Elias Stråvik is a product guy who is all about building the best possible tools. But over the past few years, he's started noticing something shifting in the startup world. "Technology is getting commoditized," he says. "When I talk to founders now, it's less about building products - it's almost always about sales and marketing."
This change has opened a whole new path in how he sees technology and the problems it can solve. As AI and automation tools advance, Elias sees technical skills becoming less and less of a competitive advantage - it’s become about finding the right customers for your product and closing deals.
Today, Elias leads Prospecterra. The company helps revenue operations and growth teams implement and scale their go-to-market strategies through automation. At any given time, Elias might be helping a client automate their outbound campaigns, score inbound leads, or clean up their CRM data.
Turning research into relationships
Helping enterprise-level companies, he works with sales development reps who research leads across different countries. "They each have their own markets," Elias explains, "and they do their own prospecting, looking through endless websites and social media profiles."
A salesperson told him she spends two hours daily just prospecting - going to websites, pasting data into ChatGPT, and doing endless research. For Elias, this repetitive work represented an opportunity to apply engineering principles to sales. His vision: let machines handle the research while humans focus on people.
The power of automated research
After exploring various solutions, Elias discovered a winning combination: Clay for data organization paired with Apify for specialized data collection. "Clay is perfect for go-to-market strategies, but we needed more.” With Actors (web scrapers and automation tools), Apify Store complimented Clay perfectly at a fraction of the cost.
"Apify has such an incredible marketplace of data tools, usually very cheap per run. For sales teams looking at 2,000 companies, it's an incredible tool."
— Elias Stråvik, Prospecterra
Socials at scale
For one client, Prospecterra needed to find YouTubers who also ran podcasts and were actively posting, and "At that time, Clay couldn't check recent YouTube activity."
"With Apify, we found 500 perfect matches that would have taken weeks to discover manually."
— Elias Stråvik, Prospecterra
This kind of scale transforms what's possible for sales teams. Instead of researching individual prospects, they can evaluate entire market segments at once. A process that might take hours per prospect becomes nearly instant when automated.
But it's not just about finding data - it's about letting sales teams do what they do best. "We can check tech stacks, open jobs, get rich prospect data, and feed it all back to sales teams automatically," explains Elias. They spend time selling instead of searching."
This is where Apify's developer-first approach shines. Rather than clicking through interfaces or waiting for features, Elias can build exactly what his clients need. If a specific data point would help qualify leads better, he can usually find or build an Actor to collect it.
Real results in real markets
Elias’s approach is delivering results across industries and use cases. For example, one client achieved an impressive 40% response rate using AI-powered lead identification. An enterprise client transformed its sales process by shifting from researching prospects one at a time to evaluating entire market segments at once.
"It's not about replacing salespeople. It's about letting them focus on what humans do best - the machines can handle finding needles in haystacks."
— Elias Stråvik, Prospecterra
Scaling and saving
When clients first see what's possible with automation, they often worry about costs. "That's where Apify is really great," says Elias. "The marketplace model means we only pay for what we use. I can almost guarantee I'll save clients money while getting better results."
This cost-effectiveness lets Prospecterra scale its services. Whether a client needs to analyze 100 companies or 10,000, the automated workflows can handle it.
Engineering the future of sales
Elias is on a mission to grow. "I want to find a few powerful tools I really believe in and get deep into them," he says. "Apify is one of those tools - it lets us solve almost any data challenge for our clients."
He's also exploring building his own Apify Actors to solve specific sales challenges. "When you see the same problem over and over, you can build something that solves it permanently. That's the beauty of having a platform that's both powerful and flexible."
For Elias, the impact of automation goes far beyond efficiency. By freeing sales teams from tedious research, he's helping them spend more time connecting with customers. This shift has not only allowed to continue building exceptional products, but has also given him the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on people's lives.
