If Fabian Maume were launching his next product today, he'd publish it as an Actor on Apify Store, let the marketplace bring the first users, and only build a full SaaS once people kept coming back. He learned that the long way, through years of automations that only he could run.
These days he gets to do it for other people. As a senior product marketing manager at Apify, he helps developers launch their Actors on what has become the marketplace of tools for AI, where people and AI agents run them on demand. In this Life at Apify story, he talks about the road in, and what the job looks like from the inside.
Growth hacking, Brno and 76 launches
Fabian got into growth hacking during his bachelor's degree in France, reading blog after blog on the subject. He says that it suits the French: La Growth Machine, lemlist and Phantombuster all started there.
The French have what they call "System D" to get the most done with limited resources. This is the core of growth hacking philosophy.
-- Fabian Maume, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Apify
So when it came to a master's, he did the math. A full degree in Brno, Czech Republic, cost less than a single year of study in France, so that's where he went.
His first Product Hunt launch came in 2017, when he helped Smartlook launch while working there as a freelance growth hacker. He was doing growth work for more than 15 SaaS companies and had about 20 ready-made automations sitting on the shelf, waiting to become products. To turn them into products, he went down the indie hacking rabbit hole and tried building Chrome extensions, which were the easiest way to ship something with a front end before AI could write one for you. It cost him a lot of time. "I'm not a front-end person," he says.
By 2021 he'd changed tack and was selling the automation as a service instead, hunting launches for other companies with a pipeline he had automated himself. Salesfit was the first. The catch was that it was a Python script that needed Selenium and a Windows setup, which nobody else was going to install. He sold consulting packages instead and ran the script for clients himself. He has hunted 76 products to date, and along the way started a YouTube channel on growth hacking and automation.
QApop, and what it taught him
Hunting wasn't the only way he put his scripts to work. In August 2020, before he started hunting for clients, Fabian launched QApop, a SaaS built on his most successful script. It mined Quora and gave users a shortlist of questions worth answering. Fabian knew Quora well, too, as a Top Writer in Email Marketing there. With a front-end developer as his partner, it grew into a standalone SaaS that users rated highly and that sold well on lifetime deals.
A Quora audit gives you most of its value the first time you run it, so even with extras like keyword monitoring, people had less reason to come back every month. That's hard to know before you launch, and a SaaS built from scratch also has to earn its search traffic from zero.
If I were to launch a new product around data mining, I would use Apify Marketplace as a test bench. Leverage the marketplace domain rank to get some SEO traffic fast and monitor retention to see if the idea is worth pursuing as a standalone product.
-- Fabian Maume, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Apify
In March 2023 he sold QApop. Soon after, ChatGPT filled Quora with AI-generated answers and changed it as a marketing channel. Fabian calls it perfect timing, and it's hard to argue.
Apify from the outside
Fabian first used Apify in October 2020, a couple of months after QApop launched, mostly scraping Google with the site: operator to build lead lists, and wrote about it on the Apify blog. When Quora started blocking by IP, he moved the part of QApop that needed proxies to Apify and kept the rest on AWS.
For his consulting clients, most of them in lead generation, Apify stayed behind the scenes. They found even Phantombuster, then the friendlier tool, too technical, so he ran Apify for them as a managed service rather than teaching them to use it. He says the platform has come a long way since, with AI taking away much of the complexity for non-technical users. He still uses both tools, each for what it does best: "Phantombuster for anything requiring login, Apify for anything requiring IP rotation."
Through his Product Hunt work, he also became one of the people Apify called on when it had something to launch, and he hunted Crawlee on Product Hunt in 2022.
Joining Apify
After the sale, Fabian went back to client work as a fractional CMO, which pulled him away from web data for a while. He kept following it, though, and the first Prague Crawl, in 2025, showed him where it was heading.
It was eye-opening on the direction of the industry. AI agents are as good as the data they have access to, and web scraping is a key component to provide agents with a good data layer.
-- Fabian Maume, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Apify
He went looking for a job at the point where web data meets AI and found it in product marketing at Apify. The work turned out to be familiar from his fractional CMO years. "I manage marketing for a cluster of products," he says. "Those products are just Actors instead of being SaaS."
The job from the inside
Now he's a senior product marketing manager at Apify, which in practice means a bit of everything. One day he's planning a feature launch with the engineering teams, the next he's helping a developer whose Actors have vanished from Store search, or writing the monthly report on how his cluster of Actors is doing.
He also looks after the developers who publish on Apify Store, which now lists more than 100,000 tools. He runs community open hours and webinars for them, mentors at hackathons, records podcasts, and briefs creators who make videos about Apify.
In September, for example, he hosted a webinar with Salesforge and two outbound agencies that generate more than $1 million in monthly pipeline for their clients, using Apify Actors to find buying signals and enrich leads.
What surprised him most on the inside was how fast AI is changing the work itself, his own included.
Manually, it takes me 1 to 3 hours to develop an Actor. With the proper Claude skill, the work is down to half an hour and a few cents of tokens.
-- Fabian Maume, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Apify
So when something keeps coming up, he builds a Claude skill for it. One drafts social posts for colleagues, and another, made for a recent open hour, helps developers find ideas for improving their Actors.
That makes him the marketing team's go-to when a technical problem gets complicated, and he'll happily sit down and walk anyone through it.
Outside work
Fabian says he rarely leaves his computer, but when he does, he's usually out hiking with his dog, Prezes. He keeps going in winter, too, and one hike at -25°C took him across a frozen lake.
For a while he did historical dancing, which is how he came to own a kilt. Kilts cover such a long stretch of history, he explains, that one gets you into the hobby on a budget.
He also drinks what he calls "an unreasonable amount of caffeine," spread across tea, coffee and maté. He brews his own maté liqueur, too, and because he's a marketer, it has full branding.
If you're ever in Brno, Fabian's tip is 10-Z, a former nuclear shelter that's now half hotel, half museum. He showed up fully equipped, gas mask and all.
Apify from every side
Fabian has seen Apify from almost every side. He started as a user, scraping Google for lead lists and keeping QApop running when Quora began blocking him. He ran it behind the scenes for his consulting clients and hunted Crawlee on Product Hunt long before he joined. Now he spends his days helping developers do what he'd do himself next time: put an idea on Apify Store, see whether people keep coming back, and build from there.
Work with us
While a lot of tech companies are cutting, Apify is hiring. Have a look at the open roles on the careers page, or come say hi to Fabian at one of the community open hours he runs for Apify Store developers.
Want to see Fabian in action? Here's the Salesforge webinar he hosted in September.
