Day 9 update block below and on the
main repo.
The honest day-4 snapshot
Update 2026年05月20日: Day 9 of this cold start. Now 14 articles in series, 1 star (still kuerdy, thanks), 0 sales. Two upstream moves landed today - opened apify/apify-docs#2549 proposing the refresh-token tutorial as an official Apify Academy doc, and seeded Discussion #16 for any builder hitting the same multi-tenant OAuth setup wall. Original post below is the Day 4 snapshot - kept as-is so the timeline is honest.
What the launch playbooks oversell
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"Just ship and the open-source community shows up." They don't, not for niche utility actors. A dependabot PR is not a signal. A single organic star at day 4 is the actual baseline you should expect from a quiet shipped MVP.
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"Write a dev.to launch post." A 5-minute single article gets buried in a feed of 800 daily posts. 7 articles spread across 4 days got 1 cumulative reaction. The article that mentions a paid product in the title (
9ドル PDF) got the only reaction.
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"Cross-link everything." Cross-linking is correct but the conversion math is unforgiving — even with a 7-article portfolio, you are talking about single-digit profile clicks, not the implied 10x audience compounding.
What I'd change if I were the past-me at hour 0
Submit to Hacker News only once, with the right URL. I submitted the dev.to write-up; it went to 1 point and then died. The link should have been the GitHub repo with a story-shaped README, not the dev.to article. dev.to URLs on HN have a worse base-rate than direct GitHub links.
Treat dev.to as a comment platform, not a publishing platform, for the first 14 days. A thoughtful comment on someone else's #apify or #automation post in the same week as your launch reaches more relevant eyes than a 7th article on your own profile.
Don't strip the contextual CTAs out of your own build-log posts. I had a phase where I scrubbed every Gumroad link out of every article to avoid looking promotional. The result is an article literally titled "9ドル PDF off a 0ドル actor" with zero way for the reader to buy the 9ドル PDF. The corrective is one contextual link, not seven banner CTAs.
Apify Store discoverability does not exist at this volume. With 0 reviews, 0 bookmarks, and a Store search index that prioritizes incumbents, the Store page is a landing page reached only by people you sent there. Treat it as a landing page, not a discovery channel.
The Gumroad companion does not need a separate marketing push. It is a footnote in the actor's README. People who want a self-host avoidance path will find it from there; people who do not, will not pay 9ドル because of a banner.
The funnel shape after one corrective pass
Two hours after writing this, I had:
- Restored a single contextual Gumroad CTA in two of seven articles (the two that are explicitly about the paid companion path — anywhere else, the CTA reads as stuffing).
- Posted four thoughtful comments on
#apify and #automation posts from other actor builders in the last 48 hours, on questions I genuinely wanted answers to.
- Set up a 5-minute Gumroad sale watcher so the next 0→1 sale event hits a Telegram push instead of being noticed days later.
If the next 96 hours produce more than 1 reaction, 1 star, and 0 sales, I'll post the updated table. If they don't, I'll post the updated table.
Honest disclosure
📚 Companion list (added 5/18 16:10 VN): awesome-apify-actors — a curated list of 68 production Apify Actors across 16 categories (Web scraping, Search, Maps, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, YouTube, Reddit, E-commerce, Real estate, Jobs, Lead gen, Email & Productivity). This Actor is listed under Email & Productivity. CC0 license, PRs welcome.
Day 6 update (5/19) — what changed:
- The 9ドル PDF is now pay-what-you-want from 1ドル+ (suggested 9ドル). Gumroad listing shows
9ドル+.
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30% affiliate program open: foxck.gumroad.com/affiliates — 2ドル.70 per 9ドル referred sale.
- The download bundle now includes a 26-page PREMIUM PDF compiling all 9 articles in this series. Same price tier; the bundle ships at every PWYW amount.
- Full reasoning + competitor scan data: Day 6 writeup →
Sample report preview: Friday Triage gist — anonymized 10-thread example of the 99ドル Done-For-You triage output. Grounded in r/sales 1tdngew (49 comments on re-engaging cold prospects) and r/smallbusiness 1td0827 (60-comment thread, top reply at 61 score: "holding 50 open loops in your head").
More from the shop:
Read the latest checkpoint: Day 16 — +51 reader spike in 85 min, 0 sales
Day 18 — pbot v1 dev preview shipped
After 18 days of this ZERO-TEN cold start: 9ドル PDF killed at Day 17, pivoted to pbot — a one-click personal knowledge bot you install on your own machine. Talk to it from LINE / Telegram / Zalo on your phone.
v1 dev preview is real: 93 MB macOS .dmg packaged, 15k-chunk SQLite FTS5 queries in 0-3 ms, Anthropic real calls with source citations, daemon auto-start on boot. Day 18 deep dive: the 7-line bigram fix for Chinese search.
Join the pbot waitlist (29ドル · first-100 get -30% → 20ドル) →