Clearbit Connect
I was so amazed when Clearbit Connect launched. It was a game-changing product. No other products existed then that made it so easy to find emails of decision-makers. On top of that, the emails were accurate for the most part.
I was curious how did they do it, and the discovery was not very nice to stomach. Clearbit reads your email and Google contacts and dumps them all into their database. To be honest, they probably take a lot more than you receive.
That said, the quality of data was great and as a (lazy) software engineer that leads sales at Enrich Layer, I want those sweet email addresses for my outbound sales campaign. To automate the process of fetching email addresses for 1000 profiles, I reverse engineered the API from their chrome extension. I also gathered a bunch of API keys by getting friends and colleagues to sign into Clearbit Connect and retrieve their API keys for my use. It worked, and I was able to get 190 email addresses from 1406 user profiles.
Scaling Clearbit
Email discovery is a core requirement in my sales outreach. When it was time to scale. I reached out to Clearbit's sales team and lo and behold. I was quoted with a five-digit monthly recurring sum for their Enterprise plan to gain access to Clearbit's prospector API. (Clearbit's prospector API can be used to programmatically enrich my list of user profiles with email addresses).
The lack of progressive pricing is a problem for a small fledgling business like mine.
Is Clearbit the gold standard for enriching contact information?
Clearbit Connect was the gold standard for me on launch. There was nothing better than Clearbit Connect for email accuracy and match rate. Let's get into the specifics.