B2B databases miss small businesses and lag behind job changes, and for an outbound agency both gaps cost meetings. Grundwerk Digital fills them with Actors from Apify Store: Google Maps for the businesses those databases don't list, and a LinkedIn check on the day each message goes out, so nobody gets asked about a job they left a month ago. The same data then gives each email and cold call something specific to say.
Grundwerk is a Berlin agency that books sales meetings for B2B companies across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, running AI-personalized outreach over cold email, LinkedIn, and phone, and it promises clients 10 to 30 meetings a month. It has sent more than 10 million emails, and one client, Birdsview, closed €240,000 in ARR within 74 days. Grundwerk runs its campaigns on software it built itself, on a large database of companies in those three countries. Co-founder and CEO Tom Soto Schiller builds those systems, for the agency's own campaigns and for outside clients that rely on the same data, and he picked Apify for "reliability, data quality, and speed of development."
Now we're building really advanced automations, and there's no other possibility than using Apify. You could switch to a competitor maybe, but it would be a lot of pain. No other company has the number and the accuracy of those scrapers.
-- Tom Soto Schiller, Co-Founder & CEO, Grundwerk Digital
The challenge: databases that miss leads and go stale
Grundwerk started out the way most agencies do, pulling data from a command line and living with whatever the databases had. That left it short in two ways.
Small local businesses barely show up in the big B2B databases, which capped how many prospects Grundwerk could find for a client in a given niche.
And the data it did have went stale, which hurt most on LinkedIn. An email address belongs to a company, so if it still delivers, the person is probably still there. A LinkedIn profile belongs to the person, and it stays live after they move on.
When you do LinkedIn outreach and someone has left the company, and you write to them, 'Hey, how are you doing at Apify?', but they're not working at Apify anymore, they think, you're stupid. If the data is even two or three weeks old, it's really bad for your reputation with your client.
-- Tom Soto Schiller, Co-Founder & CEO, Grundwerk Digital
Every agency running LinkedIn outreach carries that risk. A few stale messages are enough for a client to decide the channel is hurting their reputation and switch to email only. Grundwerk decided to check every profile first.
The solution: collect what the databases can't
Grundwerk now runs the Google Maps Scraper at volume to find the small businesses the databases miss. More companies on the list mean a bigger market for each client and, as Tom puts it, better client results.
The data is accurate enough to build a pitch on. Working on behalf of SEO agencies, Grundwerk found local businesses with no website on their Google Business Profile and told them so directly: "Hey, listen, you don't have any website on your Google Maps, that's cringe, you're losing clients," with an offer to build one for free as a way to get acquainted. Plenty of them wrote back to say it was true, which told Tom the data was right.
On LinkedIn, it runs the LinkedIn Profile Scraper on every prospect on the day the message goes out, to check whether the person still holds the role. A data provider would charge for a full enrichment record the agency does not need.
Doing this without an Apify scraper is impossible. Database APIs always cost a lot of money, and we don't need that information. We just need to know: does this person still work there or not? LinkedIn has a lot of bot detection, but I don't know what you guys did, your LinkedIn scraping is crazy good.
-- Tom Soto Schiller, Co-Founder & CEO, Grundwerk Digital
Tom's current project is a cold-call research note that runs twenty research prompts against each prospect, five of them on Apify Actors, and puts the result in the CRM, so "when the salesperson calls someone, it's a well-researched cold call, and it makes sense for the person on the other end of the line." For referrals, Grundwerk scrapes its clients' own LinkedIn followers and turns them into an ask that is hard to wave off: "We scraped all of your followers. Here are five people you're connected with. Are they just random connections, or do you know any of them personally?" When the client says they know one, Grundwerk asks for the introduction. "It's a different level of referral system," he says.
The team builds all of this with Claude Code, which calls Apify through its API, and gives every scraper its own monthly cost limit.
Anyone using Claude will probably get Apify as the first recommendation. Everyone I know knows Apify, everyone who counts, everyone with even a little experience in the field. And onboarding is easy because it's not rocket science. You scrape something and you get the data. It's easier than making a piece of bread.
-- Tom Soto Schiller, Co-Founder & CEO, Grundwerk Digital
The results
- Bigger markets for each client. Google Maps adds the small businesses that B2B databases miss.
- LinkedIn outreach clients can trust. Every prospect's role is checked on the day of contact, so stale messages no longer put the channel at risk.
- Personal pitches. Openers and referral asks start from data scraped for that prospect, with cold-call notes next.
Asked what would break if Apify disappeared, Tom's first answer, with a laugh, was that he'd have more money in the bank. His second: "Probably two months later, delivery quality would break." Replacing LinkedIn scraping in-house is "not possible," he says, and for Google Maps or Google Reviews, "it just doesn't make sense."
His summary of what Apify has meant for the team came down to value.
Apify has been easy to set up and gives us the best value for money on the market right now. It covers a huge variety of use cases, and each of them is a critical part of our business.
-- Tom Soto Schiller, Co-Founder & CEO, Grundwerk Digital
