How to Build Your First Pipeline: From Search to Sent in Ten Minutes

A step-by-step walkthrough of the Pipelines canvas. Let the AI build it from a two-minute chat, or build it by hand. Pick your search and template, check the drafts, and flip the switch.

Watch: Build it once, it runs every morning

Pipelines is the canvas inside Leadistry: one page where your whole lead generation journey gets drawn as connected steps and then runs itself. Search, signals, your browser and your emails, all in one place. This guide walks a first pipeline from empty canvas to live, and explains each piece on the way.

Before you start

Three things make the first pipeline smooth:

1. A completed search. The trigger needs a source of companies. Run any search first, or let the AI draft one for you.
2. An email template. Saved templates and the starter gallery both work. You can also write one inline while building.
3. A connected mailbox. Sends go from your own Google or Microsoft mailbox, with warm-up applied automatically.

The two doors

Open Pipelines from the sidebar. A new pipeline offers two doors:

• Let the AI build it. A two-minute chat with your AI lead-gen employee. It reads your website, asks two or three easy questions, then drafts the whole thing: the search, the steps and the emails, in your voice.
• Build it by hand. An empty canvas and the full set of blocks, if you would rather place every piece yourself.

Either way, the result is a draft. Drafts only. Nothing sends until you say so.

The fastest path: describe it

Behind the first door, type the journey as you would say it out loud:

Email new construction firms, verify their addresses first, and chase after 3 days if nobody replies.

Press Build and watch the steps appear one by one: trigger, enrich, verify, send, wait for a reply, chaser, and an end for each path. The AI drafts the structure. Nothing is saved or sent until you act. If your searches and templates have clear names, the draft often wires them in by itself.

What the blocks do

• Trigger. Where leads come from: one of your searches, the always-on signal watch, the Chrome extension as you browse, or a private webhook URL other tools can POST leads into.
• Enrich. Fills the director name, verified email and website from our cache of verified records.
• Verify. Checks the address actually accepts mail. Undeliverable leads exit here instead of bouncing off your mailbox. That protects your sender reputation.
• Skip already-contacted. Dedupes against everyone you have emailed before.
• Send an email. Your template, with merge tags resolved per lead. The card shows a live preview. "See full email" renders the whole thing against a sample lead.
• Wait / Wait for a reply. Timed pauses, and the branch point. A reply takes one lane. Silence takes the other when the window closes.
• Branches. Split on replies, clicks, any lead field, an A/B test, or AI reply triage that routes interested, not interested, and everything else.
• Send to a webhook / Wait for a webhook. The Zapier bridge, out and back in. Details in the round-trip guide.
• Notify me. An in-app ping when a lead reaches that point. Put one on the interested lane.

Click any step to set it up in place. Changes show on the card immediately. The + between any two steps inserts a new one exactly there. And every step has its own small chat: ask the AI about this email, this branch or this wait, and it advises in context.

Turning it on

The switch in the header is the whole ceremony. Off means drafting: edit freely, nothing moves. On means live: leads from the trigger enrol within seconds and walk the journey.

The switch refuses to flip until the pipeline is actually runnable. It needs a trigger with a source, at least one email step with a template, every step configured, and every path ended. If something is missing, the step gets highlighted and the message tells you what to fix. Amber dots mark unconfigured steps while you build.

Three safety rules hold for every pipeline:

• Nothing sends while the switch is off. Drafting is completely inert.
• Replies stop a lead's journey instantly. Nobody who answered gets a chaser.
• Warm-up wins. A pipeline never exceeds the mailbox's daily allowance, however many leads are queued. The surplus simply waits for tomorrow.

Watching it run

Once live, the rail shows each pipeline's pulse: how many leads are in the journey and how many replied. Deliverability and results live on the analytics page. Replies are the number to watch. Opens are approximate. Delivered means sent minus bounced.

A worked example to copy

The classic first pipeline, and the one a web design agency runs weekly (see the full web design agency playbook):

1. Trigger: your poor-website search for your region, with the signal watch on.
2. Enrich, verify, skip already-contacted.
3. Send: your intro template.
4. Wait for a reply, up to 3 days.
5. No reply lane: one chaser, then end. Replied lane: notify me, then end.

Say that sentence to the AI, check the drafts, pick your search and template, flip the switch. That is the ten minutes.

Start free with 25 leads and build yours today.