The accidental click that changed everything: the Apify origin story

Summary

Read or download the book for the full story of near-failures, pivots, and what it takes to build a lasting company ⬇️Apify was conceived in a place where necessity bumped up against imagination.The year is 2014. Apple unveils the bigger, sleeker iPhone 6, Tesla announces self-driving cars, and VR glasses come into view with Google releasing their Cardboard thingy alongside their much more expensive cousins from Samsung and Oculus Rift. Meanwhile under the hood, dynamic JavaScript is truly coming into its own, powering the interactive experiences that make us fall in love with the web all over again.It's all very pretty.But beneath that polish hides a problem. These same dynamic interfaces, the menus that load on demand, the content that updates without refreshing, and the interactive elements that make the web more accessible and intuitive for humans to navigate, are the very things that make the web inscrutable to deeper dives.Human-first design has come at a cost: Computers can't easily access the deeper data hidden behind these web pages.Here in Prague, two young developers have been thinking deeply about this problem, and are about to embark on a project that will unlock the web itself.VIDEOPrefer video? Watch the short version of the Apify story hereBefore the beginning: Two students with a dreamApify founders: Jakub Balada and Jan CurnThere's another beginning to this story. One that stretches back many years before this to the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague, where two Information Technology students, Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada, first cross paths.It is here that the seeds of what would eventually become Apify begin to sprout. Jan, working with other colleagues (though not yet with Jakub), on a school project, builds an app designed to extract data from used car websites and list the results from multiple portals in one place (aptly called najednommiste.cz). The project goes beyond a simple aggregator. Jan and his team ha...