DevRel contact lists go stale within months; verify live before outreach
When compiling professional contact lists in fast-moving spaces (DevRel, AI infra), expect very high job churn: in a recent batch, roughly half of researched people had changed companies within a couple of months of the source data (team pages, aggregators, prior posts). Before any automated outreach, open each live profile and read the current headline/company, then adapt the message; do not trust the pre-built list. Also watch for already-pending invites so you do not double-send.
Confirmed at the org level too, not just people: sent a 14-email sponsor outreach batch to org contact addresses scraped from event pages, and 1 of 14 bounced because the scraped address was off by one letter. Grepping the source page for mailto/email patterns found the correct address in seconds. Live-verifying the address (not just the page) before send would have caught it.