Updated on November 4, 2019
I get two questions all the time.
The first one is, "Can I have some free credits?" And because I'm a pushover, a nice guy, or both, I usually comply. If you want free credits, just ask and I'll give them to you.
The next one is, "What makes you different than Hunter/Anymail Finder/Norbert/whomever?" I'm just as happy to answer this but it takes a bit more explanation than throwing a few credits onto an account. The differences are important. Here they are.
Difference #1: Toofr is the best at converting company names to email domains.
Hands down, full stop, I'll pit my technology against any of the others. I can guarantee they haven't thought as much about it as I have or done as much development on it.
The reason is because it's expensive. It actually costs more to figure out a domain from company name than to find an email address. The reason for that is because I literally have to go out to Google to get it and the Google API is not cheap. I pay for my automated Google searches (there are ways to scrape Google search results but I use their APIs).
From what I can tell, a majority of the competition uses a free service by Clearbit to convert company names to domains. It works great for startups and Fortune 1000 companies but completely fails at random local businesses like the bagel shop down the street or an online company with a homepage that not very many people know about.
Toofr users prospect into companies large and small and most of the time they only have the company's name and not the website.
To show what I mean, check this out. My first job, the summer I turned 16, was as a bagel dude at the Posh Bagel on Castro Street in Mountain View. It's still there! The COO of The Posh Bakery is named William Maroun and I want to get his email. Let's do it.
Notice how I put in "Posh Bagel" and it landed the email on theposhbakery.com? That's the magic of Toofr's company name conversion engine. Let's try Hunter, and we can see where their reliance on the free Clearbit name converter falls short.
They probably use Clearbit because it's free. But you get what you pay for -- and in this case, it's junk.
Difference #2: Toofr checks the mailserver on every guess.
You saw above how Toofr tries to find the COO of Posh Bagel. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but we always try our best, which means going out to the mailserver to see if the user exists.
We've discovered that not everyone is so generous. In taking a look at Hunter's process, it's clear they don't do a mailserver check with their Finder tool. I tested it by putting in a fake name, Gibber Ish, to see how they handle it.
It gets a pretty high confidence score because most of the Hunter emails are first name @ hunter.io, so if someone named Gibber worked at Hunter, then gibber@hunter.io would be their email. But clearly this is a fake email. Let's go over to their Verifier tool to see what happens.
Here Hunter does a mailserver test and tells you correctly that this email probably isn't correct. So the question is, why didn't they tell me this when I did the Finder query?
Who knows, but I do know that Toofr does this check. You can try it yourself or see it here!
And that's it -- Toofr is different (and better) because of its attention to the company name to domain conversion problem and its generosity in using mailserver tests in email guesses.