Tell Chip who you sell to. Get real prospects back.
No sales team, and no budget for a data subscription? Describe your ideal customer in plain words and Chip finds real companies and people on the web, each with a reason and a source.
Start with the one thing you need. The rest is there when you're ready. Free plan, no card needed. Or book a demo.
Describe your customer. Chip does the digging.
Type who you are after the way you would tell a friend: "logistics companies in Lagos with 20 to 200 staff". Chip turns that into filters and searches, reads what comes back, and keeps only the businesses and people its sources support.
- Searches the web, and business listings first when they are connected
- Bigger searches run in batches; a batch that finds nobody is refunded
- Up to 250 prospects a search on Starter, 500 on Growth and Scale
Saved prospects from one search: why Chip picked each person, how strong the match is, and their email status.
A reason and a source for every name.
Each prospect comes with a Strong, Moderate or Partial match, the signals Chip found and the page it found them on. Where a reason is Chip's own guess rather than something a source says, it is marked as one.
- Why Chip picked this, with signals and sources
- Work email and business phone stay "Not revealed" until you ask
- Mark anyone Do not contact and they stay off your lists
Work emails that were found, not guessed.
When you reveal a work email, it comes from an enrichment source or from a public page where the address appears word for word. Chip never builds one from a name pattern, and personal addresses like Gmail are dropped.
- Each reveal uses Chip credits and says where the address came from
- Every address gets a free check that its domain takes mail
- Searches by health, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, politics, union membership or criminal record are refused
Keep the good ones. Skip the duplicates.
Prospects sit in Prospecting, not your contacts, until you choose. Save the ones you like and startbuddi checks for people already in your CRM, links them to a company and records the search they came from. Then send them to a sequence in Outreach.
- Add to a prospect list, assign an owner, or dismiss
- Saved prospects are leads, kept out of marketing emails until they opt in
- Bring your own list in by CSV; it goes through the same checks
Save your ideal customer once. Hear about new matches weekly.
Save an ideal customer profile with the roles, industries, places and company sizes you sell to, or ask Chip to suggest one from the customers you have already converted. Save a search, tick weekly monitoring, and only new matches are shown.
- A fit score against your profile on every saved prospect, free and without AI
- Weekly re-runs are opt-in per search and use credits like any search
- Monitoring pauses if your credits can't cover it, rather than failing
From stranger to customer.
Prospecting fills the top of your pipeline. The rest happens in the same account.
-
Chip finds prospects
With a reason and a source for each one.
Prospecting -
You keep the best
They become leads, tagged with the search.
ContactsCompanies -
A sequence says hello
From your own mailbox, stopping when they reply.
Outreach -
Interest becomes a deal
An Interested reply opens one for you.
Sales inboxDeals
Prospecting, next to the prospecting tools.
Apollo and Hunter are specialist data tools with big databases. If you want twenty good local leads this month, in the same account you send from and invoice from, Prospecting is the easier start.
| startbuddi Prospecting | Apollo | Hunter | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the leads come from | Searched live on the web for each request, with sources | Its own database: 240M contacts and 30M companies | Domain search, email finder and its Discover database |
| Free plan | Look only; searches from Starter | Yes | 50 credits a month |
| How you pay | Chip credits per search and reveal; empty batches refunded | Free, Basic and Professional plans | Credits: 1 per email found, 0.5 per verification |
| Email verification | Domain mail check, free | Not checked | Mailbox-level verifier |
| Cold email sequences | Yes, in Sales → Outreach, from your own mailbox | Email campaigns on every account | Sequences |
| Lands in your CRM with deals and invoices | Yes | Through CRM integrations | Not checked |
Where they're better
- ApolloA ready-made database of 240M contacts and 30M companies, so results come back at once, and email campaigns on every account.
- HunterMailbox-level email verification, a fast email finder, and credits that are cheap per email.
startbuddi is our product. Facts about other tools come from their own pages, checked on 6 October 2026, and plans change, so check before you buy: Apollo pricing · Hunter pricing.
CRM talks to the rest of your business.
Everything below shows up on the client's record by itself, so you never piece the story together by hand.
Ask Chip. It already knows your customers.
Chip works from your own records, so the answer comes with names, amounts and dates, and a next step you can take in one click.
Which plans include Prospecting?
On Free you can open Prospecting and look around, but searches run from Starter. Every search and every reveal uses Chip credits, and a batch that finds nobody is refunded. A search can bring back up to 250 prospects on Starter and up to 500 on Growth and Scale.
- FreeNot on this plan
- StarterIncluded, 30-day trial
- GrowthIncluded, 30-day trial
- ScaleIncluded, 30-day trial
More in Sales
Questions about Prospecting
Where does Chip find prospects?
Can I find B2B leads in Lagos, Nairobi or elsewhere in Africa?
Do you look up personal emails and phone numbers?
How do credits work?
Does Chip email prospects for me?
Can I import my own list?
Can I run it on the Free plan?
Your next customers are out there. Let Chip find them.
Describe who you sell to and get real prospects back, with the reasons and the sources.
No need to set everything up on day one.
Or book a demo and we'll set it up with you.