Updated on November 4, 2019
This report from Whoisvisiting is the most comprehensive overview of the growing email finding market. It also happens to rate Toofr highest. So rather than giving an overly biased response to the fair question of what sets Toofr apart from the competition, I'll instead summarize the findings here.
Disclosure: I have never met these guys and was not aware that they were doing this review of Toofr, Hunter, Norbert, and all the others.
In other words, maybe I just got lucky, but hey, it took a lot of hard work to get this lucky.
Here's the full summary, courtesy of Whoisvisiting:
So what does this mean? Well, I'll tell you what I've tried to do differently than the other guys.
- Toofr pays for data. I'm pretty sure the other guys have tried to spin up their own mailtesting services, which has its limits. I've partnered with services that are whitelisted to do this testing and that's how I get better results.
- Toofr's been around for a while. I'm like the old grizzly-haired mountain climber in this space and have accumulated a lot more pattern data than the other guys. Data is power in this market, and that's helped propel Toofr along.
- Toofr is super lean, bootstrapped, and nimble. I've never taken investment and Toofr has always had just one employee (me). This means I can be competitive with pricing and generous with features. I'm not feeding a team of engineers and that gives me a lot of freedom.
- Toofr isn't free. Some of the competitors offer a lot of free features and data. It's an interesting approach, and I've been experimenting to see if I'm right not to do it. So far I'm comfortable with it. I have to imagine that Hunter and Norbert are spending a ton of money on their traffic (which admittedly is much higher than Toofr) and free data plans but maybe they're converting it to dollars. Time will tell!