Show HN: EmailFast, find emails and get personalized cold emails

I'm plugging my stuff, but I think the story behind it is equally interesting:

I recently fell into the usual indie hacker/solo dev trap: write a lot of code, don’t really work on marketing. The illusion of productivity is actually crazy when you think about it.

That led me to try out no-code and low-code tools. Eventually, I settled for n8n. It’s a great compromise when it comes to prototyping. I ended up creating a bunch of scripts that helped me improve my programmatic SEO skills, taught me how to use AI agents and other nice stuff. It turns out you don’t need to write lots of code to do simple stuff. Among others, I created an n8n workflow to quickly retrieve publicly available phone numbers to reach out to my customers. Lots of signups! Feels great, doesn’t it?

But running that workflow is great when done locally, but I needed to call it from other places, moved my n8n instance to DigitalOcean, and that’s when problems began. It consumes a sht amount of RAM, and my DO instance would just crash all the time unless I increase the RAM size, which would defeat the purpose of quick dirt cheap prototyping (I think I was supposed to pay around 50 or 60 bucks per month or so). Did a LOT of optimization, but the cost was still too high to justify the use I made of it.

Guess what I did? Yep. Simply wrote the code for it using Next.js API routes and hosted it on Vercel. Much easier, even faster. From there, I added a quick interface, and I was ready to go. That’s when I realised that I created a whole new web app without even thinking about it.

I was simply experimenting with things I didn’t know much about, and one thing led to the other. I have something that’s pretty much usable. I can easily get most emails from any domain, verify them, and even make personalised cold emails. I actually launched it recently, and I’m quite happy with it.

I think the “beginner’s mind” thing is real: you don’t judge yourself or stop yourself when you don’t know much about something. You just go ahead and do it because you don’t even know what failure looks like.

EmailFast is a fast, (much more) affordable tool to find the emails of your local businesses specifically. Scrape publicly available emails from any domain, search businesses in any niche and location. You can upload lists, run bulk searches, generate highly personalized cold emails and get results in seconds. I target any niche that needs to get in touch with local businesses for custom services: web designers, agencies and more. This is, imo, what makes it just slightly different and special.

I don't do the email sending (yet?) because I can't pretend I can do it better than other available options. I'd rather add a way to send emails with those options. They come with many more options than I can offer at the moment.

Very much open to feedback, feel free to roast me, and thanks for taking the time to read all this long as text!