Research that shows its work.
Most research arrives as a conclusion you are asked to trust. WalterSignal’s arrives with the machine that produced it visible — the sources it swept, the providers it ranked, the grade it gave itself before you saw it.
- Status
- Live in production
- Runs on
- Self-hosted infrastructure
- Output
- CSV · PDF · workbook
- Verified
- July 2026
21
enrichment providers in the stack
3
of them cost money
4
quality tiers, graded before delivery
12
phases in the intro-map flow
Read from the engine, not the brochure · verified July 2026
One question, five stages, one artifact.
The same engine runs behind every report, every enriched list, and every intro map. Nothing about it is a black box on purpose.
- Stage 01
A question goes in
Research starts from a decision, not a topic.
A market to enter, a vendor to displace, a diligence question to close. The brief fixes the scope and the depth before anything runs, because the depth determines how much of the engine is worth spending on the answer.
- Scoped brief
- Fixed depth
- Named decision
- Stage 02
The sources get swept
Open sources first, and a lot of them.
Self-hosted meta-search runs the query across many engines at once without a rate-limited API in the middle. Public filings, hiring boards, code hosts, company databases, and the target's own site all get read. Paid sources stay switched off unless the free pass came back thin.
- Self-hosted meta-search
- SEC filings
- ATS + hiring signals
- Site + tech-stack scraping
- Stage 03
The waterfall runs
Twenty-one providers, ordered cheapest-first.
Each record falls through the provider stack until it is complete. Only three providers in the stack cost money, and a record only reaches them if the free ones failed to answer. A per-record spend cap stops a bad run from becoming a bad invoice.
- 21 providers
- 3 that cost money
- Per-record spend cap
- Stage 04
A judge grades it
The work is scored before anyone sees it.
An LLM-as-a-judge harness grades the output against the brief, and every record carries a quality tier. Anything that lands in the bottom tier is reworked or dropped rather than shipped. Each field keeps the source it came from, so a claim can be traced back rather than trusted.
- GOLD
- SILVER
- BRONZE
- FAILED
- Stage 05
An artifact comes out
Something a person can act on, not a data dump.
The same backbone renders several finished formats: written research reports, intro maps that trace the warm path into an account, dossier packs on a person or company, and enriched lists with a source behind every field.
- Reports
- Intro maps
- Dossier packs
- Enriched lists
Read the output, not a summary of it.
Two reports the engine produced, at two depths. Each is readable in full — the whole document, not a gated excerpt. Research is a dated snapshot, so every report says when it was built.
WalterFetch: Building a Zero-Cost Lead Enrichment Engine
A product teardown of WalterFetch itself — the 15-provider enrichment waterfall, the quality tiers, and how most records reach GOLD at near-zero marginal cost.
Commercial Due Diligence: AI Consulting Services Market 2026
An investment-grade diligence report on the AI consulting market: the integration-vs-transformation thesis, segment economics, and where the moats actually are.
The engine is the easy part.
Knowing which question is worth pointing it at is the work. Bring us the decision you are stuck on and we will scope what it takes to answer it.