Item: Hunter
Rating: 10
Author: Rowan Case

Overall Satisfaction with Hunter

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Hunter to confirm the veracity of the emails I obtain through other prospecting tools. It helps me verify whether someone is able to be contacted via that address or not, and often helps me find others within the organizations I'm interested in who I may be able to speak with instead. It's extremely helpful to verify whether an email is valid or not before I send marketing materials there.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Email Verifying
Domain verification
contact sourcing

Cons

Email automation
Prospecting

Return on Investment

5 contracts signed
100s of executives reached
1000s of emails sent and received

Usability

I think the features are good, but it makes my brain hurt (and feel overtaxed) when I have to jump between searching by name and domain and then searching via a specific email to verify. I wish I could do all of that from one landing page, one über search bar.

Alternatives Considered

Apollo.io

I've also used Apollo.io, and I think they actually work best in tandem. Apollo.io is great for broad research and list building. You can search an organization's name and find all the folks who work there that meet your search criteria. It's great for building a big list of potential contacts. That's when Hunter comes in clutch: you then verify and validate that list of contacts with Hunter so you can know which of those contacts are good to go, and which are out of date or not reachable.

Key Insights

Do you think Hunter delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Hunter's feature set?

Yes

Did Hunter live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Hunter go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Hunter again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Apollo.io, Squarespace, HubSpot CRM

Likelihood to Recommend

Hunter is extremely well suited to a situation where you've got a lead on someone you need to email or call, but you're not sure if the contact info you have is good or not. Hunter can help you verify if that contact information is valid and usable. Hunter is less suited to finding emails out of the blue, or browsing emails at a particular organization. You kind of need to have some details going in.

Evaluating Hunter and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - I had been using just straight-up google and various shady info collector sites to try to verify my contacts and get emails before beginning my outreach. It was spotty, unreliable, and I frequently had to give away MY information in exchange for getting what I needed. It wasn’t ideal. I wanted to replace that flow with something that felt like it was built for the purpose I was using it for, and with something that didn’t feel like selling my kidney to a weirdo in an alleyway. I wanted a clear, professional platform for finding and verifying my contacts.

Key Differentiators

Ease of Use
Other

The single most important factor for me was that the tool feel legitimate. I was using less than savory tools before this and it felt scummy and scammy. I wanted this tool to feel like a real business was backing it and not like I was scraping the net for the ill-gotten gains of malicious data collectors.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I think if I had to do it again I might spend more time on the competitive research portion. I didn’t really find any viable alternatives to Hunter, and the other tool I compared with, Apollo.io, I wound up using alongside Hunter. Maybe if I had spent more time on sniffing out competitors I would have had more luck finding a solution for all my needs in one.

Comments

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Worth it -- Good bang for the buck