Gui Stetelle is a go-to-market operator based in São Paulo, Brazil, who spent close to ten years in sales, runs an agency called Decade Journey, and insists he's "no developer at all." He also won the $2,000 Latin American (LATAM) regional prize in the Apify $1M Challenge.
Ten years in sales is the short version. He's made more than 50,000 cold calls and generated eight figures in pipeline, working his way from SDR to account executive to sales manager at high-growth companies, including Bringg and Tractian. His own Apify profile puts it bluntly: "I'm the weirdo who went to engineering school because I love building things, and then spent my entire career in sales because I love money." The engineering school part is real: he studied mechanical engineering, then lasted about two months in the job before sales took over.
His first Actor was also the first thing he ever built in a terminal.
Check out Gui's talk at Apify's Prague Crawl 2026
He expected a headache
Gui came to Apify the way a lot of his customers came to him: with a lead-generation problem. He was already using Actors to scrape LinkedIn and websites for his agency. What pulled him into building was the Challenge, and one detail specifically.
One thing that caught my attention was that you guys provided a prompt. A prompt that I could use, and it would generate basically the entire Actor in itself.
-- Gui Stetelle, founder of Decade Journey
He fed the prompt to Gemini, pointed it at Apify's documentation. He expected the worst.
I was fully expecting it to be a headache, because I also use n8n. In n8n you can fully expect that the first run of the automation is not going to work, and then you have to keep debugging it. But for the Actor, surprisingly enough, it was quite easy.
-- Gui Stetelle, founder of Decade Journey
An address in, a satellite photo out
The Actor he built was almost absurdly specific. "It basically gets an address and transforms that into a satellite image, and outputs a URL with the image," he said. He assumed nobody else would ever want it.
His client did, though. That customer sells commercial lighting, so the best prospects are massive warehouses and large manufacturing plants. The trouble is that nobody sells that list.
Square footage is not really a filter in any B2B database.
-- Gui Stetelle, founder of Decade Journey
So he built the filter himself. The Actor takes an address, which every B2B database carries, and returns the satellite view from directly overhead. Then AI reads the image and picks out a reference object, a car or a tree, because those come in standard sizes. From that, it works out the square footage of the building. What comes back is a targeted list nobody could have bought.
The first version ran on n8n and worked fine. He published it as an Actor because he figured other companies were probably stuck on the same thing.
That's the pattern in how he thinks about Actors. He starts from a customer who has a real problem in front of them, then works out what to build.
The Actor itself is published as Google Maps Satellite Image. You paste in a list of addresses, pick a zoom level, and get back a high-resolution image for each one at four cents an image, with the Google API costs bundled into the price.
The Actor nobody else was supposed to want is the one that won. It took the challenge's Latin American regional prize, $2,000, and a place on the results page beside the standouts from APAC, EMEA, and North America. The judges singled out his quality control.
Everything runs while he reads Slack
Gui pairs Apify with Clay, one of the go-to-market tools he lives in, and that combination is where his agency scales.
He monitors LinkedIn mentions for his clients' brands. He used to wire this up as an n8n or Zapier automation for each one. Now the clients' target companies sit in a Clay table.
Every Monday it runs that Clay table and gives me results, and I don't have to lift a finger. The notifications are sent to my Slack. I just read it and share it with my clients.
-- Gui Stetelle, founder of Decade Journey
His goal is an AI-native agency, the kind Y Combinator recently put on its request-for-startups list. Service businesses are notoriously hard to scale because growth means hiring. Gui is trying to grow without adding a large team, and Apify is how he removes the manual work.
What LATAM actually wants
Gui has a read on his region, because he watched the market find him. When he started, all of his customers were outside Brazil. Today, about 30% are Brazilian companies. The go-to-market wave that hit the US and Europe first is arriving in Latin America now, a few years late.
The region is its own market, not a translated version of someone else's. Buyers are far more price-sensitive, since a swing in the dollar hits harder against the local currency. The influencer and creator economy is enormous. And there is a real preference for buying local.
People are a lot more inclined to purchase from local tools even if they are not the best options in the market, just for having the local support, someone they can talk to that speaks their language. That's more notable in LATAM than globally.
-- Gui Stetelle, founder of Decade Journey
He sees the same gap in what gets built. Amazon has no shortage of scrapers. Mercado Libre, the roughly $10 billion marketplace that dominates Brazil and much of South America, has very few.
I truly believe the next thousand Actors should likely come from outside the US and the EU.
-- Gui Stetelle, founder of Decade Journey
Just start
Gui's whole story runs on one idea: the narrower the tool, the better the odds. He built something he was certain nobody else wanted, for a single customer, and that is the one that won. What sits in his ClickUp folder is more of the same, niche databases the bigger scrapers handle badly.
He's careful about the hype. The barrier to shipping software is basically zero now, he says, so the advantage has moved to distribution and to talking to enough customers to find out what works. That second part is what publishing on Apify does for him. He builds the specific thing one client needs, puts it in Apify Store, and other people with the same problem turn up.
The interview had already wrapped when he came back with one more thought.
You don't need to know code with Apify. Just start. That's it.
-- Gui Stetelle, founder of Decade Journey
