Choose who to target

Left to itself, Klaudius picks the next town worth working in your country and looks there for local businesses without a website. You can aim it at one town, a region, one kind of business, or several countries instead.

Aim it at a place

On the Runs page, Where to work has two optional boxes: a kind of business and a town or area. Fill them in and Run Klaudius and Run the pipeline look there; leave them empty and Klaudius picks. To see leads before anything is built, use Find leads in the sidebar: name a town or press Let Klaudius pick, then untick anything you don't want. Or ask in Conversations: "find leads in Kettering".

• A specific town is the brief. Klaudius works it fully and tells you when it's worked out, with a count of any businesses the search found in neighbouring towns, rather than wandering into them.
• A region, county or state (or nothing, meaning your whole country) makes Klaudius pick a town it hasn't worked yet at random, so sessions running at once don't collide. It favours suburbs and smaller towns over city centres, where most businesses already have websites. A thin town makes it move on; after three in one run it stops and tells you.

A town Klaudius has searched is remembered for two weeks, so the next run there reuses the same list.

Aim it at a kind of business

Name a trade ("plumbers in Kettering", or just "electricians") and Klaudius searches only that trade, plus two or three local ways of saying it. Otherwise it searches a broad set of local trades and services fitted to the town, and works the most valuable first: trades such as plumbers, electricians and roofers, then services such as cleaners and mechanics, then restaurants, cafés, salons and barbers. Across a region it moves to a new town rather than drop to restaurants and salons; in a town you named, it works everything.

Work more than one country

Your home country and language are set in Settings → Change setup → Location & pricing. To work more countries, list them in Extra countries under Settings → Pipeline settings. A run with no town then spreads across all of them, and each business gets its website and messages in its own country's language. To charge one country differently, tell Klaudius, for example "charge UK clients £799".

Choose your lead streams

Three switches in Settings → Pipeline settings decide which businesses qualify. At least one must be on.

• Target businesses with no website: the largest pool in most towns.
• Also target bad websites (rescue mode): businesses whose site is dead, broken or badly out of date, checked automatically. Usually the biggest single change to how many leads a town yields.
• Also target booking-platform pages (booking mode): salons, clinics, spas and studios that currently only have a booking-platform page instead of a website of their own. Their site comes with a booking page.

If email is your only outreach channel, Klaudius only takes on businesses with a published email address, so expect fewer leads; rescue mode helps, since a business with a website sometimes publishes its address there.

Who Klaudius skips

Chains and franchises; professions that nearly always have a website, such as dentists, lawyers, estate agents and accountants; businesses rated under 4 stars (it prefers 15 or more reviews); and businesses it can't find a way to contact.

In Find leads you can change the star and review bar for a search. For a rule that should always apply, tell Klaudius: "only pitch businesses with 20 or more reviews", or "stop pitching restaurants".

Add a business you found yourself

Ask Klaudius with whatever details you have: "add Hartford Electrical in Kettering, 01632 960123, and build them a site". It checks the phone number and email against your database first, so no business is added twice. If you've already pitched them, say how, so follow-ups pick up the conversation. See Daily follow-ups.

Read more on the blog: Rescue mode: businesses with a bad website, Booking mode: businesses paying for booking software and We audited one town for businesses without a website.