Why We Built Exarich: A Founder's Story

I'll never forget the moment I realized we needed to build Exarich. It was 2 AM, and I was staring at my screen, watching yet another $150 charge from Clay hit our company credit card. We'd just burned through our entire monthly budget, and we were only halfway through our lead list.

The Problem Started with Instantly

Like many sales teams, we started with Instantly. It seemed like the obvious choice—everyone was using it, the marketing looked great, and the promise of "unlimited leads" was enticing.

But reality hit hard, fast.

The issues with Instantly were glaring:

• No website context: Instantly would give us basic contact info, but nothing about what the company actually did. We'd reach out to leads only to find out they weren't even in our target market.
• Missed opportunities: Without website parsing, we couldn't filter leads based on the technologies they used, their company size signals, or other crucial qualifying factors.
• Generic outreach: Every email felt like a shot in the dark. We had no context to personalize, no insights to reference, just names and email addresses.

Then We Tried Clay

Frustrated with Instantly, we switched to Clay. On paper, it had everything we needed—integrations, website scraping, custom workflows. The promise of "build anything" was exactly what we wanted.

But Clay introduced a whole new set of problems:

• Complexity overload: Setting up a simple enrichment workflow required watching hours of tutorials and understanding their proprietary "table" system. What should take 5 minutes took 5 hours.
• Expensive mistakes: Every time we misconfigured something, we burned credits. And boy, did we misconfigure things often. Our first month, we accidentally ran the same enrichment three times and got charged accordingly.
• It never "just worked": Clay is powerful, sure, but it's built for data engineers, not sales teams. We wanted to enrich leads, not become Clay experts.

The "Aha" Moment

The realization hit me during a particularly frustrating debugging session: Why isn't there a tool that just works out of the box?

Sales teams don't need infinite customization. They need:

• Website parsing that actually works


• AI summaries to understand each lead quickly


• Smart filters to separate good leads from bad


• Bulk processing that doesn't require a PhD to set up

That's when we started building Exarich.

What We Built Differently

With Exarich, we made three core decisions:

1. Works out of the box
No complicated setup, no tutorials required. Upload your leads, get enriched data. That's it.

2. Website context is non-negotiable
Every lead gets their website scraped and parsed. Our AI generates summaries so you know immediately if they're a good fit.

3. Transparent, affordable pricing
No surprise charges, no credit systems that punish mistakes. Pay for what you use, and know exactly what that will cost upfront.

The Road Ahead

We're not trying to replace every tool in your stack. We're not promising infinite customization or enterprise-grade features you'll never use.

We're solving one problem really, really well: enriching leads at scale so you can focus on selling, not configuring tools.

If you've ever felt the frustration of overpaying for Instantly or getting lost in Clay's complexity, Exarich was built for you.

We're still early, and we're still learning. But every feature we build, every decision we make, starts with one question: "Does this help sales teams do their job better?"

That's why we built Exarich. And that's the promise we're committed to keeping.

Ready to try lead enrichment that actually works? Start your free trial today.