Recipes / Email-finding waterfall that only pays for misses

Email-finding waterfall that only pays for misses

Hunter + Findymail + HubSpot

IntermediateRevOpsSDRs

Who it's for

RevOps and SDRs with CRM contacts that have no email, who want to fill the gaps with a second provider only where the first one missed. Hunter or Findymail can be swapped for LeadMagic, Prospeo or RocketReach. HubSpot can be swapped for Salesforce, Attio or Pipedrive.

What you get

Waterfall results and the HubSpot updates waiting for approval. Sample output: every company and person in it is fictional.

HubSpot contacts with no email in 'Q4 target accounts': 50
Skipped before lookup: 4 (no company domain)

Round 1, Hunter Email Finder: 46 lookups, 31 found
Round 2, Findymail find_email (Hunter misses only): 15 lookups, 9 found
Not found by either: 6
Verification (Hunter Email Verifier): 40 checked, 34 verified, 6 not verified

| Contact | Company | Email | Found by | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dana Okafor | Larkspur Freightworks (fictional) | [email protected] | Hunter | yes |
| Sam Whitlock | Quarry Lane Analytics (fictional) | [email protected] | Findymail | yes |
| Priya Raman | Mossgate Labs (fictional) | [email protected] | Hunter | no |
| Alex Rivera | Fernhill Software (fictional) | none found | none | n/a |

Calls made: Hunter 46 finder + 40 verifier, Findymail 15 finder.
Check the credit figures for each tool on the tool pages; your plan may differ.

No HubSpot records changed yet.
Ready to write: 34 verified emails, each to a contact whose email is still empty.
Reply 'write 34' to approve, or list contacts to leave out.

Time and cost

Estimate About 15–25 minutes for 50 contacts, most of it reviewing the results.

Assumptions: 50 HubSpot contacts with no email, a Hunter hit rate of about two in three, and every found email verified once.

Exact credit costs depend on your plan with each vendor. Check the tool pages before a large run.

MCP servers

Every server is confirmed in: Claude

Set up in a chat app

Every server in this recipe is confirmed for Claude. Connect each one, then paste the prompts below into one conversation.

Developer setup

Auth setup and mcp.json for Claude Code and Cursor
  • Hunter: Use OAuth sign-in for interactive use. For headless runs, use an API key in the X-Api-Key header.
  • Findymail: Paste an API key from the vendor's settings into the config (header or URL). There's no browser login, so it works well headless.
  • HubSpot: Sign in with OAuth in your client (run /mcp in Claude Code). Do it once interactively, and the client stores and refreshes the token.

Put this in .mcp.json (Claude Code, project root) or ~/.cursor/mcp.json (Cursor). Swap the example keys for your own, and don't commit real ones. Remove the // comment lines if your client requires strict JSON.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "hunter": {
      "url": "https://mcp.hunter.io/mcp"
      // headless alternative: "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_HUNTER_API_KEY" }
    },
    "findymail": {
      "url": "https://mcp.findymail.com/mcp"
      // headless alternative: "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_FINDYMAIL_API_KEY" }
    },
    "hubspot": {
      "url": "https://mcp.hubspot.com"
    }
  }
}

Step-by-step prompts

  1. Find HubSpot contacts in {list_or_filter} with no email address. Show me a table with first name, last name, company and company domain, and the count. List any with no domain separately. Don't change anything.
  2. Tell me how many Hunter Email Finder lookups that is. After I approve it, run Hunter Email Finder for each contact with a domain. Show me hits and misses.
  3. Tell me how many Hunter misses there are. After I approve it, run Findymail find_email only for those misses. Show me what it found.
  4. After I approve it, verify every found email with Hunter Email Verifier. Show me one table: contact, email, which tool found it, and whether it verified. Add a count of calls made to each tool.
  5. After I approve it, write the verified emails to the matching HubSpot contacts. Re-read each contact first and skip any that now have an email. Then tell me how many were written and skipped.

Run it on a schedule (optional)

Where this goes wrong

Gotchas

Download

Get the prompts, guardrails and expected output as one Markdown file. Paste it into a Claude Project or ChatGPT project's instructions, or save it as CLAUDE.md for Claude Code.

Download email-finding-waterfall.md

Vendor sites: HubSpot. If we join an affiliate program, these links will be labeled as affiliate links.