Why We Built Easy Email Finder: The Founder Story

The Problem We Kept Running Into

Before Easy Email Finder existed, we were trying to do something simple: find email addresses for local businesses in specific cities. We wanted to reach out to dentists in Austin, landscapers in Denver, and restaurants in Miami. The kind of outreach that small agencies and freelancers do every day.

We tried the established tools. Hunter.io was excellent for looking up emails by domain, but it assumed you already knew which businesses to target. Apollo.io had a massive database, but it was built for enterprise sales — finding the CFO at a Fortune 500, not the owner of a local bakery. Both charged monthly subscriptions whether we used them or not.

The biggest issue was data quality. Many tools use email pattern guessing. They observe that a company uses firstname@domain.com and extrapolate that pattern to people who might work there. For enterprises with standardized email formats, this works reasonably well. For small businesses where the owner's email might be anything from info@domain.com to mike1987@gmail.com, guessing fails constantly.

The Insight: Start with Google Places

Google Places already indexes virtually every business with a public presence. It knows their name, address, phone number, website, hours, ratings, and categories. What it does not always surface is their email address. But their website usually has it — on the contact page, in the footer, or on the about page.

The idea was straightforward: use Google Places to find businesses, then scrape their actual websites for email addresses. No guessing, no pattern matching, no stale database. Just go to the website, look for an email, and return what you find.

We wrote the first prototype in a weekend. A Google Places API query to find businesses, Cheerio and Axios to scrape their websites, and basic email regex to extract addresses. It worked. Not perfectly — the email validation needed work, the scraping was slow, and edge cases abounded — but the core idea was sound.

Why Pay-Per-Email Instead of Subscriptions

We thought about the subscription model. It is the default in SaaS for good reason: predictable revenue, lower churn friction, easier financial planning. But we kept coming back to our own experience as users.

When we were prospecting for our agency, some months we needed 500 emails. Other months, zero. Paying $49 or $149 per month during quiet periods felt wasteful. And the psychology of a subscription meant we sometimes forced ourselves to prospect just to justify the cost, which led to lower-quality outreach.

Pay-per-email at $0.25 aligned costs with actual value delivered. You pay when you get an email. You do not pay when you do not. Credits never expire. There is no pressure to use them by the end of the month. This model works particularly well for freelancers and small agencies with variable workloads. We explore this philosophy further in why we do not charge monthly.

Building the Quality Signals

Finding an email is step one. Knowing whether the business is worth emailing is step two. We realized early that we were already visiting each business's website — why not extract additional intelligence while we were there?

So we added tech stack detection. If a business runs WordPress, Shopify, or Squarespace, that tells you something about their technical sophistication and potential needs. We added social media link extraction, franchise detection (chains have different decision-making structures than independents), and we surfaced Google Places data like ratings, price levels, and business categories.

All of this comes from the same scraping pass. Zero additional API calls. The result is that every email comes with rich context that helps you decide whether and how to reach out.

What We Have Learned

Since launching, a few things have become clear. First, local business prospecting is underserved. Most tools in this space target enterprise sales teams. Small agencies, freelancers, and solopreneurs are an afterthought. Second, real-time scraping is more accurate than database lookups for small businesses, even though it is slower. Third, people appreciate simple pricing. The number one comment we get is some variation of "thank you for not making me do math to figure out what this costs."

We are not trying to replace Hunter.io or Apollo.io. Those are excellent tools for their intended audiences. We built Easy Email Finder for the people those tools were not built for: small operators who need local business emails without enterprise complexity or enterprise pricing. If that sounds like you, give it a try with 5 free credits — no credit card required.

For a detailed feature comparison with the major players, check out our ultimate email finder comparison guide.