You can literally win 50K... Just By Prompting

I bet that you didn't know that one of the biggest opportunities of this year just started on November 3rd, the Apify $1 million challenge. And all you have to do is bring your best ideas, build actors, and publish them to the Appify store to get a chance to become the winner of this challenge. Now, if you have no idea what I'm talking about or what actors even are, that's okay because that is exactly why we've partnered with Appify to bring you this video. I want you to have a fighting chance in this and for that I'll be explaining the whole challenge and what you need to do to actually win it. The challenge has already started and it's going to end on January 31st, 2026. You might wonder why is this challenge so long? Well, it's because of how the prize pool is actually distributed. Before we move on to the prize pool, what do you actually need to do in this challenge? You need to build actors which you can essentially consider as automations. You can make up to five during this entire period and the challenge will be judged based on those five actors you publish after registering. Only those five will be eligible for rewards. I'll be explaining what these actors are and how you can make them later in the video. The way this challenge is structured, the top three participants will be selected by judges. First place takes home $30,000 and second and third places get their own prizes, too. But here's where the $1 million prize pool comes in. When you publish your Appify actor to the store, it gets rated by real users. For each monthly active user, you get $2 in prize money. With a,000 users, you can earn a maximum of $2,000 per actor. And remember, you can submit up to five actors, and you have until January 2026. There's also a $2,000 weekly prize, so the opportunity is massive. All you have to do is be creative and build genuinely useful actors that people will want to use. And it's not just that. Appify actors actually earn on the store regardless of this challenge. Even if you build good actors that get a lot of users, you're creating a steady revenue stream that continues as long as they keep using what you've built. The Appify store has all these different actors. For example, there's a Google Maps scraper that extracts business data from Google Maps to help you generate leads, a huge use case. So far, it has 11,000 monthly active users and around 200,000 total users, which is massive. There are thousands of actors on the store right now, all being actively used and paid for. You can basically think of this challenge as paying you to open up another revenue stream for yourself, which is really exciting. And as I'll show you later in the video, it's actually very easy because you don't have to do everything manually. They themselves have made sure you can build them as easily as possible using AI. The first question is, what are ampify actors? This is going to get a little technical, but bear with me. This isn't going to be a programming video, but you do need to understand a few things to know what we're dealing with here. These Ampify actors are basically Docker containers where we put our code and then we send them to the Appify platform which hosts them. The real agent is the code that we write inside. Appify also provides other supporting tools. But this is the main concept you need to know. Each actor takes a well-defined input and produces a structured output. That's all you need to understand about an actor. You don't need to dive deep into the code because we're not going to be doing that. There are also different types of actors. Some are designed to crawl websites while others actually spin up a separate browser and start working from there. They've basically provided you with some code templates to spin up actors more quickly with the basic configuration already done. Whether you're a developer who wants full control over your code or you prefer using AI tools like I do, Ampify supports both approaches. And a really interesting new template that they're pushing hard is for automations using MCP servers. If you've been a part of this channel, you already know that MCPs can get really crazy in terms of functionality. So, you can get a lot of great ideas from them as well. If you want to start with a template, you just have to open it. Go to this use locally section and down here you'll find a command to create an actor. You're basically going to need this later on, but again, you don't have to code anything. This is just for people who already know a bit of the technical side. even for others. If you ever want to customize how your actors are built later on, this is really helpful information. Remember when I mentioned that they made sure it's easy for everyone to build these actors? That's because they actually build the documentation for AI coding themselves. Normally, what I or any of you would have done is go to the documentation, load up the information the agent needs, and pick out different pieces from the guides, such as how actors run or how to develop them, and then make a context file for the agent. But what they've done here is directly provide us with AI coding instructions so we don't have to go out and build them ourselves. When I open up the prompt, it's a really detailed one with everything included. In there, you'll see that the agent file references the Appify CLI, which is really important because it basically gives the agent full control from writing the code locally to testing it and even uploading it to Appify. It makes everything really simple and keeps all control in the hands of your agent. It also gives clear instructions on how to install, run, and use it. I'm going to be using Claude Code here, and I basically copied the prompt and pasted it inside Claude Code. Right now, I've already built two actors, which I'll be showing you. And the prompt basically guided me through completing these actors and uploading them. For example, I told it that I wanted to make a Google map scraper and I just asked it to collect some information about what we should add. Basically, to scrape Google Maps and generate leads for me. Based on that input, Claude Code was able to generate the complete actor. You don't need to worry about any of this if you think it looks complicated. That prompt already provides the context on how to actually use the CLI. The CLI automatically pushes your project and even gives you the link to open. So, you really don't have to worry about that. Here in source, you'll see an input tab. In that tab, you basically need to enter the parameters I mentioned earlier, your input. This requires a Google API key to use Google Maps. So I had to get that manually but Claude code helped me with that as well. Then you specify the search query, the type of businesses you're looking for, the location and the maximum number of results. If I go to the final output, you can see that it was successfully generated and we got only 17 results for the area we entered. Here we have a lead quality field along with their phone numbers and websites. If I open a website, it takes me directly to it. And as you can see, I wrote printing shop. So that's exactly what it fetched. Just like that, your actor is ready and actually running on Appify. Now that it's deployed, how do you actually publish those actors to the Appify store? You go back to the Appify console and here you'll see this icon. Right now, you can see that only I can use this actor because it hasn't been published yet. If I go ahead and publish the actor, there are two sides that need to be completed. On the actor side, it needs to be deployed, have a comprehensive readme, a properly configured input schema as we already showed with the input items, assigned categories, SEO optimization, and a working demo. These are the key requirements on the actor side. On the user side, you need to fill out some basic details and set up a public profile with billing information so you can receive your revenue. Again, as I mentioned earlier, people are already making money with these appy actors. But this challenge is an extra incentive that you should definitely be a part of. I also went ahead and built this Gemini MCP actor as well. For this one, I basically got the idea from their own idea page and there are a lot of ideas there. What they've done is list an actor they think should exist along with its target audience. They also mention that it's just an idea and anyone is free to adapt or build it in their own way. I went ahead and implemented it. There are tons of possibilities for getting ideas here, either from the ones they've already provided or if you're a bit more technical by looking at these templates and thinking of ways to build something truly amazing. So, if you're excited about this new challenge, I'll be pasting a link down below so you can sign up directly. As I already said, the challenge ends in January 2026, but the earlier you join, the more chances you'll get to win the weekly prizes I mentioned before. Also, since we've officially partnered with Appify, you can head over to our Discord channel where you'll get the official representatives from Appify to answer any questions. And not only that, we're also going to host an exclusive Q&A session with the Appify team for our Discord members. So, make sure that you're on the lookout for that. That brings us to the end of this video. If you'd like to support the channel and help us keep making videos like this, you can do so by using the super thanks button below. As always, thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.