u/Confident-Log-1018

every visitor id vendor will quote you a match rate between 40 and 60%. heres what most of them wont tell you: a big chunk of that number is fuzzy math.

probabilistic matching uses device fingerprinting, ip inference, and household graphs to guess who someone is. it gets the number up, which makes the demo look good and justifies the usage-based bill. but it also quietly counts bot traffic, data center hits, and scraper sessions as 'resolved visitors.' you pay more, feel like you're getting more, but a meaningful slice of what you're actioning isnt a real buyer.

you find out when your reply rates look nothing like the pitch deck. sequences bounce. reps get ghosted. you start to lose trust in the tool and eventually the whole category.

we built midbound on the opposite bet. deterministic, high-confidence matches only. bot and data center traffic filtered aggressively before it hits the counter. no probabilistic inflation. no fingerprint-based guessing that might be right.

the tradeoff: our match rate looks lower on paper. 10-30% depending on the customer versus the 40-60% others quote. but every identified person is someone you can actually email without embarrassing yourself. the data is enriched and executable from the moment it lands. verified name, role, company, contact. no second enrichment vendor required.

this makes us a fit for a specific kind of team. high-traffic sites where even 10% means thousands of real people a month. high-acv motions where one bad outreach costs more than five missed ones. us-focused gtm where our coverage is strongest. teams who already have the downstream motion figured out- crm, sequencing, ai sdrs, ad platforms, reverse etl- or are actively building it.

for pure volume plays this is probably the wrong choice. youll want something that errs on the side of more matches, even if some of those matches are noise. use the right tool for your motion.

this is also why we agree on waterfall setups. deterministic first for the people you're going to actually contact. probabilistic on top for retargeting and audience sync where a false positive doesnt cost you a relationship. different jobs, different tools.

if youve been burned by match rate claims that didnt survive contact with reality, drop it in the comments. this is the single biggest source of vendor trust problems in the category and nobody talks about it honestly.

theres 'intent data' and then theres pure intent. most people use those words interchangeably and its killing their outbound.

bombora, 6sense, g2, techtarget, demandscience, useful tools, but they mostly sell the same thing. account-level signal. sourced from third-party publisher networks. inferred from browsing correlates. an agent cant act on 'acme corp is researching cloud security.' theres no person to reach. no surface the message should come from. no proof the signal reflects a real buyer vs some analyst intern reading a blog post.

this was fine when a human sdr was always in the loop to filter. human reads the signal, judges whether to act, decides how. the filtering absorbed the noise. autonomous agents cant do that. they're only as good as the substrate they run on, and the substrate is mostly garbage.

pure intent is different. it passes three tests.

one. you know exactly who the person is. not an inferred account. not a device id. a named professional with a verified email and role.

two. the signal comes from your own website. not a third party network. your surface, your traffic, your data.

three. the action you observed IS the buying behavior, not a correlate of it. a named vp spending fourteen minutes on your pricing page is buying behavior. 'someone in their industry read a blog about the category' is a correlate.

pricing page visits from a named decision maker pass all three. demo page dwell from a committee member passes all three. pricing calculator interaction from a director-level buyer passes all three. almost nothing else in the market does.

this matters because agents need actionable signals, not analytical ones. the old intent market was built for humans to read reports off of. the new one has to be built for agents to act on in real time.

curious what signals your team treats as actionable today and which ones get ignored. if you're running any of the big intent vendors, are you actioning at the account level or filtering down to named humans first?

theres 'intent data' and then theres pure intent. most people use those words interchangeably and its killing their outbound.

bombora, 6sense, g2, techtarget, demandscience, useful tools, but they mostly sell the same thing. account-level signal. sourced from third-party publisher networks. inferred from browsing correlates. an agent cant act on 'acme corp is researching cloud security.' theres no person to reach. no surface the message should come from. no proof the signal reflects a real buyer vs some analyst intern reading a blog post.

this was fine when a human sdr was always in the loop to filter. human reads the signal, judges whether to act, decides how. the filtering absorbed the noise. autonomous agents cant do that. they're only as good as the substrate they run on, and the substrate is mostly garbage.

pure intent is different. it passes three tests.

one. you know exactly who the person is. not an inferred account. not a device id. a named professional with a verified email and role.

two. the signal comes from your own website. not a third party network. your surface, your traffic, your data.

three. the action you observed IS the buying behavior, not a correlate of it. a named vp spending fourteen minutes on your pricing page is buying behavior. 'someone in their industry read a blog about the category' is a correlate.

pricing page visits from a named decision maker pass all three. demo page dwell from a committee member passes all three. pricing calculator interaction from a director-level buyer passes all three. almost nothing else in the market does.

this matters because agents need actionable signals, not analytical ones. the old intent market was built for humans to read reports off of. the new one has to be built for agents to act on in real time.

curious what signals your team treats as actionable today and which ones get ignored. if you're running any of the big intent vendors, are you actioning at the account level or filtering down to named humans first?

https://reddit.com/link/1stli3l/video/b789x7ogjywg1/player

inbound waits for someone to fill a form. outbound blasts cold lists hoping to catch someone at the right moment. both models were built for a world where buyers told you they were interested.

that world is changing drastically...

the modern b2b buyer does 90% of their research invisibly. they hit your site from a linkedin ad, bounce to a competitor, come back a week later, read two case studies, open your pricing page at 9pm on a tuesday, sit on it for eleven minutes, then close the tab. they dont fill a form. they dont book a demo. they might come back in three weeks. they might buy from whoever reaches out to them first when they finally raise their hand.

that invisible middle is where buying actually happens now. not the 1-3% who convert on form fills. not the cold outbound lists who never asked to be contacted. the 97% of your traffic doing real evaluation work while you have no idea who they are.

we named the company midbound because thats where the money sits. between inbound and outbound. closer to your buyers than either of those motions can reach on their own.

but the hard part isnt naming it. the hard part is actually seeing into it. knowing who those people are, what they're looking at, what signals predict they're about to make a decision. thats what the last 18 months have been for us, and what the next few posts are about.

if you run outbound or demand gen at a b2b company and you've felt the ground shift under you- reply rates dropping, ad costs up, forms converting worse every quarter, this is the reason why. your buyers moved. most tools havent caught up.

more to come. im eli, co-founder and ceo at midbound. sub if you want the rest- were posting twice a week for the next six weeks, walking through why this category exists, what we built, what we got wrong, and where we think this whole space is going. ill read and reply to every comment.