Today, Fernly is open to everyone. We have been building quietly for a while, and we think it is ready. Here is the story of what we made and why.

The problem we kept seeing

Talk to any web designer or SEO agency doing local work and you will hear the same frustration: finding good clients is harder than the actual work. Most lead generation advice points you toward platforms like Upwork or Bark, where you compete on price with dozens of other freelancers for low-quality inbound enquiries. Or you spend hours manually searching Google, visiting business websites one by one, trying to figure out who might need help.

That manual process actually works, but it is painfully slow. You could spend an afternoon scouting a single city. And the businesses that need you most, the ones with no website at all, are the hardest to find because they are invisible to any tool that works from domain data.

What Fernly does

Fernly pulls live data from Google Places for any location and keyword you choose. It checks each business to see whether they have a website, how their Google reviews look, and whether their web presence is strong enough that you would bother reaching out. You can filter for businesses with no website, low review counts, or specific categories. In a few minutes you can have a qualified list of prospects that would have taken hours to build by hand.

From there, the workflow stays in the same place. You move leads through a Kanban pipeline, send emails directly from Fernly, track when they opened, and when a lead converts you can create a client portal and send invoices. The whole cycle from cold prospect to paying client happens without leaving the tool.

Who it is built for

Fernly is specifically designed for web designers, web developers, and SEO agencies who sell services to local businesses. Restaurants, tradespeople, accountants, salons, clinics. Businesses that exist in the physical world and need a better digital presence.

It is not a general-purpose CRM or an enterprise B2B tool. The filters, the outreach copy, the portal system, all of it is built around the workflow of someone who is pitching website or SEO work to a local business owner.

What is included today

• Scout — run discovery searches and pull qualified local business leads
• CRM — Kanban pipeline with lead notes, activity tracking, and DNC management
• Outreach — send cold emails, track opens, manage follow-up sequences
• Projects and Portals — create a branded client portal, share assets, and send invoices via Stripe
• Teams — invite colleagues, assign leads, and collaborate on the same pipeline

What is next

We are adding more outreach channels, improving the email personalisation options, and building out reporting so you can see what is working across your pipeline. If you have a feature request or run into something that does not feel right, we want to hear from you at hello@fernly.io.

Thanks for being here at the start.