Discover

Discover

Find companies matching any criteria and size how many contacts they hold — all free, no credits consumed. To turn companies into named, verified contacts you then use Domain Search (which consumes credits); for the full "find people by role" pipeline, use the prospecting skill.

Examples

• /hunter:discover fintech startups in France
• /hunter:discover SaaS companies using Salesforce
• "Find healthcare companies in Germany with 100+ employees"
• "How many contacts could I get across these fintech companies?"
• "Series B startups in Europe"
• "Save this search as 'French fintech'"
• "Run my saved search"

Steps

1. Find companies. Pass the user's query directly to Find-Companies as the query parameter — it accepts natural language and handles parsing.

2. Present the results:

# Discover: Fintech Startups in France
**Found:** 43 companies | **Showing:** 10
| Company | Domain | Industry | Size | Location ||---------|--------|----------|------|----------|| Qonto | qonto.com | Fintech | 150 | Paris, FR || Pennylane | pennylane.com | Fintech | 120 | Paris, FR || Swan | swan.io | Fintech | 95 | Paris, FR || ... | ... | ... | ... | ... |
## Next Actions1. Narrow or refine the criteria to surface different results (Find-Companies / Find-People have no offset paging)2. Find the actual contacts at one of these (Domain-Search — consumes credits)3. Estimate how many contacts these companies hold, free (see "Sizing a batch" below)4. Save companies to a list (company-lists skill)5. Run the full people pipeline on these (prospecting skill)6. Rerun one of your saved searches (List-Saved-Searches)

3. If results are too broad (hundreds of companies), suggest narrowing: "That's a broad search. Try adding filters like industry, size, location, or technology."

4. If zero results, suggest loosening criteria: "No companies matched. Try broadening — for example, widen the location or employee range."

5. Remind users this is free: "Discovering companies is free — refine as many times as you'd like. You only spend credits when you pull the actual contacts with Domain Search."

Finding people by role

Find-People does not return individual people — it reports, for each matching company, how many email addresses Hunter's index holds (emails_count.personal for named people, emails_count.generic for role addresses like info@). Use it to size a batch, not to list contacts.

• "How many contacts could I reach across these companies?" → call Find-People. To size a specific selection, pass the exact domains of the displayed/selected companies — not the original query, which re-counts every company matching the search and overstates the budget. Present the totals so the user can budget credits before running Domain Search.
• "Find the CTOs / VPs of Sales / marketing leaders" (actual named people by role) → this is not a Find-People call. Run Find-Companies for the segment, then Domain-Search on each company's domain with the role mapped to server-side filters (seniority: "executive", department: "it", etc. — see the domain-search skill). For the end-to-end version, hand off to the prospecting skill.

Saved Searches

• Reuse an existing saved search → List-Saved-Searches to show the user's saved searches, Get-Saved-Search to load one's stored filters. Find-Companies/Find-People can't re-apply the stored structured filters verbatim, so the natural-language query you reconstruct is approximate — present it to the user to confirm or refine before re-running Find-Companies, so a complex saved search doesn't return an unexpected scope.
• Create a saved search → Create-Saved-Search stores a structured filters payload. After a Find-Companies run, pass the meta.filters from that response to Create-Saved-Search to save the current search. (A bare natural-language string with no filters payload can't be saved this way.)
• Delete a saved search → confirm the name first, then Delete-Saved-Search.

Credit Cost

• Find-Companies, Find-People (counts), and all saved-search operations — Free (no credits).
• Pulling the actual contacts (Domain Search) and verifying them consumes credits — confirm before doing it in bulk.

Success Criteria

At least one company returned matching the user's criteria — with people-by-role requests correctly routed to Domain Search / prospecting rather than to Find-People.