Trawl is a local-first desktop app that finds real businesses, researches their websites with AI, scores the best-fit leads, and tees up outreach without turning your pipeline into SaaS sprawl.

The Pitch

Most outbound tools give you a list.

Trawl gives you a point of view.

It is a desktop command center for B2B prospecting: discover businesses in a target market, crawl their sites, extract useful intelligence, rank who actually fits, and generate personalized draft outreach from a single local app.

No hosted CRM maze. No browser-tab archaeology. No lead spreadsheet that dies the second it gets exported.

Why It Hits

• Local-first by default. Your app, your database, your workflows, your machine.
• Distributed as a desktop app. Install it like a product, run it like an operator console.
• Research-backed prospecting. Trawl uses Playwright and LLMs to read the actual website, not just metadata.
• Built for action. Discovery, enrichment, scoring, and draft creation live in one pipeline.
• Human-close friendly. AI does the heavy prep; humans step in when judgment matters.

Core loop

1. Discover businesses by market and geography.
2. Enrich each lead with website content and business signals.
3. Score fit against your own company profile.
4. Queue personalized draft emails for review and sending.
5. Work the warmest leads instead of babysitting a list.

Desktop Distribution

Trawl ships as an Electron desktop application with:

• A bundled Next.js UI
• A bundled Node runtime for packaged builds
• Local SQLite storage
• Bundled Playwright Chromium for web research tasks

Release artifacts are produced into dist-electron/ when you run a desktop build, and the GitHub Actions workflow publishes installers on demand.

Quick Start

Run locally

pnpm install
pnpm desktop:install-playwright
pnpm desktop:dev

Build desktop installers

pnpm desktop:dist

That build path packages the desktop app and writes distributables to dist-electron/.

Manual Release Workflow

A manual-only GitHub Actions workflow lives at /.github/workflows/desktop-release.yml.

It does three things every time you trigger it from Actions:

1. Builds fresh desktop distributables for macOS, Windows, and Linux.
2. Collects the generated installers and metadata.
3. Creates a brand new GitHub release with a unique timestamped tag and attached assets.

There are no push or pull request triggers. Releases only happen when you explicitly click Run workflow.

Stack

• Electron
• Next.js 15 App Router
• React 19
• Tailwind CSS
• SQLite via node:sqlite
• Playwright
• Vercel AI SDK

Who This Is For

• B2B founders who want a private outbound machine instead of another SaaS seat
• Agencies and service businesses working narrow local markets
• Operators who want researched leads, not raw exports
• Teams that prefer shipping desktop software over maintaining backend infrastructure

Repo Notes

• Primary desktop entry: electron/main.cjs
• Desktop build scripts: scripts/desktop/dist.mjs
• Runtime bundling: scripts/desktop/prepare-node-runtime.mjs

If outbound software should feel more like a mission-control app than a spreadsheet with a logo, that is the lane Trawl is trying to own.