The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the HeyLead — Autonomous LinkedIn SDR listing page.
HeyLead is an AI agent for LinkedIn outreach: it finds the right people, writes to them in the voice of your own LinkedIn posts, follows up, and handles replies. It runs from Claude Code, Cursor, any MCP client or a web dashboard. Sign in on the web, then talk to your AI and say "find me leads."
A campaign has one of six goals, and the ICP, the fit check and the messages follow it: Sell a product or service, Find a job, Hire people, Find partners or investors, Find a vendor and Research interviews.
Hire people, Find partners or investors and Research interviews run on a custom brief until their message sets exist.
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.
Claude Code, as a plugin (hosted, nothing to install):
Then run /mcp, pick heylead and choose Authenticate to sign in to your
HeyLead account. The plugin connects the hosted server at
https://heylead.dev/mcp and adds skills for starting a campaign, approving
waiting messages, answering replies, a weekly review, pausing, and adding a
list of people. Its source is in
plugins/heylead.
Or run the client locally over stdio. You need uv:
Claude Code:
Cursor: Settings > MCP > "Add new MCP server" > Name: heylead, Command: uvx heylead
Any MCP client:
Update with uvx --refresh heylead.
Option A — Hosted (easiest): take the 90-second quiz or sign in at heylead.dev/dashboard/login. Your quiz personas become a draft campaign. Connect LinkedIn in Settings → Connected accounts, then launch from the dashboard — or copy your setup message from Settings → Integrations → Chat client into your AI chat. Nothing sends before you launch. Hosted users share a professional directory; campaigns and inboxes stay private.
Option B — Self-hosted: run everything against your own accounts. You need two things first:
~/.heylead/config.json as unipile_api_url
and unipile_api_key.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.
Sending 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. HeyLead sends from your own LinkedIn account at a human pace: at most 20 invitations a day and 100 a week on a free LinkedIn account (more on Premium or Sales Navigator), Monday to Friday 08:00 to 22:00 in your time zone, minutes apart. It backs off when LinkedIn pushes back and resumes on its own. You can pause any campaign at any time. Launching is also what
commissions 24/7 cloud sending — in observe mode nothing is commissioned and
nothing is sent, from either machine.
Approval mode (hosted): a workspace that has not chosen otherwise holds
every opening DM and follow-up until a person approves it, and the approved
text is what is sent. Read what is waiting on the dashboard's Approvals page or
with inspect(action="waiting"); decide with prospect(action="approve_message")
or discard_message. Autopilot sends them unread and is one switch away
(Settings → Sending, or scheduler(action="approval_mode", mode="autopilot")).
Invitations, InMail and replies are never held.
HeyLead gives your AI 22 tools:
| 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 |
icp | Previews which LinkedIn profiles a saved ICP matches, without creating a campaign |
profile_signals | Compiles a targeting request (country ties, interests) into LinkedIn recall queries and profile-evidence scoring |
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 |
book_meeting | Puts an agreed call on your Google Calendar and sends the prospect an invite |
show_status | Your dashboard — campaigns, stats, hot leads, account health. Links to the matching heylead.dev/dashboard page and, on hosted accounts, attaches a snapshot card |
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
send_message | Sends follow-ups and replies to prospects |
send_email | Sends email via a connected Unipile mailbox (Gmail/Outlook). Never Mail.app. |
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 |
| 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 |
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
analytics | Campaign analytics — reports, comparisons, and exports |
inspect | Read-only digest of operator holds, strategist replans, closer decisions, reply skips, and gated jobs |
knowledge | Curates the knowledge base that grounds messages — lists, adds, removes, refreshes, and searches sources. Hosted only |
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 — a reciprocal pool of members' connected accounts; join to use it |
| 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 |
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
scheduler | Manages the autonomous scheduler — status, on/off, send_from (cloud default / local opt-in) |
product | Local git checkout only — patch this repo and/or open a PR |
account | Manages LinkedIn accounts — list, switch, or disconnect |
organization | Hosted orgs — list, switch, invite editor/viewer, create a client workspace |
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. On a hosted account, cloud is the default sender for every campaign. Launching commissions the cloud, so outreach continues 24/7 with your laptop closed: invitations, opening DMs, first-touch InMail, follow-ups, engagements, follows, endorsements, email fallbacks, prospect top-ups, auto-replies, inbound, warmup, signal collectors, and post-intel. This machine does not start a local scheduler engine for that work. Move the whole account here with scheduler(action='send_from', host='local'), which turns the cloud scheduler off. Observe still means nobody sends. Direct / self-hosted installs send from this machine only.
Engagement Warm-ups — Automatically engages with prospect posts before sending connection requests, building familiarity.
Pace — HeyLead sends from your own LinkedIn account at a human pace: at most 20 invitations a day and 100 a week on a free LinkedIn account (more on Premium or Sales Navigator), Monday to Friday 08:00 to 22:00 in your time zone, minutes apart. It backs off when LinkedIn pushes back and resumes on its own. You can pause any campaign at any time.
Outcome Tracking — Mark deals as won/lost, track conversion rates, identify stale leads, measure engagement ROI.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Up to 2 follow-ups per prospect |
| Pro | $29 per connected LinkedIn account per month | Up to 5 follow-ups per prospect |
Invitation limits follow the LinkedIn account (free, Premium or Sales Navigator), not the HeyLead plan. Self-hosted free installs have monthly quotas: 50 invitations, 20 messages, 30 engagements, 1 active campaign, 3 ICP generations.
heylead config telemetry off or DO_NOT_TRACK=1Power users: Pass your own LLM key (Gemini/Claude/OpenAI) during setup to use your own AI. Completely optional.
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.
The base install covers all core features. For advanced ICP generation:
"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" on the LinkedIn row of the sign-in page (dashboard: Settings → Connected accounts) and completed the LinkedIn login. Then run setup again.
Need help? Open an issue.
To make HeyLead available on PyPI (or to publish a new version):
PYPI_TOKEN with the token value.pyproject.toml (version = "0.2.4").v0.2.4, release title optional). The workflow .github/workflows/publish.yml runs on release and publishes to PyPI.After publishing, anyone can add it with claude mcp add heylead -- uvx heylead (Cursor: command uvx heylead).
HeyLead is designed as an MCP-native tool — built for AI agents, not humans clicking buttons.
Install as MCP server (stdio):
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.
22 tools covering the full SDR workflow: prospect discovery → outreach → follow-up → reply handling → deal closing.
See AGENTS.md for the full agent integration guide.
MIT (code) — see LICENSE
Knowledge base and prompt configurations are proprietary.