No leads in your queue yet

An empty queue is a result, not a failure. Embers will not invent names, so when nothing ranks there is a specific reason, and it is almost always one of four. Work them in this order.

1. The scan has not finished

The onboarding scan runs on the server and keeps running after you leave onboarding, so “still processing” and “finished with nothing” look similar for a while. The processing screen says which one you are looking at: it only shows an empty result once the scan has settled.

After onboarding, agents run on a 24 hour cadence. A profile you connected an hour ago has not been scanned a second time yet, and a lead that engaged this morning may not appear until the next pass. If your agents are paused, nothing is scraped and nothing is re-scored. Check that first on Agents, pause, and scan history.

2. Nobody engaged with the sources you chose

Embers only reads public activity inside the lookback window. Two of the empty states say exactly this:

• No public posts were found. There was nothing to read on the profile you connected in that window. A recurring scan checks again as new posts appear.
• Posts were found, but nobody engaged with them. The collection worked. There is simply no audience yet.

This is the most common outcome for a profile that posts rarely, or for a watchlist entry that has been quiet. It is not something you can configure your way out of. You need a source with recent public engagement on it.

3. Everyone who was found got filtered out

The other two empty states mean people were found and then removed:

• Nobody cleared your ICP. The engagers were checked against your buyer description and none of them matched. A narrow or jargon-heavy ICP does this, and so does a source whose audience is peers rather than buyers.
• Matches were found but could not be verified. Some people cleared your ICP, but their public profiles were missing a name, role, company, avatar, or the engagement that surfaced them. Embers holds those back rather than showing a half-empty card.

Three more filters run quietly:

• A lead needs a score above zero and either an ICP match or a manual override to show in the default view.
• You and your teammates are excluded, and so are employees of a competitor you track.
• Anything on your company blocklist is removed everywhere, including Slack, HubSpot, webhooks, and exports.

4. The sources are too narrow

One quiet profile and no keywords gives Embers one small window into LinkedIn. Broaden the input:

1. Add watchlist profiles

   Public profiles whose audience is your audience: competitors, influencers, investors, clients. Solo allows 5, Growth 10, Enterprise 20. Your own profile, if you added it, counts as one of them.

2. Add keywords

   Keyword tracking finds people posting publicly about your problem, whether or not they have ever seen you. Solo allows 10 keywords, Growth 25, Enterprise 50.

3. Turn on the agents you skipped

   Post engagement, comment engagement, watchlist, and keyword tracking each read a different surface. Running one of four is a common cause of a thin queue.

Retrying during onboarding

When the first onboarding scan settles empty, Embers offers one cost-capped alternate scan against a narrower, more specific source, usually a keyword derived from your inputs. A validation correction or an infrastructure retry does not consume it. Once it is used, the honest next step is a recurring agent rather than another one-off scan, and the screen switches to saying so.

When to ask for a Signal Audit

If you have run the alternate scan, widened the ICP, and added sources, and the queue is still empty, the problem is upstream of the product: there may be no public engagement to read. Request the free Signal Audit. A person looks at your profile, your posting history, and the accounts you picked, then tells you whether Embers has anything to work with. The retry card in onboarding links to it directly.

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