Three months of shipping from Nairobi. 48 actors on the Apify Store. 746 users. No funding, no team, just a laptop and a lot of late nights.
I want to walk through what I actually built, what's working, and what surprised me along the way.
The Stack
Every actor runs on the same foundation: Node.js, Crawlee, Puppeteer, and the Apify SDK. Six of them are instant response APIs (subsecond latency). The rest are batch scrapers that handle proxies, pagination, and retry logic. All of them use pay per event pricing, so users only pay for data they get back.
Sales & Lead Gen
This is where the real money comes from. The Lead Enrichment Pipeline takes a company name or domain and returns verified contacts, tech stack, funding data, and social profiles in about 42 seconds for $0.03 per lead. It chains together multiple data sources behind the scenes.
The LinkedIn Employee Scraper is my biggest hit with 293 users and a Rising Star badge on the Apify Store. It pulls employee names, titles, and profile URLs for any company page. Sales teams use it constantly for prospecting.
I also built a Website Lead Extractor that crawls any site and pulls emails, phone numbers, and social links. Pair that with the Company Enrichment API and you've got a full lead gen stack without paying for ZoomInfo.
Market Research & Monitoring
The Reddit Brand Monitor watches subreddits for mentions of your brand or competitors and scores each post for lead potential. I use it myself to find people asking about web scraping tools.
Google News Alert & Brand Monitoring does the same thing but across news sites. $0.003 per article. Cheaper than any media monitoring SaaS by a wide margin.
The Telegram Channel Monitor scrapes public channels for market intel. Crypto traders love this one. And the Influencer Discovery actor scans social platforms to find creators in specific niches with engagement metrics.
Compliance & Finance
This category surprised me the most. The OFAC Sanctions Screener checks names against the US Treasury sanctions list for $0.01 per entity. FinTech companies need this for KYC workflows and it's one of my stickiest products.
The DeFi Chain Metrics API pulls 82 onchain metrics across 6 blockchains: TVL, volume, fees, active addresses, the works. Built it because every DeFi dashboard was scraping CoinGecko manually.
US Tariff Lookup was a timing play. Built it during the trade war panic and shipped in one day. It returns current tariff rates for any HTS code. Still getting new users months later.
Content & AI
The YouTube Transcript Extractor has 150 users and growing. Content creators and researchers use it to grab full transcripts from any public video. Dead simple, works every time.
My AI Content Detector analyzes text for machine generated patterns. $0.003 per check. The AI Text Humanizer does the opposite: it rewrites AI text to read more naturally. These two work as a pair and the humanizer has been getting attention because a competitor with 19K subscribers proved the demand exists.
Google Scholar Scraper pulls paper titles, authors, citations, and abstracts. Academic researchers and SEO agencies are the main users.
What I Learned Building 48 of These
First, speed matters more than perfection. The tariff actor took one day to build and got users immediately. The actors I spent weeks polishing sometimes got zero traction.
Second, pricing under $0.01 per request removes all friction. Nobody needs to think about whether $0.003 is worth it. They just run it.
Third, building from Nairobi is not a disadvantage. The Apify platform handles global distribution. My users don't know or care where I'm based. They care whether the data comes back clean.
The portfolio is generating meaningful revenue and growing. Not life changing yet, but enough to prove the model works. Every actor I ship adds another revenue stream that runs while I sleep.
If you want to try any of these, the full portfolio is at apify.com/george.the.developer. Everything is pay per use, no subscriptions required.
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