The founder of ParseForge was scanning business listing sites, looking for his next acquisition. Like thousands of other search funders and investors, he relied on email alerts to catch new opportunities before the competition. But the platform's alerts were costing him deals.
"You'd get an email saying, 'Hey, this fits your buy box,'" the founder recalls. "But you couldn't actually get to the business that was for sale. It was so messy."
Coming from a background in tech and startups, he saw this as more than just an annoyance - it was an opportunity. He knew the broken alerts were costing serious buyers deals. So instead of waiting for the platform to fix it, he built his own solution: a scraper using Apify that actually worked.
That single Actor now generates around $1,000 per month in recurring revenue.
Then it clicked.
"I thought, 'Wow, this is like real estate on the internet. You build something, and it pays you rent monthly.'"
-- Founder and CEO at ParseForge
That realization sparked the idea that would become ParseForge - a company dedicated to building production-ready Actors at scale. The goal: 1,000 Actors by 2027.
Six months after launching, ParseForge, at the time of publication, has published 124 Actors on Apify, attracted 1.9K users, and developed a systematic approach to building scrapers they call "The Actor Factory."
Building the Actor Factory
With proof of concept in hand and a vision forming, they put together a global team of junior and senior developers - and got to work systematizing their approach.
"We coined the name 'The Actor Factory,' where we're treating what we're building on Apify as truly like a factory. The idea was: you can't just scale a team building individual Actors. It's terribly inefficient."
The Factory is now a process that can transform a website into a completed Actor in less than a day. The team's output is impressive:
- Junior developers: build 4 Actors per week
- Senior developers: build 5 Actors per week
- Team output: 13+ Actors per week
- Time to market: Under 24 hours from concept to published Actor
From 70% DevOps to pure logic
Before Apify, the founder worked with engineers who spent weeks building scrapers for larger enterprises. The time breakdown was brutal.
"Before, we were spending 70% of our time on DevOps, 30% on logic," he explains. "The Apify CLI and the SDKs really made it simple for us. We can apply templates, quickly figure out what's required, and work through our series of steps to get to a finalized Actor."
What Apify eliminated:
- Custom proxy management ("Proxies are a big one - just turning on a button")
- Scaling infrastructure ("The ability to scale with Apify is really amazing")
- Server maintenance and deployment complexity
- Manual orchestration of residential and data center proxies
"If we were building all this on custom infrastructure? I can't even imagine how much it would cost. It's kind of hard to fathom."
-- Founder and CEO at ParseForge
The infrastructure freedom allows ParseForge to focus on what matters: reverse engineering websites, hitting APIs efficiently, and delivering reliable data to users.
The first-mover advantage
That first buy-sell business listing scraper taught ParseForge an important lesson about the Apify marketplace: speed matters.
"It was one of the first buy-sell Actors, and then a whole flood of copycats came in," he explains. "But what I noticed was that the first-mover advantage really helped. Even if we were to raise prices, people still come to us. You're number one, you keep great reviews, and maintain good reliability."
The other thing they noticed? Apify's SEO power.
"One of the core benefits of building on Apify is the SEO," he says. "You build something, and within 24 to 48 hours, if you're the first mover and no one else has built it, you're on top of Google. It's amazing."
The next step: AI tools
ParseForge started with what worked: business listings. Then real estate. Then yachts. But the team quickly learned a hard lesson.
"You can't just build it, and they will come," he says. "We built some awesome Actors that delivered a lot of value, but we ran into a wall with technical versus non-technical users."
That's when ParseForge found a different approach: AI-powered tools that anyone could use.
Inspired by ideas from Apify's $1 Million Challenge, they started building tools including:
- Virtual Staging Actor - Transforms empty or furnished rooms into professionally styled interiors for real estate agents
- Modern Manga Colorizer - Adds vibrant colors to black and white manga panels
- Vintage Photo Restorer - Repairs and enhances old photographs
"The Virtual Staging Actor came from my background in real estate," he explains. "I used to deal with rental properties where tenants had their stuff everywhere. Now you can take a photo, clear out the room, and make it look any style you prefer - mid-century modern, transitional, very traditional."
Staging an empty space with Virtual Staging Actor
These tools use external AI models (like Google's "Nano Banana") while using Apify's infrastructure for orchestration and scaling.
"We're building AI processing tools that complement data extraction workflows," he says. "The vision is taking this to non-technical people as well, maybe building front-end SaaS products using Apify as the backend to power it."
Beating the competition
ParseForge's users are solving a specific problem: getting to valuable data before their competitors.
"It's agencies and investors - real estate investors looking to find deals, business buyers scanning for opportunities," he explains. "The use case is: the site you're using doesn't provide proper alerts to fuel your acquisition. So you use Apify to bring it into your automated flow, and have a report in your inbox or spreadsheet every day."
The results can be dramatic for their users.
"We've heard from brokers: 'Holy cow, I just listed that thing. How did you hear about us?" the founder laughs. "Well, we scan the website every single day. You're the first person to respond because you're seeing the data immediately."
Other customers include:
- Early-stage startups in finance using investor data for outreach
- Search funders looking to buy businesses (the "Harvard MBA" types who'd rather buy a business than work for McKinsey)
- Agencies needing structured data for client work
ParseForge's biggest month brought in $8,000 in revenue from a single customer scraping an entire database.
"When you wake up and see a big windfall from somebody going through and scraping an entire database, that is like a huge dopamine hit. It's such a motivator for the team."
Beyond scrapers
ParseForge sees its future as more than just scrapers.
"I hope to be here a year from now with real verticalized SaaS or real companies built on the backbone of Apify. That's where we're heading."
-- Founder and CEO at ParseForge
The plan includes:
- More AI-powered processing tools
- Front-end SaaS products with Apify as the backend
- Maintaining velocity toward the 1,000 Actor goal
- Building tools that connect multiple Actors for complex workflows
ParseForge sees itself as a testing ground for Apify's future features.
"We want to be early-stage testers and users that give feedback to Apify," he says. "This could be a multi-billion dollar company, and Apify's really got a nice foothold here."
Advice for developers: Start building
The founder of ParseForge shares straightforward advice:
"Apify is in a prime place to be the de facto marketplace to build in a really simplified way with incredible scalability. If you're looking to go to market quickly with structured data from a web scraping standpoint, or perhaps a tool, you can get it up and running very quickly."
"You can do more with a single developer on this platform than would typically be required for multiple different skill sets. Apify takes care of all the backend work - the proxies, the scaling infrastructure. You deploy with a single command through the CLI, test locally or remote, and you don't have to spend time on maintenance."
The road to 1,000 Actors
ParseForge's success comes down to three things: systematic Actor production, first-mover advantage, and creative problem-solving. They built an Actor Factory that transforms websites into production-ready Actors in under 24 hours.
The results speak for themselves. Their first Actor generates $1,000 monthly in recurring revenue. Their biggest month brought in $8,000 from a single customer. They're on track to hit 1,000 Actors by 2027.
Their 124 Actors include business listings, real estate, academic research tools, and AI-powered solutions. Some standouts include:
- Pitchbook Investors Scraper - A favorite among lead gen professionals targeting contact info for investment firms
- Auction.com Scraper - First to market for the platform
- James Edition Real Estate Scraper - Another first-mover win
- YouTube Scraper - Video data extraction at scale
ParseForge also won the Apify Social Good Award with their FEC Campaign Finance Contributions Scraper, which makes political donation data more accessible.
The Actor Factory playbook
1.9K users. 99% success rate. 1,000 Actors by 2027. That's what a small team with the right system can build on Apify.
ParseForge proves what happens when you build with real intention.
Turn a weekend side project into serious income - or scale it into a full business.
Check out ParseForge's Actors for ready-to-use scrapers and AI tools.
Want to build your own? Explore 1,000+ Actor ideas and start building for free.
