Lying in your Hunter account are leads who replied, converted, or told you the timing was wrong. They’re useful, but it takes a lot of manual effort to find leads who look just like them - until now, and the new Find Similar feature.
Find Similar is built into Hunter and helps you to instantly build lists of contacts or companies that you'd like more of.
No filter combinations, no ideal customer profile workshop, and no email by email building effort.
It's a real time-saver that's already keeping me away from manual list building, cleansing, and segmentation, and more so doubling down on the type of leads I already win.
Now, you can do the same too, and it's perfect timing. It's September, and from studying five years of sending data from 14,500 senders, we know reply rates are about to peak.
So, read on for 15 time-saving, list-building tips across sales outreach, marketing, link building, and recruiting using Find Similar in Hunter.
The 15 list-building tips:
- Rebuild your ICP from the people who replied
- Clone your closed-won accounts in ten minutes
- Turn a “not right now” into a whole segment
- Rescue the 500-lead list that produced three replies
- Expand a single Email Finder lookup into a list
- Cover each company with two or three contacts instead of one
- Chase a spike in form completions while it’s still warm
- Fill your next webinar with people like the ones who showed up
- Test two customer profiles against each other before you commit budget
- Find more sites like the ones already linking to you
- Get on podcasts like the one that sent you signups
- Build a press list from the placement that drove traffic
- Build a displacement list from accounts on a competitor’s product
- Source candidates who look like the hire who worked out
- Turn a client’s dream logos into their target list on day one
What Find Similar does
Find Similar is a feature you'll see throughout Hunter when you click on a contact or company record in Leads or underneath the results in an Email Finder search.
It expands any list in Hunter into up to 1,000 new prospects, using the leads you already have as the seed.
It starts from proof.
You hand Hunter a dozen customers and ask for more of the same, so you never have to describe your ideal customer in the abstract and hope a filter combination finds them.
You control how close the match is, too.
Keep the similarity high and you get a near-identical list. Go lower and you start seeing patterns in your own customer base that you hadn’t noticed, which is where new segments come from.
Find Similar is available on any paid Hunter plan.
How Find Similar works
Find Similar works across the Hunter platform:
- Records: Click on the name of a contact/company to open the record and go to the Similar leads tab.
- People/Company Leads: Select a number of records by clicking the box next to each row, then Find Similar Leads in the blue toolbar pop up.
- Verifier/Finder results: After finding or verifying a lead, you'll be met by "We found x highly similar profiles..." beneath your results.
Once Find Similar is chosen, the workflow is the same:
- Refine your results using filters like job title, location, verification status, and the new "similarity score" that ranks.
- Click Reveal x selected to save your results to a new or existing leads.
- Click See in leads to go straight to the new contacts.
The quality of the leads that Find Similar gives you depends on the information you give it.
The more consistent the job title or location or company industry, the more precise the lookalikes. You can use this to your advantage to find the right balance of targeting lookalikes and opening the envelope
Throw in every customer you’ve ever had, including the two who were a bad fit, and the results widen to match.
15 tips on building and fixing your lead lists
Every play in this section runs the same way:
- You assemble the seed in Leads, usually by tagging the records you want so you can select them in one action, and
- Then you run Find Similar and save the output to its own list.
- What changes between them is which records you pick as the seed, and that is the only decision here that needs any thought.
What changes is which records you pick as the seed, and that's the only decision that needs any thought.
1. Rebuild your ICP from the people who replied
ICP documents are often great in theory, but the reality of prospecting can shape changes, especially when your reply data indicates that you have a change in ICP. Take every contact in your ICP who gave you a positive reply and use those selections to find lookalikes with Find Similar. If the roles, industries, and company sizes don’t match your ICP document you wrote in January, trust the results to test a different direction and use that to update the ICP document.
2. Clone your closed-won list
The usual answer to “get me more customers like our best customers” is a workshop, a spreadsheet, and a week of arguing about firmographics. Tag every account that signed this year and seed from the full set instead. You’re handing Hunter a dozen real customers and asking for more of the same.
3. Turn a “not right now” into a segment
“Interesting, but the timing’s wrong” gets thrown into the abyss and long forgotten - but what if that was a seed for Find Similar? That "not right now" type response is confirmation of interest in your solution, but the timing is wrong. So, go find people who have the buying window that aligns to right now. Build a new list from their record and prospect the segment while you wait for them.
4. Rescue a list that underperformed
You built 500 leads, three replied, and the campaign looks like a write-off. Don't let it become a one-and-done, instead, use this as a way to feed a new list. Our State of Email Outreach 2026 research found lists under 100 recipients pull 158% more replies than lists of 500 or more, so the smaller rebuild has a real chance of beating the original.
5. Expand a single lookup
You ran one Email Finder search for someone you met at a conference, got the address, and moved on. Find Similar sits underneath the result, so that one address becomes a batch of people in the same role at comparable companies before you’ve left the results page.
6. Reach deeper into the buying committee
A list with one contact per company makes one person’s vacation the difference between a deal and silence. This is an important lesson that runs through our Outreach Planner - there are at least four personas to reach inside any one company that open a door to a deal.
Run Find Similar on companies first, then Domain Search each one to pull a second and third name. Emailing two people per company gets a 46% higher reply rate than emailing one, according to the same research, and this builds a list structured that way from the start.
Following a signal from your marketing
These three start outside Leads.
Something happened, a download, a registration, or a click, and you have a small group of people who did it.
Get that group into Hunter as a list, tag it, and seed from the tag. Speed is what matters here, because a three-week-old signal is worth far more than the same signal next quarter.
7. Chase a spike in form completions
A guide you recently published suddenly pulls 4,000 downloads, and 120 of them are operations managers at logistics companies. This many downloads from one job title in one industry is a pattern. Seed from those 120 and build the outbound list while the guide is still pulling downloads. Waiting until next quarter means writing to people whose interest has gone cold.
8. Fill the room for your next event
Take the people who registered for your last webinar and turned up, leaving out the no-shows, because attending is a much stronger signal than registering. Seeding from that group gives you an invite list for the next session based on who shows up.
9. Find out which profile responds before you commit budget
Pick two customers who look nothing like each other and build a lookalike list from each. Send both the same email. Whichever profile replies more is the one to build a campaign around, and the answer cost you two small sends instead of the budget it takes to run that test in paid.
Earning links, mentions, and coverage
Link building runs on people, so these start from an individual record. Open the writer, host, or editor in Leads, go to the Similar leads tab, and keep the similarity setting high. A beat is narrow, and a loose match gives you people who cover something adjacent to your topic rather than your topic.
10. Find more sites like the ones already linking to you
In your backlink profile is a small group of sites that have linked to you more than once, and whose editors reply when you email them. Those relationships took months to build. Seed from those editors to find their counterparts at publications like theirs, which is a better starting point than a scraped list of every site in your category.
11. Get on podcasts like the one that sent you signups
One episode sent you signups for a month, and your only obvious route to the next one is scrolling through charts. Seed from the host’s record and go after the hosts of comparable shows. You already know your story suits the format and that the audience is right, so you already know the format works before you send the pitch.
12. Build a press list from a placement that worked
A journalist covered you and the piece drove real traffic. Their record is the seed for your next press list. Find Similar returns writers on the same beat at similar outlets, so the list is ready weeks before your next announcement.
Seeding from people you don’t sell to
The seed doesn’t have to be a customer, or even someone you want to sell to. Find Similar reads the pattern in a record whether that record is an account on a competitor’s product, a person you hired, or a logo on a client’s wishlist. Where the seed is a company, run Domain Search on the results to turn those companies into named contacts.
13. Build a displacement list from accounts on a competitor’s product
You know a handful of companies using a competitor, whether from a lost deal, a logo on their website, or something mentioned on a call. Seed from those companies to get more like them, then write to them as switchers and ask about the gaps you know that product has. A question about their current setup gets more replies than a pitch, and it tells you whether the gap is one they feel.
14. Find more candidates like the hire who worked out
Look at the best person you hired this year. Their role history, company background, and location form a pattern, and Find Similar reads that pattern the same way it reads a customer. Recruiters doing their own sourcing get a shortlist without going near a job board.
15. Turn a client’s dream logos into their target list on day one
A new client names the three companies they’d love to work with on the kickoff call. Rather than spending week one on manual research, run Find Similar on those three before the call ends, and start the work with a 500-lead target list.
Send cold emails with Hunter