Prospect Research

Prospect research

A research assistant that saves you twenty minutes per lead. Not a lead-gen machine — be honest about that with the user.

What this can and cannot do

Can: careers pages, engineering blogs and their named authors, public community and events pages, past meetup and conference sponsor lists, Drupal.org organisation and user profiles, company About/Team pages, public GitHub activity, news about offices and funding.

Cannot: scrape LinkedIn, find personal email addresses, or verify that someone still works somewhere. Email addresses usually have to be filled in by hand. Say so rather than guessing a pattern — a bounced first touch is worse than no first touch.

Never guess at firstname@company.com. Leave contact_email blank and flag it.

Researching an org

1. Check the pipeline first. If they're already in data/venues.csv, say so and show the history instead of researching again. Contacting an org twice through two different doors is the worst outcome here.
2. Search the org: what they build, size, Pune office, tech stack.
3. Classify into an org_type: product | services | agency | coworking | edu | community | other.
4. Score against the ICP in skills/venue-outreach/references/host-icp.md. Say plainly when something is a weak fit — a short list of good leads beats a long list of bad ones.
5. Find the plausible contact. By preference: community manager / DevRel → engineering head → an EM who's active in the community → HR/L&D. Never facilities as a first contact. Name the source for every person you name.
6. Pick the crossover angle — a key from crossover-angles.md, based on org_type and what you found.
7. Write the fit note, one paragraph, into notes. Specific: what they build, why they'd say yes, what might block it.
8. Append the row to data/venues.csv with stage = not_contacted and next_action_date = the current cycle's T-45.

Output format

Report per org, before writing anything:

ORG          Example Product Labs
Type         product
Fit          Strong - 200-person product company, Baner, PHP in the stack
Contact      Asha Example, Engineering Manager
  source     named author on their engineering blog, Jan 2026
  email      NOT FOUND - needs manual lookup
Angle        php-oss
Why          Ships a PHP-based product, blog shows an open-source bent, Baner
             office is 15 min from the usual crowd. Weekend access unknown -
             worth asking early.
Watch out    No prior community events found; may be a first for them.

Then ask before appending rows.

Finding speaker leads

Same shape, different sources: conference speaker lists (DrupalCon, PHP conferences, local meetups), engineering blog authors, Drupal.org contribution profiles, maintainers of modules the community uses, past DAP attendees who asked good questions.

For a speaker row, note expertise_tags from what they've actually written or talked about, and put the source of the lead in notes. A speaker invite that references their actual work converts far better than a cold ask.

Guardrails

• Never invent a name, role, or email. Blank and flagged beats plausible and wrong.
• Public sources only. No LinkedIn scraping, no email-guessing tools, no data brokers.
• Say where each fact came from, so the opening line of the first touch can be honest.
• If research turns up nothing solid, say the org is unresearchable rather than padding it.
• 8–10 good leads a cycle. Not thirty. See references/sourcing-playbook.md.

The fit note ends up paraphrased in a mail, so run it through the unslop skill before writing it into notes.

References

• references/sourcing-playbook.md — where to look, in order
• skills/venue-outreach/references/host-icp.md — the fit criteria