Nick Saraev switched gears from medicine to build successful digital media businesses. His work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Bloomberg, and Apple News, with one of his books becoming an Amazon Kindle bestseller. Today, Nick combines running his automated ventures with teaching others how to build passive income streams through smart automation strategies.
Before discovering automation, Nick built his business through pure hustle. In 2019, he launched a door-to-door digital marketing company, connecting with 50 to 100 local businesses each day to share his marketing expertise. While winning clients face-to-face worked well, Nick wanted a better way to help even more businesses through the power of automation.
“I found it very unscalable and knew there was a better way,” Nick says. Instead of physically visiting businesses, he started experimenting with scraping leads digitally from home.
His company tested different approaches, using Make.com (then Integromat) and custom scripts, but kept running into challenges with proxies, CAPTCHAs, and web scraping limitations. That’s when he discovered that Apify was the missing piece of the puzzle. “Eventually, I found Apify, which offered so much out of the box,” says Nick.
Building an automation powerhouse
Nick launched 1SecondCopy in 2020, quickly growing it into one of Canada's largest content marketplaces. By using Apify for web scraping, he could skip the technical headaches and pour his energy into scaling the business. This system helped him scale his content company to earn over $90,000 a month.
“I combined Apify with Make.com, other no-code tools, and a few custom servers for processing. At one point, we were using Apify-sourced records to reach out to several thousand people per day!”
-- Nick Saraev, 1SecondCopy and Maker School
Alongside 1SecondCopy, "I started an automation agency that specialized in scraping and outreach, where I used Apify all the time and recommended it highly," Nick says. His success with automation led him to share his methods on YouTube, eventually launching Maker School - a community and AI automation agency accelerator where he teaches others to build scalable systems using Apify and no-code tools.
Nick built a strong automation setup with Apify and shared his approach with others, leading to over 250 referrals. Apify is a reliable tool that keeps things simple, so the people he refers continue using it to scrape data, automate their workflows, and grow their businesses quickly. As Nick stays committed to Apify in his own work, he sees his earnings rise steadily, proving the value of sticking with what works.
