How do you build a prospect list?

Starting with sources is the most common mistake. Every row collected before the description exists is a row you will delete later.

The description has four fields: industry, headcount range, city or country, and the job title that decides. Write all four and the right sources become obvious.

These are free and fresher than most purchased lists, because companies maintain these entries themselves.

Once you have the company you need the right person. Checking the team page on their own site and professional networks gives better results than any purchased list.

Email address patterns are consistent within a company: first.last, firstlast, or initial plus last. Where the pattern is known the address can be inferred, but every inferred address has to be verified before you send.

Every email to a dead address bounces, and bounce rate is the signal spam filters treat most harshly. Above two per cent, sending reputation degrades quickly.

So however good the source, address verification is not a step to skip. It removes about a tenth of the list and gets the other nine tenths delivered.

The problem with bought lists is not price, it is date. The same list is sold to hundreds of companies, so the same people receive many emails in the same month and complaint rates climb.

Building your own takes longer, but the description you write once gets reused every week. Pocufy takes over that repetition: it derives the description from your site, finds matching companies and verifies each row.