Passive income sounds like a dream until you have it.
Then it sounds like a spreadsheet that updates every morning.
D+20. Here is what April 2 looks like: 14,492 total runs. ~$140 estimated. 96 users.
The number moved by about 30 overnight. Korean businesses open at 9am KST; the traffic spikes, drops around midnight, and repeats. I know the pattern now. I do not have to watch it.
That is the conveyor belt.
What changed between month 1 and month 2
Month 1 felt like a launch. Every run was a signal. Every new user was proof that someone cared. I was checking the Apify dashboard three times a day.
Month 2 is different. The first day of April, I checked the dashboard once.
Not because I stopped caring. Because the question changed. In month 1 the question was: does anyone want this? Now the answer is yes. The new question is: how do I grow it?
Those are completely different problems. One is existential. The other is operational.
What the data actually says
naver-news-scraper carries 72% of total volume. 8,500+ runs. 6 external users.
That is one pipeline — probably automated Korean media monitoring. I cannot see who runs it, just the pattern: batch runs every few hours, weekdays heavier than weekends, 9am KST spike consistent across two weeks.
naver-place-search has 22 users and 1,100 runs. The inverse: many people, small batches. Restaurant research, travel planning, business reviews. Human-scale use.
The same portfolio, two completely different use cases. I did not design this. The market told me.
What I expected month 2 to feel like
Faster. More users. Exponential somehow.
What it actually feels like: steadier. The curve is flattening from hockey stick to something more horizontal. Which is what a baseline looks like. Not a spike — a floor.
The goal for month 2 is not to double the number. It is to find the second floor.
What I am actually doing
Not building new actors.
Writing (this is #39 in a Dev.to series that started when I had $0 in revenue).
Preparing a Show HN post — scheduled for 4/7 or 4/8, depending on HN timing strategy.
Waiting on Reddit karma (30-day lockout zone, resets April 3).
The distribution problem is harder than the technical problem. I have 13 actors. The hard part is getting 14 people to know they exist.
The honest number
Gross: $64.80. Net after Apify's 30% platform fee: $47.
For 14,492 API calls across 96 users.
That is $0.003 per run. Less than a cent per user action. Priced to make the math easy for someone building a pipeline, not a fortune for me.
But it is real. It is predictable. And it compounds — slowly, like a conveyor belt.
The excitement is gone. The work is not.
Korean web scraping APIs: Apify Store. MCP server for AI agents: korean-data-mcp.
Top comments (0)