Lead Generation

Sharing some lessons from building a Google Maps lead scraper for home services niches

Spent the last few weeks building a scraper for home service businesses (plumbers, electricians, HVAC, roofers, handymen) and learned a few things I wish I'd known earlier:

1. Google Maps caps results at ~120 per query no matter how you scroll. To get full coverage of a city you have to grid-search by neighborhood/zip and dedup by place_id.
2. The official Places API is cleaner but adds up fast, about $17–32 per 1000 detail calls depending on fields. Scraping is free but you need rotating delays or you'll eat CAPTCHAs around the 200-listing mark.
3. The highest-value field isn't phone, it's the website, because you can then crawl the site for emails. Email-enriched lists are worth roughly 3–5x phone-only lists in my experience pricing them out.
4. Reviews matter more than rating. A 4.2 with 800 reviews is a more reliable target than a 5.0 with 6.

I'm now packaging the output as ready-made lists by niche + city. Happy to send a free 100-lead sample to anyone who wants to evaluate quality before paying, just DM me your niche and city.

Curious what others here are using for local lead gen. Apollo? Apify? Building your own?