A bought list hands you a title with no provenance. A name from the company's own leadership page held 12 times out of 13; an aggregator name, 0 of 17.
Decision-makers, plural. The bought list says CEO. The company page says that person is a customer who left a review. For a forty-person agency the owner is one name, and nobody on the list found it.
By hand today
“I’ve emailed ~300, but about half were to general emails (info@, sales@, etc).”
Hans Desjarlais, on Indie Hackers
That is how the stage starts. Half the list goes to a shared inbox because nobody found a name. The other half goes to whoever a bought list called the decision-maker. Job adverts say “decision-makers” in the plural and never say the owner.
For a company under a thousand people, the person who can say yes is one person: the chief executive, the founder who still runs it, the managing director, the owner. Everyone else can say “interesting” and pass it up the line. A bought list hands you a name with a title and no way to tell where it came from. Sometimes the team page. Sometimes a customer review signed “Chief Executive Officer” by someone who runs a different company.
What it costs you each week
$40,000 to $50,000 a year, the advertised salary for a sales development representative whose duty is connecting with decision makers. That is the hire who reads company pages so that you do not have to.
Source: a US job advert for a sales development representative, read 7 September 2026
The advert, posted by a US software company on the Greenhouse job board, lists “building rapport with the gatekeepers, connecting with decision makers to set up meetings” as the job. The other route is a seat on a search tool at a monthly price, plus your own evenings. Neither tells you which names are real.
The build
Open Codex. Ask for the ladder. Every name carries where it came from: a leadership page, a press piece, a testimonial, or a list. Only the top two rungs reach the CRM. The other two wait until the company page says so.
Open Codex in the folder that holds the company list from chapter 3, each with a domain and a reason. Then say what you want:
For every company in companies.csv, fetch the company website and find the page
that lists its leadership (about, team, leadership, our people). Return the person
named as chief executive, founder who runs the company, managing director or owner.
Record the rung each name came from: 1 a leadership listing, 2 a press piece or a
filing, 3 a testimonial or review block, 4 an aggregator only. Ignore any name that
sits inside a review, a quote or a star rating. Write rung 1 and rung 2 names to
people.csv with the page URL and the line of evidence. Write rung 3 and rung 4 to
holding.csv. Never write a rung 3 name as the buyer. Report the count per rung and
list every site you could not read.
What comes back is a short script, a run over the list, and a report: names per rung, and the sites that could not be read. A dead site or a page behind a challenge screen is a stop, not a retry.
Two files are saved. people.csv holds the names you may write to, each with the page it came from and the sentence that proves it. holding.csv holds the rest. Load the first into your CRM as contacts, with two fields on each: where the name came from, and the evidence line.
Then the second pass. For each holding row that came from a list, ask Codex to fetch the company page and answer one question: does it name this person in this role, someone else, or nobody. Tell it to ignore testimonials, or it will hand a customer back.
The pattern is the provenance ladder ArkOne runs on its own CRM, written down in .claude/skills/ceo-capture/SKILL.md. Over 33 companies in one session, a name from the leadership listing was writable 12 times out of 13; an aggregator name 0 times out of 17; a testimonial 0 of 3 (lines 28 to 31). Fetching the company page promoted about one aggregator row in four (line 45). Those are ArkOne numbers on an ArkOne list; you read your own.
What it feeds
Getting their email. Each person now has a name, a title and the page that proves it. Nobody guesses a name. The number to read: names from the company page against names in total. On our list, 12 of 13 held.
The next stage looks for an address, starting from a name a page has confirmed. That is what makes the address findable rather than guessable.
The number that proves this stage worked is the count of contacts whose name came from the company page, against contacts in total. Read it from the CRM field, not from memory. On the ArkOne list the top rung held 12 of 13 times (.claude/skills/ceo-capture/SKILL.md line 28).
What stays with a person
The review signed CEO. The tool says the name came from the company website. A person reads the line and sees a customer quote. An Acting CEO, a truncated name, a founder with no title: a person rules once and writes the ruling down.
Rung 3 is the one that fools a check, because it passes “it came from the company website”. Three catches from one ArkOne batch: a five-star review signed “Chief Executive Officer”; a chief executive of a different company praising this one; a managing director lifted out of a Google review block. The evidence line beside each name is what lets a person catch these in a glance.
The rulings do not move either. Is an “Acting CEO” the buyer this quarter? Does a truncated surname count? Is a founder with no title on the page the person who says yes? The tool sorts. A person decides, once, and the decision is written where the next run can read it.
The tools you already pay for
Nothing new to buy.
CRM gains two fields on every contact: the source of the name, and the line of evidence.
Browser is driven by the tool; it fetches the team page you would have opened by hand.
Spreadsheet keeps the holding rows, and empties as pages confirm them.
No data vendor. A search seat you already hold stays useful for a profile URL once a name is confirmed; it is not where the name comes from.
One name per company, with the page that proves it. Then the email can be found, not guessed.
Ask: On your list today, how many names can you trace to the company page itself?
The ladder here is chapter 4 of twelve, after keeping only the companies that fit and before getting their email without guessing. The book, Building a real outbound engine with Claude Code and Codex, end to end, runs the whole engine in order, one chapter per stage. A free starter edition for firms under fifty people is coming through the 100k programme.