i tested an email enrichment waterfall on a real batch in july. the exact setup every ai sdr thread still swears by. find rate: 4.9 percent. of the addresses that came back, 70.3 percent were catch all. they accept everything and tell you nothing about whether a human is on the other side.
out of a hundred people i actually wanted to reach, i got maybe one address i would put money on. the rest was noise dressed up as data.
nobody selling enrichment publishes numbers like these. they publish match rates. a match is not a person. it is one database row nodding at another database row. both can be years old, both can be wrong, and the charge hits either way.
growth twitter is admitting it now. threads this week are full of people saying their scraped lists bounce, their domains burn, their reply rates live under one percent. the tools didnt fail. the premise failed.
the premise is simple and wrong: that a strangers inbox is worth guessing. it isnt. email data rots the day someone changes jobs, and people change jobs all the time. you are buying photos of a crowd that already left.
what holds is behavior you can watch happen.
someone liked or commented on a competitors post yesterday. they told you, in public, with a timestamp, that they care about the problem you solve. no guessing required. no enrichment. no bounce risk. they raised a hand where anyone could see it.
someone just started as head of the function you sell into. fresh mandate, budget still unspent. or someone senior just left and the team they ran is about to change how it buys. all of that lives in public profile data, updating in real time. almost nobody treats it as the lead source it already is.
this data is easier to pull than emails ever were. engagement is public. job moves are public. you dont need a chain of vendors reselling each other. you just watch the surface where buyers already show themselves.
i build tools for that. one grabs everyone who engaged with any linkedin post, likers and commenters, into a clean list: https://apify.com/george.the.developer/linkedin-post-engagers-scraper?fpr=bbquoh. another tracks companies and flags new hires and departures as they land: https://apify.com/george.the.developer/linkedin-company-employees-scraper?fpr=bbquoh. the rest sit at pipelines.trykioko.com.
run your own numbers on your own list before you buy another credit pack. count the catch alls. count the bounces. then count how many of your best customers ever arrived from a cold guessed inbox versus someone already circling in public.
the list you need is not sitting in a database. it is performing in public every day. almost nobody is writing it down.
Top comments (0)