Social lead discovery

Some buyers never touch LinkedIn but post every week on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube: architects, interior designers, home builders, e-commerce brands, coaches, clinics, restaurants. Their posts say what they sell and their bio says how to reach them. This skill turns a topic into a list of those accounts, reads each bio for the link and the email, and hands back verified contacts plus a "social only" list for the ones that keep their inbox off the internet. Nothing is sent from here.

Before you start

• Load the core routergrowth skill (https://www.routergrowth.com/SKILL.md) if it is not loaded. Confirm access with the free balance tool or routergrowth balance, without printing credentials.
• Ask for four things if the user did not give them: who the buyer is (one sentence), the topics or hashtags that buyer posts under, which of the three platforms to cover, and what "high intent" means for them (posting about a project, asking for a quote under a competitor, using a hashtag that implies a purchase).
• Inspect the five capabilities once and show the prices before the first billable run: routergrowth inspect -c social.search, then social.comments, social.profile, contact.find, contact.verify. Quote the run as a whole, get a yes on the total.
• Know the platform rules before you search. Instagram search is by hashtag only: no keyword, bio, location or follower search exists. TikTok and YouTube take free-text keywords. None of the three exposes a follower export, so "everyone who follows X" is not a list you can build; commenters under X's posts is.

Steps

1. Discovery: who is posting, who is asking

Two sources, use one or both. Keep the first limit at 50 per query until the user has seen a result.

Topic search. One run per platform and query. Instagram takes the hashtag with or without the #:

routergrowth run -c social.search -i '{"platform":"instagram","query":"interiordesignlyon","limit":50}' --max-cost 0.20 --wait 120 -o ig.json
routergrowth run -c social.search -i '{"platform":"tiktok","query":"kitchen renovation before after","limit":50}' --max-cost 0.20 --wait 120 -o tt.json
routergrowth run -c social.search -i '{"platform":"youtube","query":"house tour architect 2026","limit":50}' --max-cost 0.25 --wait 120 -o yt.json

Each post comes back with author (the handle; the channel handle on YouTube when the platform exposes it), author_url when the platform gives one, url, text, created_at and engagement. Priced per post, about $0.003 on Instagram, $0.0026 on TikTok and $0.0036 on YouTube at the time of writing, so 50 posts is under 20 cents. Three hashtags per platform beats one broad one: the specific hashtag is where the specific buyer posts.

Audience mining. The comments under a competitor's post, a supplier's post or a niche creator's post are the people who already want the thing. Pick three to five posts from the search above (highest replies), then:

routergrowth run -c social.comments -i '{"url":"https://www.tiktok.com/@competitor/video/7301","limit":100}' --max-cost 0.10 --wait 120 -o comments.json

Priced per comment, about $0.003 on Instagram, $0.0014 on YouTube and under a tenth of a cent on TikTok. Each comment carries author, author_url when the platform exposes it, text and likes. A comment that asks a price, a lead time, a location or "do you do this in Bordeaux" is intent written down; keep the text as the evidence column.

Dedupe on handle across every query and every platform before step 2. The distinct-author count is the number the rest of the run is quoted on.

2. Qualify from the post, before paying for the profile

Every step after this one costs more per row than the search did, so filter here, for free:

• Drop authors whose posts are in the wrong language or country for the offer.
• Drop negative keywords the user gave (students, inspiration accounts, "dm for credit" reposters, media pages).
• Keep the recency and engagement floor the user set. A post from 2023 is not a signal.
• On comments, keep the ones that ask or complain. "Stunning" is applause, not intent.

Show the user the count in and the count out, with five sample rows, before step 3.

3. The profile: bio link, own domain, public email

One call per surviving handle. Pass the handle, or the author_url for YouTube channels:

routergrowth run -c social.profile -i '{"platform":"instagram","handle":"atelier.nord"}' --max-cost 0.02 --wait 120

About $0.0035 on Instagram, $0.0026 on TikTok and $0.0036 on YouTube per profile. The profile object always carries name, handle, followers, bio, verified, and when the platform exposes them: website (the bio link), links (every link the profile lists), domain (the registrable domain of the person's own site; link hubs such as Linktree, Beacons and Stan are never a domain, and neither is another social network), email (a public or business email, or one written in the bio), profile_url, is_business, category and location.

Score each profile before anything else is spent: bio words that match the buyer description, a follower band that fits (a 300k account is media, a 2k account with a studio website is a buyer), is_business true, category in range, a domain present. Then route each row:

• email present: go straight to step 5.
• domain present, no email: step 4.
• links holds a LinkedIn URL: that person is reachable through the linkedin-outbound skill; note the URL and move on.
• only a link hub, or nothing: keep the row in the social-only list with profile_url. Reaching them means a human DM, which is out of scope for every skill here. Do not try to scrape the link hub from this skill; web.scrape is not routable on production yet.

4. Work email from the domain

contact.find needs a first name, a last name and the domain. Split name when it is a person. When the account is a studio or a shop ("Atelier Nord"), you need the owner's name first: ask the user if they know it, or look for it in the bio and pinned posts you already paid for. Only when the account is worth it, people.search with the company name and the titles founder, owner, gérant finds the person for about 15 cents base plus a few tenths of a cent per result; it is the one call in this skill that is not cheap per row, so quote it separately.

routergrowth run -c contact.find -i '{"first_name":"Claire","last_name":"Nord","company_domain":"atelier-nord.fr"}' --max-cost 0.10

Auto routing waterfalls across providers and charges only the one that delivers, about four cents on a hit, nothing on a miss. Small studios miss more often than SaaS companies; that is expected, and the miss costs nothing. Over MCP, send the rows as one batch_run with max_cost per item and max_total_cost for the batch. Before the lookups, run the free dedupe pass: routergrowth history --file handles.txt (one handle, email or profile URL per line) says who was already enriched or contacted and returns the reusable result.

5. Verify before anyone sends

routergrowth run -c contact.verify -i '{"email":"hello@atelier-nord.fr"}' --max-cost 0.02

About a cent each. Keep valid. Drop invalid. Hold catch_all and unknown in their own column and say so: a catch-all domain accepts everything, so the address is unproven, not clean. Verify the emails that came from a bio too; a bio email is often the oldest address the person owns.

Rules

• Inspect once per capability, quote the whole run, then run. Do not re-ask between rows once the user approved the total.
• max_cost on every run, max_total_cost on every batch. Stop and ask before a batch over about $1 unless the user asked for that volume.
• Public business and creator profiles only. Skip accounts that read as private individuals, and skip anything that looks like a minor's account. Keep the columns the user needs and nothing else; the evidence column is a post excerpt, not the person's whole feed.
• Never follow, like, comment, DM or send anything from this skill, on any platform. Discovery and enrichment only. Email outreach is the cold-email-pipeline skill, LinkedIn is the linkedin-outbound skill, and a DM is a human.
• Never present sandbox (rg_test_) output as real data. Every row carries the run ID that produced it.

Human gate

Before handing off to any outreach: show the account count by platform, the contact count by verification status, the size of the social-only list, the total charged, and five sample rows with their evidence. Wait.

Budget for one run

Estimate from the rate card at the time of writing, not a recorded run: three platforms at 50 posts each, about $0.45; 60 distinct authors qualified down to 30 profiles, about $0.10; 12 of those with an email in the profile; 10 with a domain sent to contact.find, at most $0.38 with the misses free; 20 verifications, about $0.19. About $1.10 for roughly 20 verified contacts and a social-only list of the rest. Instagram business accounts carry an email far more often than TikTok or YouTube accounts do, so a run that is Instagram-heavy spends less on step 4.

Output

A CSV with one row per account: platform, handle, profile_url, name, followers, category, is_business, source, evidence, bio, website, domain, email, email_source, verify_status, run_id, charge. source is the query or the post URL that surfaced the account; evidence is the post or comment text that qualified it; email_source is profile, bio or contact.find. Plus the totals: authors found, authors qualified, profiles read, emails found, emails valid, social-only accounts, total charged. Misses are listed at the bottom with the reason, so the user can see what was filtered and why.