You will do it better. You will not do it every week.
Manual research is the highest-quality option available and the least likely to still be happening in March.
What doing it yourself is genuinely better at
Quality, and it is not close. A founder who reads a prospect's last two blog posts, their job board and their investor's thesis will write a better opener than any system, and will notice things no filter encodes. For the first twenty customers this is usually the right answer, and a tool that talked you out of it would be selling you something.
Where they differ
| The question | Doing it by hand | Huntloop |
|---|---|---|
| How good is the research? | Better than ours, when you actually do it. | Consistent, cited, and it happens on the weeks you are busy. |
| How many companies can you cover? | As many as you have hours for. | The market your profile describes, watched continuously, with the ones that changed surfaced. |
| What happens in a busy month? | It stops, and the pipeline gap arrives a quarter later. | It keeps running, and the queue is waiting when you come back. |
| Where does what you learn go? | Your head, mostly. | The profile and the scoring rules, where the next person to join inherits it. |
When to choose doing it by hand instead
If you have not closed ten customers yet, do it by hand. You are still learning who your buyer is, and a profile drafted before you know that is a guess Huntloop will faithfully act on. Come back when the pattern is real — the product will tell you as much on the ICP screen.
Judge it on your own market
Put in your domain and read what it produces. That is worth more than any table.