Skip to main content

HeyLead

Your AI sales rep. One command to fill your pipeline.

HeyLead is an MCP-native autonomous LinkedIn SDR that runs inside Cursor, Claude Code, or any MCP-compatible editor. No dashboard. No web app. Just chat with your AI and say "find me leads."


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

HeyLead runs locally over stdio. You need uv:

Claude Code:

claude mcp add heylead -- uvx heylead

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

Any MCP client:

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

Update with uvx --refresh heylead.

Step 2: Set up your account

Option A — Hosted (easiest): sign in at heylead.dev/auth/login-url with Google, connect LinkedIn, and copy the message it shows you. Paste that message into your AI chat — HeyLead finishes setup automatically. LinkedIn access and AI calls are handled by the HeyLead backend; no API keys needed.

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 into ~/.heylead/config.json as unipile_api_url and unipile_api_key.
  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?"

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

Safety 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.


Tools

HeyLead gives your AI 27 tools:

Core Workflow

Tool What it does
setup_profile Connects LinkedIn and analyzes your writing style into a voice signature
generate_icp Generates a rich Ideal Customer Profile with buyer personas
create_campaign Creates an outreach campaign (as a draft) from a natural language description
generate_and_send Generates a personalized LinkedIn message and sends it
check_replies Checks for new replies across campaigns, classifies sentiment, surfaces hot leads
show_status Your dashboard — campaigns, stats, hot leads, account health

Outreach & Engagement

Tool What it does
send_message Sends follow-ups, replies, or voice memos to prospects
engage_prospect Comments on, reacts to, follows, or endorses a prospect to build trust
inbox Browses and reads LinkedIn inbox messages directly
backfill_inbox Processes unreplied inbox messages through the inbound pipeline
create_post Generates and publishes a voice-matched post to LinkedIn, X/Twitter, or both

Campaign Management

Tool What it does
campaign Campaign lifecycle — launch, pause, resume, archive, delete, emergency stop, retry failed
edit_campaign Edits a campaign's name, mode, booking link, or context fields
prospect Manages prospects — skip, close with outcome, view conversation or timeline
import_prospects Imports prospects from CSV data into a campaign

Insights & Analytics

Tool What it does
analytics Campaign analytics — reports, comparisons, and exports
suggest_next_action Recommends the best next action, prioritized by impact
signals Views and analyzes buying signals — news, company engagement, website visits, profile viewers
manage_watchlist Adds, removes, and lists signal keyword watchlists
network Network intelligence — leverages all connected accounts as a distributed pool

Growth & Relationships

Tool What it does
brand_strategy Analyzes and improves your LinkedIn personal brand
profile Views and restores LinkedIn profile change history
partner Tracks follow-ups with business partners, vendors, and investors
contacts Searches, browses, and manages your global contact base
crm_sync Syncs campaign contacts and deals to HubSpot CRM

Automation & Account

Tool What it does
scheduler Manages the autonomous scheduler — status, on/off (local or cloud 24/7)
account Manages LinkedIn accounts — list, switch, or disconnect

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. Enable cloud scheduling for 24/7 operation even when your laptop is off.

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

Adaptive Rate Limiting — Starts conservative, ramps up when acceptance rate is high, pulls back when it drops. Respects LinkedIn safety limits.

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


Pricing

Plan Price What you get
Free $0 50 invitations/month, 1 campaign, 2 follow-ups per prospect, 30 engagements/month
Pro $29/mo Unlimited campaigns, 5 follow-ups with multi-day schedule, 5 LinkedIn accounts, cloud scheduler

Privacy

  • AI calls — routed through HeyLead's backend or your own key
  • Cloud MCP — your data is processed server-side but never shared with third parties
  • Local mode — contacts and messages stay on your machine in a local SQLite database

Power users: Pass your own LLM key (Gemini/Claude/OpenAI) during setup to use your own AI. Completely optional.


Backend mode & env

When the MCP client talks to a HeyLead backend (e.g. heylead-api), the backend uses these environment variables. Operators running their own backend should set them as required.

Purpose Example env vars
LLM GEMINI_API_KEY, or OPENAI_API_KEY / ANTHROPIC_API_KEY if using other providers
Search / crawl SERPER_API_KEY, FIRECRAWL_API_KEY (or similar) for ICP and company context
Auth / storage GOOGLE_* (OAuth), UNIPILE_* (LinkedIn provider), plus DB/Redis if used
Optional Feature flags, rate limits, logging — see backend repo

For full backend configuration and deployment, see the heylead-api (or backend) repo and its docs.


Optional Dependencies

The base install covers all core features. For advanced ICP generation:

pip install heylead[icp]    # Embeddings for RAG-powered ICP generation
pip install heylead[crawl]  # Web crawling for company context ingestion
pip install heylead[all]    # Both

Troubleshooting

"uvx: command not found" Install uv first: curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh (or brew install uv on Mac)

"MCP server not connecting" Restart your editor after adding the MCP server. In Cursor, check Settings > MCP — the server should show a green dot.

"Setup failed" or "LinkedIn not connected" Make sure you clicked "Connect LinkedIn Now" on the sign-in page and completed the LinkedIn login. Then run setup again.

Need help? Open an issue.


Publishing to PyPI (maintainers)

To make HeyLead available on PyPI (or to publish a new version):

Option A: Publish via GitHub Release (recommended)

  1. One-time: Create a PyPI account and an API token. In your repo: Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → add secret PYPI_TOKEN with the token value.
  2. Bump version in pyproject.toml (version = "0.2.4").
  3. Commit, push, then create a GitHub Release (tag e.g. v0.2.4, release title optional). The workflow .github/workflows/publish.yml runs on release and publishes to PyPI.

Option B: Publish manually

pip install build twine
python -m build          # creates dist/
twine check dist/*       # optional: validate
twine upload dist/*      # prompts for PyPI username + password (use __token__ and your API token)

After publishing, anyone can install with pip install heylead or run with uvx heylead.


For AI Agents

HeyLead is designed as an MCP-native tool — built for AI agents, not humans clicking buttons.

Install as MCP server (stdio):

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

OpenClaw: Add the same entry to your openclaw.json under mcp.servers. Also available on ClawHub — search "HeyLead".

Sign in at heylead.dev (hosted), or bring your own Unipile account and LLM API key (self-hosted).

Capabilities: LinkedIn lead generation, cold outreach automation, ICP generation with buyer personas, voice-matched personalized messaging, multi-touch drip sequences, reply sentiment classification, engagement warm-ups, campaign analytics, and autonomous 24/7 scheduling.

27 tools covering the full SDR workflow: prospect discovery → outreach → follow-up → reply handling → deal closing.

See AGENTS.md for the full agent integration guide.


Links

License

MIT (code) — see LICENSE

Knowledge base and prompt configurations are proprietary.

Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

heylead-0.10.187.tar.gz (912.6 kB view details)

Uploaded Source

Built Distribution

If you're not sure about the file name format, learn more about wheel file names.

heylead-0.10.187-py3-none-any.whl (901.0 kB view details)

Uploaded Python 3

File details

Details for the file heylead-0.10.187.tar.gz.

File metadata

  • Download URL: heylead-0.10.187.tar.gz
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 912.6 kB
  • Tags: Source
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.12.13

File hashes

Hashes for heylead-0.10.187.tar.gz
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 5d1ad309e9e50a2c653c2b59c485193778e48acac5c4d4db528ac335ddfd5ca6
MD5 88bbde9bbc93919b6fd11fa3896fb32c
BLAKE2b-256 b3d28c7c3a5af5d83a8b80c553b7e1715b6d33cc8fd44af75f879d3c97533273

See more details on using hashes here.

File details

Details for the file heylead-0.10.187-py3-none-any.whl.

File metadata

  • Download URL: heylead-0.10.187-py3-none-any.whl
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 901.0 kB
  • Tags: Python 3
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.12.13

File hashes

Hashes for heylead-0.10.187-py3-none-any.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 9003f349f46755e36e6f454d9731ecb643d9b73e41ba8f891f2fdb20ea28c54e
MD5 48135c6593e2e76529bd1b0bd63ab901
BLAKE2b-256 9d67a6c68699025a7f8e756f98dd3c426e5172c681f2bba1e96fd24749a92cbb

See more details on using hashes here.

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

Supported by

AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Depot Continuous Integration Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page