Creating a Discovery Profile

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Discovery profiles tell Alva what kind of companies to search for. You describe what you’re looking for in natural language, choose the geography to search across, and Alva finds matching companies automatically.

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What is a discovery profile?

A profile is a set of search parameters:

• Profile type — what kind of companies you’re looking for (customers, vendors, partners, suppliers, or competitors). See Profile Types Explained.
• Description — a natural language description of your ideal target
• Geography — which regions, countries, or cities to search in
• Match threshold — how closely a company needs to match to be included

Alva uses your description to extract search categories, then systematically searches across your chosen geography to find matching companies.

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Creating a profile

Go to Discovery → Search Agents and click Create New Search Agent.

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Step 1: Choose your profile type

Select one of the five profile types:

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Step 2: Describe what you’re looking for

Write a short, natural language description of the type of company you’re looking for. Keep it to 1–2 sentences (50 words max). The key principle: describe what the company IS, not what it needs or why it would buy from you. Alva finds companies by searching business directories and reading company websites — so your description should match what a company would say about itself on its own website. Broader is better. A broader description finds more companies — you can always filter and refine the results later. An overly specific description will reject most companies, even good prospects. When you enter your description, Alva runs a validation check that flags any criteria that can’t be matched — such as pain points, technology needs, or employee counts — and suggests an improved version.

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Step 3: Choose your geography

Select the regions and locations to search across. Alva’s database covers over 4.3 million locations worldwide. You can select:

• Entire countries
• Regions (e.g. South East England, California)
• Individual cities or towns

Alva uses round-robin geographic diversity when searching, so results are spread across your chosen locations rather than concentrated in one area.

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Step 4: Review categories

After you submit your description, Alva extracts search categories — specific terms it will use to find companies. You’ll see these listed on the profile page and can:

• Delete individual categories that don’t look right
• Re-extract categories if you’ve updated your description
• Reset to draft to start over

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Profile statuses

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Activating a profile

Once you’re happy with the description, categories, and geography, click Activate to start the search. Alva begins finding companies immediately.

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How searching works

When you activate a profile, Alva begins searching across your chosen geography automatically. Searches are generated and executed in the background — you don’t need to do anything. You can see the progress on the profile detail page, including the number of searches completed and the overall completion percentage. Alva works through your geography systematically, spreading results across locations rather than exhausting one area before moving to the next.

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Managing active profiles

From the profile detail page, you can:

• Pause — temporarily stop searching (useful if you need to review results before more come in)
• Resume — restart a paused profile
• Edit — change the description or settings (while in draft)
• Delete — remove the profile and all its results
• Adjust match threshold — change how strictly companies need to match
• Adjust throttle speed — control how fast searches run
• Toggle auto-import — automatically import high-confidence matches into your CRM

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Per-company billing

Each company discovered uses credits from your balance. The cost per company decreases at higher volumes — the more you discover, the less each company costs. You can see your discovery costs broken down in Settings → Usage. For current pricing, visit Settings → Billing or alvahq.com.