## Start with the customer you'd clone
List your 10 happiest customers. Write down what they share: industry, size, tech stack, recent funding, geography, role of the buyer. That's your ICP — not a "100-employee SaaS company in North America."
## The signal layer
Good lists are built on signals, not filters. Examples that actually predict buying:
- Just hired a new VP of {function}
- Posted a job for {role you sell to}
- Mentioned a competitor in a recent earnings call
- Opened a second location in the last 90 days
- Switched from {tool A} to {tool B} (detectable via tech stack APIs)
## Verification beats volume
Every email must be SMTP-verified the day before you send. Catch-all domains go into a separate, lower-volume sequence. Roles like info@ and hello@ are deleted, not sent to.
## The 500-lead test
Before you scale to 5,000, send 500. If reply rate is below 3%, the list is wrong — don't blame the copy. Fix the targeting, then scale.