# Builder spotlight: the mechanical engineer who won $30,000 on Apify > Source: > Published: 2026-07-30 09:13:50+00:00 Rapha is a mechanical engineer who taught himself to build in the hours after his family went to bed. Today, he runs [SIÁN](https://apify.com/sian.agency), a data and automation agency, with [Apify Actors](https://apify.com/partners/actor-developers) covering social media, e-commerce, real estate, and other niches. He was also the winner of the [Apify $1 Million Challenge](https://apify.com/challenge), taking home $30,000, with hundreds of Actors live and revenue that has grown every month but one since last August. ## The first Actor About two years ago, Rapha got pulled into the AI wave. He spent the spring and early summer of that year exploring what was possible: what tools existed, what could be automated, what ideas he'd been sitting on for years that now had a chance to become real. "I always had a lot of ideas," he told us. "But a lot of them were related to software development or coding. I didn't have the experience, and I didn't have the money to hire a team." He started with content automation for Instagram and TikTok, and needed the data to fuel it. A YouTube video mentioned Apify as a way to get the data he needed for his projects, and that was enough to [get started](https://console.apify.com/sign-up). He used existing Actors for a while. Then he went looking for something specific: a tool that could pull metadata from social content and transcribe Instagram Reels at the same time. It didn't exist, so he decided to build it. In August last year, he published his first Actor, an [Instagram AI transcription tool](https://apify.com/sian.agency/instagram-ai-transcript-extractor). Within a day, he had users and revenue. I told my wife: I just uploaded something, and I'm already making a dollar a day. It was like, oh my God. This was when I knew I was onto something. -- Rapha, SIÁN The motivation and momentum were there. Sustaining them with limited spare time is the real challenge. ## Four hours after bedtime He comes home from work, takes care of his son, and when everyone is in bed, he opens the laptop. Four to five hours, most nights, and that shapes everything about how he builds. **He doesn't have time to maintain complicated things, so he doesn't build them.** His guiding principle, one he returns to all the time, is simplicity. The user comes to the platform, sees basically two things to interact with, puts in a URL, and starts. Not proxies, not this and that. I built it for someone like me: someone without technical knowledge who just wants results fast. -- Rapha, SIÁN When your time is limited, you can't afford to build things users don't understand. You learn quickly what works and what doesn't. His Actor READMEs follow the same logic. He thinks of them as both documentation and marketing (informative but not exhaustive), with real use cases and enough keywords to be findable. It's a balance many developers struggle with and a proven way to build traction for the tools you build on Apify. That same instinct for simplicity carries over into how he talks to users when something breaks. Apify lets developers message their users directly, and Rapha uses it as an early warning system rather than a last resort: the moment something breaks, he sends a note explaining what's wrong and how long the fix will take, instead of just flipping the Actor to maintenance mode and going quiet. If there's a problem, I want to be the first to tell them. Not just hit the maintenance button and disappear. -- Rapha, SIÁN ## The win When the Apify [$1 Million Challenge](https://apify.com/challenge#grand-prize-winners) started, Rapha had around ten Actors live across social media and real estate verticals. He signed up and kept building, but he also started quietly tracking the competition: which Actors were entered, how fast their user counts were climbing. He leaned even harder into being responsive, jumping on problems the moment they came up. He didn't expect any of it to add up to a win. I had a good feeling, but I never expected this. My whole body was shaking when they called my name for the grand prize. -- Rapha, SIÁN The challenge judged developers, not single Actors, on monthly active users, Actor quality, technical excellence, and real world usefulness. Rapha's catalog hit all four. He took first place and the $30,000 grand prize, the top award, ahead of the $20,000 and $10,000 runner-up prizes. Winning gave Rapha a spotlight he used quickly. He put together [SIÁN's website](https://sian-agency.online/). A day after launching it, an email arrived from a company in California. They'd been using his [Smart Idealista Scraper](https://apify.com/sian.agency/smart-idealista-scraper); they liked what they saw, and they wanted to hire him to build something more complex for the Italian real estate market. That project is now in its second phase. ## Finding the gaps Rapha's most-used Actors today span social media, e-commerce and real estate: his [Instagram AI Transcript Extractor](https://apify.com/sian.agency/instagram-ai-transcript-extractor), his [TikTok AI Transcript Extractor](https://apify.com/sian.agency/best-tiktok-ai-transcript-extractor), and the [Smart Idealista Scraper](https://apify.com/sian.agency/smart-idealista-scraper), alongside the China-market tools that came out of a decade in Asia, his [Taobao/Tmall Product Scraper](https://apify.com/sian.agency/taobao-tmall-product-scraper) and his [XiaoHongShu/RedNote Scraper](https://apify.com/sian.agency/xiaohongshu-rednote-scraper). That regional angle is where he keeps finding data gaps most Western developers never think to look for. The gaps aren't guesswork. Before Rapha builds anything, he checks what people are already searching for, which categories are underserved, and what a run will actually cost him. He built a tool to do that, originally just for himself, and called it [ApifyIntel](https://apifyintel.com/). It's still his first stop for every new Actor, and he eventually made it public because it's what he wished had existed when he was starting out. That research is what makes the pace possible. He's published nearly 200 new Actors in the last two months, and several of them have already become Rising Stars on [Apify Store](https://apify.com/store), his Douyin and Taobao scrapers among them. His XiaoHongShu scraper went from 37 monthly users to 346 in its first thirty days. Knowing which of them actually works is a second problem, so he built a second tool. [Apify Portfolio](https://portfolio.apifyintel.com) takes the analytics JSON straight out of the Apify Console, drag and drop, and turns it into costs, margins, gross revenue, and net earnings per Actor. Everything is parsed in the browser, so no numbers are ever uploaded. It also turns the developer journey into a climb, with milestone tiers for revenue, users, and profit that unlock as you grow. Both tools started as something he needed himself, and both ended up public. The client side has grown past what one person can deliver. He now brings in other developers from the [Apify community](https://discord.com/invite/crawlee-apify-801163717915574323) on SIÁN projects, just a year after he was building alone after bedtime. ## Still early Rapha is careful not to oversell any of this. He's kept the day job for now, though SIÁN's client work has grown into its own operation, with other Apify developers delivering alongside him. The ideas still outnumber the time available. From here, the plan is depth over new verticals. The next target is 500 Actors, then a thousand within the year, with the research pipeline doing the selection and Apify Portfolio showing which ones earn their keep. The challenge has moved from building to keeping several hundred Actors working while the sites underneath them keep changing, and that's where most of the engineering goes now. His advice to other builders: I can only tell everyone who wants to try Apify: they should. It's a free chance. You have nothing to lose except your time and your ideas. -- Rapha, SIÁN