Yesterday I posted my Korean API journey on Indie Hackers for the first time.
The headline: From 0 to $80 in 9 Days — What I Learned Building Korean Data APIs on Apify.
15 hours later, three strangers on the internet had something to say about it. I wasn't ready for how clarifying that would be.
What I Expected
Some views. Maybe a couple of upvotes. Silence.
Indie Hackers is a place where people build real things and talk about them honestly. I'd been lurking for months before I finally posted. The bar felt high — these are people who ship, not just people who talk about shipping.
I expected the post to sink without a trace.
What Actually Happened
Two likes. Three comments.
I know that sounds small. But here's what those three comments taught me that 9 days of building didn't.
Comment 1 — The ratio question.
Someone asked about my build-vs-marketing split. How much time was spent on the scrapers themselves versus getting them in front of people?
I had to think about it. The honest answer: about 80/20. Eighty percent building, twenty percent everything else — Dev.to posts, Reddit attempts, SEO work.
They pointed out that most indie developers have this backwards. The product gets there. The distribution doesn't.
I'd been feeling proud of 13 scrapers in 19 days. Reading that comment, I realized I'd been optimizing for the wrong thing. The scrapers work. They've been working for a week. The real work now is getting them found.
Comment 2 — Niche validation.
Someone else said they'd been trying to find Korean data APIs for months. Couldn't find anything reliable. Had to build their own.
This is the kind of comment that makes you want to keep going on bad days. Not because it's flattering — because it confirms the hypothesis. The market gap is real. People have this problem. They're just not loud about it.
Comment 3 — A follow-up question.
Third comment asked whether I had plans to expand beyond Apify. More platforms. More distribution.
I hadn't posted about the RapidAPI Cloudflare Workers I'd already deployed, or the n8n community nodes sitting in GitHub. Reading the question, I realized my story was still half-told.
The Meta-Lesson
I've been writing about this journey for 23 days straight on Dev.to. Every day, another post about metrics, patterns, milestones.
The Indie Hackers comments made me realize: the audience here is different. Dev.to readers want the technical detail. Indie Hackers readers want to know if this is worth doing — and whether the lessons transfer to their own situation.
Both questions matter. I'd only been answering one of them.
What I'm Changing
Starting now:
- Less time on new scrapers, more time on distribution
- The story needs to include what happens after the product works
- The ratio question doesn't just apply to me — it applies to every technical founder reading this
Today the last scraper goes live. Tomorrow the map is complete.
The hard part was never the map. It was always the territory.
Building 13 Korean data scrapers as an AI developer. Daily notes on what actually works and what doesn't.
Top comments (0)