Transcript
I sell business automations for a living. In the last hour, I built an AI app that now decides what happens to every single lead in my business. It not only captures the leads, it scores them by budget, intent, and urgency, automatically sending high-quality leads for immediate follow-up while lower quality leads go into nurture, completely filtering out time wasters.
I'm going to take you through exactly how I built this. Today we're using Softr, the AI builder that gives us the power of a Vibe-Coding block but also the reliability of no-code drag-and-drop tools.
Before building anything, we always first need to set out exactly what we want. Let's jump into Excalidraw and start mapping out what we're actually looking to do. The first thing we need is to capture leads through a web form.
A client comes to our website, fills out the form with details, and we capture that lead. We will probably capture information like project budget, project timeline, and obviously information around their name and company. We might also capture their LinkedIn profile.
Next, we want to process those leads. We've already talked about different potential categories for that. Perhaps we have high intent leads, which is when their budget and urgency are high enough. We might also have medium intent leads and low intent leads that we probably want to filter out of the process.
Naturally, as a business, I want to focus all my energy on the high to medium intent leads to give us the best chance of converting them into paying customers. We're going to have to process those slightly differently. An indicator of a high intent lead is a high budget and high urgency, which are things we are capturing.
That high intent lead could probably go straight to my calendar. However, I don't want just anyone booking into my team's calendar. A medium intent lead might be marked for team review. A low intent lead might immediately get an email or placeholder message letting them know we are not taking on their business right now.
Ultimately, when we're building an internal AI application like this, we're looking to have minimal manual admin tasks. We want the maximum number of things completely automated to give us only the high intent leads and allow us to review the medium ones.
Alongside this, we want to save time in the research stage. Normally, we might do manual research on a prospect before a meeting. We might want some automated research to help us qualify and score leads before taking those meetings, doing that for both high and medium intent prospects.
Now that we have a clear understanding of exactly what we want to do, let's sign up to Softr. Once you sign in, you'll be greeted with an applications page.
We're going to start with a template because it's always better to see if somebody has made something first that we can leverage instead of building from scratch. Softr has many templates available. I am going to type in lead, and I can see we have a lead generation form and a lead capture form.
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Note from Softr: While browsing App templates is a great way to start, you can also use our AI co-builder to generate a complete lead capture app in seconds. Just prompt the AI with what you need, and it will build the pages, schemas, and design automatically—allowing you to tweak it manually later.
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The lead capture form suits my branding a bit more, making it easier to build off. It is a simple template used to capture interest from potential users, which sounds exactly right. We're going to use that template, and it will load into the application backend where we can start editing it almost like a webpage editor before publishing it live.
One of the big benefits of using Softr versus coding from scratch or using other AI app builders is the built-in databases. You can build databases from scratch, connect to existing data like Supabase, Excel, Google Sheets, or Airtable, or use the built-in option. Connecting those built-in databases to your apps makes managing data incredibly easy.
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Note from Softr: While Softr integrates beautifully with external options like Airtable and Google Sheets, using native Softr Databases is the most powerful way to manage data directly within Softr. It offers maximum performance and keeps your entire app ecosystem under one roof.
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We have a data field here, and you can see that it captures every lead that fills out the form. We are going to go and test it, making sure we have the right fields set up.
Clicking on any block opens a logical right-hand side menu where we can go to steps. For each step in the form capture, we can hide a field, change it from required to non-required, and add the new fields we spoke about earlier. To add those inputs, we need to make sure they are supported in our backend.
We go to the data first, add a field, and create a long text field called project description. Next, we add a select field for the project budget. Let's add a few options: zero to 1K, 1K to 3K, 3K to 5K, or 5K plus.
Our 5K plus tier will represent high urgency or the ideal customers we want. We might also have a select field for the timeline, with options like start ASAP, one to two months, or two months plus. We will actually name the field When do you want the project to start and leave no default options selected.
We probably want a status field, which will also be a select. This status helps my team understand what stage these potential leads are in. We could have declined in red, for review in orange, meeting scheduled in blue, and client signed in purple. Again, we will leave no default option and make sure we name it status.
Finally, we might want to capture something like their LinkedIn profile. We can add a URL field and call it LinkedIn. That should give us enough to complete our form setup.
Let's save that and go back to the interface. Now, if we click on the block again, go to steps, and open the section, we can add all of those fields back in and drag and drop them however we please. We are going to remove the generic message field since we no longer need it.
We will add fields for LinkedIn profile, project budget, description, status, and the preferred project start date. You will see we get a nice form layout with these inputs. However, we actually don't want to show status on the frontend because that is an internal field, so we will delete it from this block.
The remaining fields, like project start date and description, are now required to fill out. We can publish this now and immediately go to preview to see what our data capture looks like. In a real scenario, we would likely change all the headers, but for the demonstration, we are going to leave them as is.
Let's fill out a test submission for Scrapes AI. We will select a company size of two to ten, enter a company website, and add a LinkedIn profile. We'll set our project budget to the 5K tier and indicate we want to start ASAP.
For the description, we will explain that we want to completely automate our bookkeeping process. Since we currently use QuickBooks and handle the process manually, this is a great use case. I will fill out that project description, hit submit, and it displays a success message stating our request was received.
Right now, it just shows a placeholder message. However, what we really want is to understand immediately if this is a lead with high intent and urgency. We need logic to decide if it is a lead we want to service right away or whether it needs manual review.
A simple placeholder might work for reviews, or we might want to automatically tell unqualified leads that it isn't the right time. Let's return to the lead capture form and check the backend data. We should now see our new entry populated with the project description, budget, and start date, so I will delete the old example rows.
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Note from Softr: When building logic like this to process form inputs, Softr Workflows are the perfect solution. You can set up native automations that evaluate budget and urgency inputs to dynamically send emails, assign team members, and update data directly. This is a common pattern when building your own CRM in Softr.
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Reminding ourselves of the plan, we wanted high intent leads to go straight to calendar booking, minimizing any friction. Medium intent leads should be reviewed manually by the team. Low intent leads should immediately receive a polite placeholder message.
Going back to our app, we need to create a new destination page to direct the qualified leads to. Before we can add any logic steps, we need that page ready. We will add a new page, call it the booking page, and start with a blank canvas where we can drag and drop new blocks.
