u/Few-Cobbler-2370

I'm a freelance web dev, 18, based in France. I needed clients.

Manual outreach was boring, slow, and felt like a second job.

So I did what any slightly technical person does: I tried to automate it.

One week of vibe coding. A VPS, an AI agent, a WhatsApp API, a web scraper, a Telegram bot for alerts.

Countless bugs, a few sleepless nights, and one very confused AI until I got the prompts right.

But I got it working:

- 162 prospects contacted

- 30 replies

- 18.5% reply rate

Zero meetings.

The automation wasn't the problem. The messages were:

too generic, wrong angles, weak personalization, follow-ups that added no value.

Fixing any of it meant rewriting scripts, re-prompting the AI, validating every message before it went out.

I spent more time maintaining it than letting it actually prospect.

I'm technical enough to manage it. Most freelancers aren't — and they shouldn't have to be.

So I'm building Lihn.

- Email-first — no ban risk, legally clean.

- You describe your business in plain language, like to a colleague.

- She finds the right prospects, writes emails in your tone, sends them, follows up automatically.

- You only step in when someone's actually interested.

Under €20/mo. 100% French, 100% GDPR.

Site is live: lihn.fr

Waitlist open — launching autumn 2026.

Anyone else gone down the "build it yourself" rabbit hole before realizing it needed to be a product?

What does your current outreach process look like?

https://preview.redd.it/o10g1brc194h1.png?width=1275&format=png&auto=webp&s=2f9cc3aede38b0a2f200b0d0672d5afc8886d7dd

For example, look at the animated illustrations and feature demos on sites likehttps://www.zite.com/. They have these incredibly clean, stylized vector animations that show exactly how the software flows.

Here is my challenge: I'm currently developing my own SaaS, so the product is not fully ready yet. I can't just do a simple screen recording because the UI is still shifting and some features only exist in code or design mockups.

How do these teams actually proceed from scratch?

The Assets: Are they creating "Fake UI" layouts in Figma and animating them there? Are they using AI tools to generate the isometric/3D motion graphics? Or is After Effects still mandatory?
The Animation: Once they have the mockup, how do they bring it to life on the frontend? Do they export it as code (Lottie/Rive) or stick to optimized video loops?

Every outreach tool is built for sales teams. Nobody built one for solo freelancers. So I did.

How do you actually create interactive images, product animations, and fake UI videos without After Effects for your Saas ? (In the style of "Vibe Coder")