Amaze Labs

Hi, I'm Cristian.

I've spent 15+ years co-founding companies and building the systems behind them: CRMs, integrations, data pipelines and automation. I live in Auckland and run Amaze Labs, where I build my own products and work with a few teams at a time.

Cristian Filimon

How I think about systems

I start from how the business really works, not from a tool. Most growing companies run on tools that don't talk to each other, so people copy data by hand and nobody trusts the numbers.

I use the tools you already pay for before I suggest new ones. When a tool can't do the job, I build the missing piece: an integration, an automation or a small custom app.

I build with AI coding agents, under a spec, review and test process. That's how I built a podcast studio's whole operations platform on my own, with 19 integrations.

You own what I build: the data, the accounts and the documentation.

  1. Founder

    Amaze Labs · Auckland, New Zealand

    • Launched Podify and PodcastStudios: semantic search inside YouTube podcast archives, and a worldwide directory where podcasters book a recording studio by city and date.
    • Built VibeAudit, 16 specialised AI code reviews that founders run before launch, and DocFlows, which fills a small business's own Google Docs templates automatically.
    • Run every project through Orion, my spec, review and test pipeline for AI coding agents, used across about 30 projects.

    Jan 2026 – present

  2. Product Lead, Digital, AI & Data

    360tuned · Auckland, New Zealand

    • Run discovery with leadership teams of New Zealand nonprofits, map how their work and data flow, and turn the gaps into scoped data and automation projects.
    • Run donor data diagnostics read-only on production, with donor data pseudonymised before analysis, so no donor details reach an AI tool.
    • Trace the gaps that block fundraising decisions: acquisition sources that were rarely captured, gift income that didn't match between the CRM and finance, and donor metrics skewed by migrated data.
    • Deliver data dictionaries, KPI frameworks, donor segments and multi-year revenue models.
    • Built the delivery tooling that cuts weekly client reporting from hours to minutes: AI writes the reports from time and task data, and flags hours that drift from capacity.

    Nov 2025 – present

  3. Co-founder, systems & automation lead

    Amaze Studio · Remote

    • Raised customer lifetime value by 50% and cut onboarding costs by 40%, by rebuilding data workflows, segmentation and automation.
    • Replaced five disconnected tools with one operations platform I designed and built, so a team of 2–5 runs without a development team.
    • Connected 19 integrations around it: invoicing and card payments, e-signing, marketing automation, transcription, YouTube statistics and storage.
    • Gave clients a portal where they see their productions, documents and invoices without emailing the team.
    • Added 0–100 lead scoring synced to Brevo and ActiveCampaign, so campaigns reach the warmest leads first.
    • Moved the business from separate on-premise CRMs to one SaaS setup, through discovery workshops, process documentation and data mapping.
    • Automated sales, video production, CRM, finance and reporting with no-code tools and API orchestration.
    • Ran solution design sprints and set OKRs, so key decisions came faster and the product followed the business strategy.

    Jan 2022 – present

  4. Senior Salesforce Product Manager

    Publicis Sapient · Remote

    • Delivered customer segmentation and activation in Salesforce Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud, across several data streams.
    • Improved data quality at ingestion (cleansing, integrity, compliance), so segments ran on clean data.
    • Ran discovery workshops with healthcare clients and turned their needs into the backlog and acceptance criteria for a Sales Cloud integration.

    Jul 2024 – Oct 2025

  5. Technical Product Manager

    SEOmonitor · Remote

    • Launched the first business intelligence dashboards for the executive team, built on API integrations.
    • Launched the SEOmonitor Marketplace, so third parties could plug their modules into the product.
    • Launched SEOmonitor Trends as a response to the market shift during COVID.

    Sep 2019 – May 2021

  6. Co-founder, Technical Product Manager

    Symbolic Software · Bucharest, Romania

    • Co-founded the company and managed its sale to Zitec, one of Romania's largest independent software companies, at a 2.5x EBITDA valuation.
    • Ran CRM implementations, system integrations and SaaS rollouts for clients.
    • Led and coached a team of 13 developers.

    May 2015 – Sep 2019

  7. Product and digital project roles

    Comodo, Avia Motors

    • Product and digital project management.

    2010 – 2014

Let's talk