, YouTube, and blogs are documented extension points that require no core changes.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Fix
No Substack sources were discovered	Keyword returned no *.substack.com results	Use broader keywords or paste newsletterUrls.
Found N source(s) but collected 0 author profiles	Publication has no visible authors / was blocked	Try a larger publication (e.g. https://lenny.substack.com).
0 are billable (no public contact found)	Authors don't publish public contact	Broaden keywords, or set includeContact=false to get the full list.
Run fails immediately	Proxy not enabled	Ensure proxy.useApifyProxy = true.
Empty dataset	No input provided	Provide keywords or newsletterUrls.

Honesty / limitations

• Discovery via keyword uses a search index (DuckDuckGo in MVP). For production volume, wire a paid search provider (SerpAPI / Bing) — a documented extension point.
• Authors who don't publish a public email are still returned, flagged contactReady:false. We never invent contact data.
• audienceSize is often unavailable from public Substack APIs and may be null.