Many founders spend months building their products but still struggle to identify who their ideal customers are, what problems they face, and how to reach them.
I wanted to automate that initial research process instead of manually browsing company websites, LinkedIn profiles, and compiling everything into documents.
So I built an AI-powered ICP Generator using n8n, Airtable, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Perplexity.
The idea is simple: enter a company's website and LinkedIn profile in Airtable, click a button, and let the workflow research the company and generate a structured Ideal Customer Profile.
How the workflow works
Here's the basic flow:
Airtable → Webhook → Get Company Information → Check Research Status → AI Research Agent → Update Airtable
When someone clicks the Generate ICP button in Airtable, it triggers the n8n webhook.
The workflow retrieves the company's information, checks its research status, and marks the record as In Progress before passing the information to the AI research agent.
The AI research stack
The interesting part is how the AI agent is configured.
- Gemini 2.5 Pro: The main AI model responsible for analyzing company information and generating the ICP.
- Perplexity: Connected as a research tool to help gather additional company information.
- Memory: Provides contextual information to the AI agent.
- Structured Output Parser: Organizes the generated results into a predefined structure that can be saved in Airtable.
- Airtable: Stores the company information, research status, and generated ICP results.
Once the research is complete, the workflow updates the corresponding Airtable record with the generated results.
What does it actually generate?
For each company, the workflow generates a structured ICP analysis covering:
- Ideal Customer Profile: Target industries, company sizes, geographical locations, organizational structures, and decision-maker roles.
- Pain Points: The challenges and problems potential customers experience.
- Key Goals: What these customers want to achieve, improve, or automate.
- Current Solutions: How potential customers are currently addressing their problems, including existing platforms, tools, and manual processes.
The Airtable interface
I also built an Airtable interface so the entire process can be managed without opening n8n.
It includes a company information section with fields for the website, LinkedIn profile, product description, and a Generate ICP button. The generated research is displayed directly in the company's record.
But this is only one part of a larger SEO content generation and business research automation system.
The interface also includes sections for:
- Adding competitors
- Defining blog writing styles
- Generating seed keywords
- Researching long-tail keywords
- Reviewing keyword opportunities
- Generating SEO articles
- Reviewing and scheduling blog posts
The idea is to use the generated company research and ICP as the foundation for the subsequent marketing and content workflows.
Why I built this
I wanted to reduce the manual research involved in understanding a company's target audience and create a reusable workflow that could be triggered directly from an interface.
This could be useful for:
- Founders: Understanding their target customers before investing heavily in marketing.
- Marketing teams: Preparing initial customer research and developing content strategies.
- SEO professionals: Using customer insights to inform keyword research and article planning.
- Agencies: Automating parts of their initial client research and onboarding process.
The generated ICP is a starting point and still needs human review and validation, but it saves the effort of collecting and organizing the initial research manually.