wtf is outreach-os?

Outreach-os is a set of ready made automation workflows that handle an entire cold email outreach process for small businesses, from finding leads to following up with them, without needing any custom backend code. It is built to run inside N8N, a visual workflow automation tool, and was created as a free alternative to paid outreach services that can cost fifty to three hundred dollars a month. The pipeline starts by pulling business leads from the Google Places API, then scores each one out of 100 points based on things like its star rating, number of reviews, whether it has a website, and whether it is currently open. Leads that score well are marked as hot and separated from lower priority ones in a Google Sheet. For each hot lead, an AI model writes a personalized cold email tailored to that business's industry, and a matching banner image is generated automatically. The email is then sent through Gmail. A separate part of the pipeline checks the connected Gmail inbox every morning for replies. If a lead has not responded after three days, it automatically sends an AI written follow up email, and every lead's status, such as pending, emailed, replied, or followed up, stays synced in the Google Sheet throughout. The project can be installed with a single command through its own npm package, which copies the workflow files into a folder along with a setup checklist, or by manually importing three JSON workflow files into an N8N instance. Running it requires setting up several free or low cost accounts, including Google Places, Google Sheets, Gmail, and an AI provider such as Z.ai's GLM-4, which the author used mainly on its free tier. The project is licensed under the MIT License.