StartupFast Scraper - Startup and Product Directory

Scrape public startup and product listings from StartupFast by category. The Actor exports each project's name, own website, tagline, logo, category labels, upvotes, comment count, source rank, and StartupFast listing URL. It is designed for market research, startup discovery, prospecting, launch monitoring, and category-level competitor analysis without requiring an account or API key.

Why use this Actor?

Startup directories are useful because founders describe their products in compact, comparable language and link directly to the product website. That makes the data relevant for researchers, accelerators, agencies, investors, partnership teams, SEO analysts, and B2B sales workflows. Copying directory cards manually is slow, and category overlap creates duplicate records. This Actor paginates the public directory and merges the same project across multiple requested categories into one structured row.

Typical uses include:

• discovering newly launched AI, SaaS, developer, ecommerce, or marketing products;
• building a prospect list with direct startup websites;
• monitoring category entrants over time;
• comparing taglines and positioning in a niche;
• finding products with visible community engagement;
• enriching startup databases and CRM records;
• identifying potential partnerships, integrations, or acquisition targets;
• creating category dashboards for an accelerator or research team.

Input

Enter one or more StartupFast category slugs and choose a sort order. Category slugs are the values visible in StartupFast category URLs, such as ai, saas, marketing-tools, developer-tools, ecommerce, finance-tech, productivity, and open-source.

{
  "categorySlugs": ["ai", "saas"],
  "sort": "recent",
  "maxResultsPerCategory": 20,
  "maxPagesPerCategory": 5
}

Input fields

Field	Description
categorySlugs	One or more public StartupFast category slugs.
sort	recent, upvotes, or alphabetical.
maxResultsPerCategory	Maximum source projects processed for each category.
maxPagesPerCategory	Hard pagination limit; currently 10 cards are returned per page.

The default input is deliberately small and current, which keeps scheduled Tasks and Apify's daily automated test fast. The Actor accepts up to 25 categories and enforces a maximum page count so an accidental large input cannot create an unbounded run.

Output fields

Each default-dataset item represents one unique StartupFast project. The output includes:

• id and slug from the public listing URL;
• name without the visual ranking prefix;
• tagline shown on the category card;
• project_url on StartupFast;
• the product's external website_url;
• logo_url;
• human-readable categories and source category_slugs;
• public upvotes and comments counts;
• source_rank within the source page;
• matched_categories and category_ranks when a project appears in more than one requested category;
• final unique-result rank, source URL, and scrape timestamp.

Example result:

{
  "id": "tunestems",
  "name": "TuneStems",
  "tagline": "AI stem splitter for clean practice tracks, lessons, remix planning, and browser-based audio separation.",
  "project_url": "https://www.startupfa.st/projects/tunestems",
  "website_url": "https://tunestems.com/",
  "categories": ["Artificial Intelligence", "Machine Learning", "SaaS"],
  "upvotes": 0,
  "comments": 0,
  "matched_categories": ["ai"]
}

Cross-category deduplication

A startup may be listed under several categories. The Actor uses the public project slug as its stable key. When the same project appears again, it does not create another billed dataset item. Instead, the Actor appends the source category to matched_categories and records the category-specific position in category_ranks. This makes multi-category runs useful for lead qualification: a product found under both ai and saas remains one lead with both signals attached.

Lead generation workflow

The direct website is the most valuable field for prospecting. A practical workflow is:

1. scrape recent projects from commercially relevant categories;
2. filter out products already in your CRM;
3. pass website_url values to a website contact or company-enrichment Actor;
4. qualify by category, positioning, launch recency, and engagement;
5. add only relevant prospects to a compliant outreach sequence.

Directory presence is not consent to unsolicited contact. Apply the laws and platform rules that govern your region and channel, respect opt-outs, and keep outreach relevant.

Scheduling and integrations

Save the input as an Apify Task and schedule it weekly or daily with sort set to recent. Consume results through the dataset API, a webhook, Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, n8n, or your own code. Retaining past datasets lets you identify newly appearing slugs without rescanning or manually comparing pages.

For a category-positioning study, use upvotes sorting and collect the first several pages. For a monitoring workflow, one or two recent pages per category are usually enough and keep the run inexpensive.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing: a small run-start event and a result event for each unique project saved to the default dataset. Duplicate projects across selected categories are merged before storage, so they are not billed twice within the same run.

Reliability and data scope

The Actor reads StartupFast's public server-rendered category cards using Chrome-compatible HTTP requests. It does not open a browser, sign in, bypass private pages, or depend on an external paid API. Requests use retries, short delays, and strict page limits. If StartupFast changes its card markup, open an Actor issue with the run ID and affected category so the parser can be adjusted.

The output reflects public card data at run time. It does not claim that votes are unique users, that directory content is independently verified, or that a project is active. Visit the product website before making commercial or investment decisions.

FAQ

Do I need a StartupFast account?

No. The Actor reads public category pages.

Can I scrape more than one category?

Yes. Add multiple slugs. Duplicate projects are merged and preserve every matched category.

Which sort modes work?

Recent, upvotes, and alphabetical sorting are supported because they are exposed by the public directory.

Does the Actor visit every startup website?

No. It exports the external website URL shown by StartupFast. Avoiding detail-site crawling keeps the Actor fast, predictable, and low cost.

Can I get emails from the results?

This Actor does not invent or infer contact details. Use the exported website URLs with a dedicated website-contact workflow where lawful and appropriate.

Can I export CSV or Excel?

Yes. Every Apify dataset can be downloaded as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, RSS, or read through the API.

How fresh is the data?

Each run fetches the current public pages. Use a recurring Task to maintain a change history.

How do I report a broken category?

Open an issue on the Actor page and include the category slug and run ID. If the Actor saved you time, please leave a Store review; reviews help other users evaluate it and help prioritize maintenance.

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• Startup Directory Scrapers
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Keywords: StartupFast scraper, startup directory scraper, startup leads, SaaS directory, product launch scraper, startup website list, AI tools directory, founder lead generation, startup market research, startup API