Six months ago I shipped findmemail.io, a B2B email finder built around plain-English search instead of filter pickers.
Sharing the things I'd do differently if I started over today, in case it's useful to anyone in a similar spot.
what worked
plain-english search as the wedge. every existing tool in this space (apollo, hunter, zoominfo, lusha) makes you click through 5-8 filter dropdowns to define an ICP. it works once you learn it, but the first-run experience is brutal. i let users type "VPs of operations at copper mines in chile" and the system parses + filters. early activation rate jumped 3x vs the filter ui i originally shipped.
lifetime pricing for the bottom of the market. subscription pricing forces the smallest customers to either pay full SaaS rates or churn immediately. a $200 one-time tier serves the indie founder/freelancer segment that big tools deliberately ignore. these users are also the loudest evangelists when something works.
verification waterfall over single-source. every "verified" email has a non-trivial bounce rate. running every result through 2 independent SMTP checks before serving it cut bounces from ~12% to under 4%. higher infra cost, but the alternative is users blaming you for sender reputation damage.
what i'd do differently
ship the public landing page before the product. i spent 3 months building before showing anyone a URL. should have launched a landing page with the plain-english search demo on day 14, taken a waitlist, and used the wait list as my user research panel for the next 6 weeks.
don't try to compete on database size. i wasted an entire month chasing data volume to match apollo's 200M+ contacts. nobody cares. a 32k-company index that's actually fresh and well-verified beats a 200M-company index that bounces at 20%. focus on a tight TAM and serve it well.
charge from day 1. my first 50 users were all free. 47 churned. the 3 who paid stayed for 6+ months. the lesson wasn't "free is bad", it was that paying users self-select for ICP fit, and free users mostly don't.
what i'm working on now
distribution. the build was the easy part. for an indie b2b tool with no warm network, the only real channels are: founder LinkedIn, communities where your ICP already hangs out, and very narrow paid retargeting. ad spend before product-market fit is just expensive education.
happy to answer questions if anyone is shipping in this space.
Top comments (0)