Leads Extractor — Free Chrome Extension

Context

Cold outreach starts with a list. For SMB-focused sellers, Google Maps is the richest free source of local businesses — name, category, address, and often contact details for every plumber, clinic, café, auto shop, and service provider within a search radius. But copy-pasting details one entry at a time is the bottleneck that kills most lead-gen efforts before they start.

The workflow most sales operators actually run looks like this: search Google Maps, open a tab per result, copy the details into a spreadsheet, repeat for a few hours, end up with a partial list that's already stale. The labor cost per qualified lead in that flow is high enough that most small teams quietly abandon local prospecting entirely — not because the leads aren't there, but because the extraction tax is too big.

The Challenge

Three problems with the available alternatives:

• Google Maps data is visible but not easily bulk-exportable. The platform renders business details cleanly on screen, but there's no native export, no easy spreadsheet dump, no API access for casual users.
• Paid scrapers exist, but charge monthly fees for work that should be a button press. The commercial Chrome extensions in this category run $30–$100/month with tiered usage caps. For a founder doing outreach one day a week, that's a subscription to avoid, not a tool to buy.
• Most free tools are abandoned, broken, or collect user data as their real business model. The free-extension category in this space is a minefield — extensions that silently exfiltrate browsing activity, that break after a Google layout change and never get updated, or that phone home with usage telemetry the user never consented to.

The problem isn't that local-business prospecting is hard. It's that the tools in the market have taught users to expect friction at every step.

Approach

Release a clean, free Chrome extension that does exactly one job and gets out of the way. No login. No usage cap. No data collection. No analytics, no telemetry, no "premium features." Open the extension on a Google Maps search, click once, get a usable list.

Design rules I held to:

1. One job, done well. The extension doesn't try to be a CRM. It doesn't try to enrich. It turns a visible Google Maps search result into structured, exportable data. Everything else is out of scope.
2. Install-and-forget. No account creation. No onboarding flow. No upsell. The install experience and the usage experience are the same three steps.
3. Fail quietly, don't fail loudly. When Google changes a class name or layout, the extension degrades gracefully — a best-effort extraction rather than a broken popup.
4. Format the output for real workflows. The export is shaped for downstream tools — spreadsheets for manual outreach, n8n or Make for automated enrichment, CRMs via CSV import. Not a proprietary format that forces the user into a specific next step.

What I Built

• Chrome extension that runs on any Google Maps search result page. Activates from the toolbar, reads the currently-rendered result set, and produces an export.
• Location API integration for reliable business data pulls — name, address, category, contact details where available. The extension uses the structured data Google already exposes rather than scraping visible HTML, which makes it resilient to layout changes.
• One-click export to a format that drops straight into outreach tools — spreadsheets for manual work, n8n or Make for automation, CRMs via standard CSV.
• No account required — install from the Chrome Web Store, open the extension on a Maps search, extract. Nothing between install and usable output.
• No data collection — the extension runs locally in the browser. The output goes wherever the user sends it; nothing returns to a backend I control.

Timeline

Built and released over 2025. The shape of the work:

• Requirements and API research. Mapped what structured data Google Maps actually exposes to Chrome extensions, identified the reliable fields, ruled out the ones that would require screen-scraping brittle HTML.
• Extension build. Manifest, content script, extraction logic, export formatter, browser-side UI.
• Testing against real workflows. Exercised the extension against actual Google Maps search patterns — category searches, location searches, multi-page result sets — rather than just happy-path cases.
• Chrome Web Store submission. Packaged, reviewed, published. Free, no account, no telemetry.

Outcome

• Shipped publicly, free forever — no paywall, no login wall, no "premium" tier quietly unlocking the features that should have been default.
• Works out of the box for any Google Maps search — keyword plus location, category plus location, arbitrary search strings.
• Doubles as a portfolio piece — shows the automation side of my work without needing a client reference. A prospect can install it, use it, and see what clean one-job tooling looks like.

What I'd repeat

The "single-purpose free tool as portfolio" pattern is underrated. A one-job tool released openly does three things at once: it delivers real utility to users who'd otherwise pay for the same thing, it gives a prospective client a live demo of how the operator thinks about tool design, and it earns organic referrals without an ads budget. The pattern only works if the tool is actually good — but the cost of building it right is usually lower than the cost of building a "portfolio piece" nobody uses.