LeadOcean + Clay: target companies that run your competitor

You get a list of buyers at companies whose website shows a competitor's tool, ready for a sequencer. Clay's template follows the same three steps: find companies that use your competitors, find contacts there, then write messages and push them to your sequencer (Clay template, September 2026). Here LeadOcean does the first two with one technologies filter.

The signal comes from site crawls, so it covers about 7.8M of the 67M companies in the database. A company we have not crawled never matches.

How it works

1. Name the competitor. Pick one tool your product replaces, for example HubSpot.
2. Size the list for free. Send the search with count=true and limit 1. It returns a total and spends no records.
3. Add the buyer filters. Narrow by jobFunction, jobLevel, hqCountry and employeeRange. Enum values are exact strings, so look them up with GET /v1/enums.
4. Pull the people. Run POST /v1/people/search and page with cursor, 100 rows a page. One search pages to 10,000 rows, so split bigger lists by country or size.
5. Get the addresses. Search rows carry email_status but never the address. For each row you keep, call POST /v1/people/enrich with meta.source_ids.person_id and reveal_email: true.
6. Load them into Clay. Save the rows as CSV and import them as a table. Keep email_status as a column.
7. Send. Only sequence rows with verified or catch_all_valid status, and hand the table to your sequencer.

Configuration

Size the list first. This call is free.

curl -s -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/search?count=true" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "limit": 1,
    "technologies": ["HubSpot"],
    "hqCountry": ["US"],
    "employeeRange": ["51-200", "201-500"],
    "jobFunction": ["Sales & Business Development"],
    "jobLevel": ["C-Team", "VP"]
  }'

Then drop count=true and set limit to 100 to get the rows. Use the account-first route if you want companies before people: POST /v1/companies/search with the same technologies filter, then GET /v1/companies/{domain}/people.

Run the same sizing step for each rival you target. Keep one list per competitor, so each opener names the right tool. Free counts let you rank rivals by list size before you write a single email.

Field mapping

Cost at 10,000 rows

A 10,000-person list costs 10,000 search records plus 10,000 enrichments for the addresses, so 20,000 records. An enrichment that finds nothing is free. The Free plan covers 1,000 records, one-off. Solo is $97 a month: 100k search records and 10k enrichments every 5 hours. Agency is $497 a month: 25M search records a month and 1M enrichments a day. The count in step 2 is free, so you see the size before you spend.

Clay's HTTP API column needs Growth, at $495 a month billed monthly or $446 billed yearly (Clay pricing, September 2026). This recipe avoids it by importing a CSV. You only need the HTTP column if you enrich rows later, at one Action per call.

Troubleshooting

FAQ