From 0 to $80 in 9 Days: What I Learned Building Korean Data APIs on Apify

Good luck with the listing — if you have 4 endpoints live and working, the RapidAPI submission moves fast once you get the OpenAPI definition set. The tutorial-per-use-case approach really does compound. Each one (e.g. "how to audit Core Web Vitals before a product launch") becomes a separate search entry point that's harder to replicate than the API itself. Let me know how the SEO API performs once it's up.

Bit of both. The hypothesis was "Korean platforms have no structured data access" — that was intentional. But naver-news specifically wasn't a carefully tested first choice. I built it early because Naver News is the most fundamental data source in the Korean web stack. That naver-news became the volume leader (8,400+ runs, 6 users) while naver-place-search became the user leader (22 users, 1,100 runs) was emergent — I didn't predict which would dominate. The market told me after the fact.

Thanks! Hope you find something useful — the marketplace discovery alone made Apify worth starting with. Good luck with whatever you're building.

Good luck with the listing — if you have 4 endpoints live and working, the RapidAPI submission moves fast once you get the OpenAPI definition set. The tutorial-per-use-case approach really does compound. Each one (e.g. "how to audit Core Web Vitals before a product launch") becomes a separate search entry point that's harder to replicate than the API itself. Let me know how the SEO API performs once it's up.

Thanks, really appreciate the honest comparison. 21 Gumroad products at $0 is actually a useful data point — it means your build velocity is solid, but the distribution channel might be the bottleneck rather than the products themselves.

One thing that helped me was picking a platform where discovery is built in. Apify's marketplace works like an app store — people search for specific scrapers and find mine organically. If your SEO tools are good, the question might be less about building more and more about getting them in front of the right audience. Content that ranks for "[your tool category] free API" or tutorials showing real workflows could flip the ratio faster than you'd expect.

I checked out vemtrac — the tech stack looks solid. Have you considered listing on a marketplace with built-in traffic (like RapidAPI for APIs) instead of relying on Gumroad's relatively limited discovery?

Bit of both. The hypothesis was "Korean platforms have no structured data access" — that was intentional. But naver-news specifically wasn't a carefully tested first choice. I built it early because Naver News is the most fundamental data source in the Korean web stack. That naver-news became the volume leader (8,400+ runs, 6 users) while naver-place-search became the user leader (22 users, 1,100 runs) was emergent — I didn't predict which would dominate. The market told me after the fact.

Great question. Honestly, it was a mix of both. I built naver-news first and saw organic runs within the first few days — people were searching for "naver scraper" on Apify and finding it because there was literally nothing else. That signal gave me confidence the niche was real.

But I didn't wait for full validation before building the rest. I batched scrapers 2-8 in the next two weeks, partly because the Korean platforms share similar structures so the marginal cost of each new scraper dropped fast. The first one took a week, the last few took a day each.

In hindsight, I should have paused after 5-6 and measured which categories had real demand. My webtoon and book scrapers still get almost zero usage. If I'd validated first, I would have skipped those and spent the time on marketing the winners earlier.