Same underlying solution as the Actor. Different shape. Different buyer.
This is the build log.
Why split a product into two shapes
The Actor and the PDF solve the same problem at two ends of the same buyer spectrum:
| Actor (free, MIT) |
PDF (9ドル) |
| Buyer |
developer running > 50 client threads |
freelancer running 5-30 threads |
| Setup |
clone, OAuth, Python, deploy |
30 labels + 12 filters in Gmail UI |
| Customization |
fork the code |
edit the JSON in a template |
| Maintenance |
self-host |
none, runs inside Gmail |
The Actor is the right answer when manual labels stop scaling. The PDF is the right answer when you've never set up a Gmail label system in your life. Pretending one product covers both audiences was the original mistake — solving for "developers who run Python actors" and "freelancers who barely know what Gmail filters are" with the same listing means losing both.
The framework I followed
The 4-hour shape came from a Douyin video I'd been chewing on. The framework was:
-
Find demand, don't invent it. Search for what indie sellers are already moving (not what 1M-follower creators are doing — what 3,000-follower accounts with 5,000 sales are doing). If a tiny seller can move that volume, the demand is real and the bar is low.
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Pull the product out of your own experience. Not "what do I want to build" but "what do people already ask me about." The intersection of that question and step 1 is your product.
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Use AI to compress the build. 3-4 hours, not 3-4 weeks. The framework: AI for the skeleton, your real cases and mistakes for the filling.
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List where the buyer searches. A great PDF on a platform the buyer never visits is worth zero. SEO-style content (the search query the buyer would actually type) is the distribution.
The Actor I had already built was steps 1-3 for the developer audience. The PDF is the same steps for the freelancer audience — the underlying labels and SLA logic are identical, just repackaged.
The build, step by step
Step 1 — Validate the demand (5 minutes)
Searched "Gmail freelance follow up" on Reddit and Indie Hackers. Hit a 2026 IH article titled "Still Using Gmail for CRM? There's a Better Way" that directly framed the pain: "Gmail is just an inbox with labels and stars — no pipeline, no contact record tied to invoices."
That's my buyer typing the pain into Google. Validated.
Also checked Gumroad: there's a "Email Templates For Freelancers" listing in the same space — meaning some seller before me already proved people pay for this category. The differentiation: I have the Gmail-label-system + Apps-Script + 5-template combination, none of the existing listings have all three.
Step 2 — Extract the content from my existing work (90 minutes)
The Actor repo already had:
- The 30-label naming system in
INPUT_SCHEMA.json (pipeline stages, source tags, priority flags)
- The SLA breach logic in
reply_metrics.py (the 7-day and 14-day cutoffs)
- The follow-up templates I'd used myself (the proposal-stalled-then-replied conversations I had in the past year)
- 6 dev.to posts covering the OAuth, quota, and pricing design
The PDF is 80% extraction. Rewriting it for a non-developer audience was the actual work — removing every "you OAuth into a refresh-token-only flow" and replacing with "go to Gmail Settings → Filters."
Step 3 — Generate the deliverables (60 minutes)
- 10-page customer-facing PDF (HTML + CSS → headless Chrome
Page.printToPDF for one-pass typography)
- 40-line Apps Script (extracted the time-based relabel logic from the Actor's
reply_metrics, rewrote as a Gmail trigger function)
- 5 follow-up email templates (each with: subject, body, send conditions, "do NOT use" guard rails)
- Friday 10-min audit checklist (1 page, printable)
The Apps Script was the most interesting part. The Actor's SLA detection runs on a server. The Apps Script runs inside Gmail on a 6-hour trigger, applying the same Stalled-7d / Stalled-14d labels. Different runtime, identical effect.
Step 4 — Listing + distribution (45 minutes)
- Created the Gumroad listing via Brave's CDP automation (cover image, thumbnail, 9ドル price, full description, content upload, publish)
- Added a cross-link block to the Actor's README ("Don't want to self-host? Get the manual pack")
- Appended a one-line CTA to all 6 existing dev.to posts in the series
- Wrote this post
Total elapsed: about 3 hours of focused work, 1 hour of small fixes.
What this proved (and what it didn't)
Proved: A repackage of existing work for an adjacent audience is faster than a new build. The Actor → PDF shape is 90% content reuse, 10% audience translation. If you have an open-source project with documented design choices, the productized version is almost certainly hiding in plain sight.
Didn't prove (yet): Whether the PDF will actually sell. The funnel is live (Gumroad + 6 dev.to CTAs + Actor README + Twitter), but the first cash-in moment is still ahead. The framework says "list where buyers search" — and dev.to isn't where freelancers search for Gmail label systems. Indie Hackers, Reddit r/freelance, and direct Google SEO are the real distribution channels for this product, and those are tomorrow's work.
Will follow up with the actual conversion numbers either way.
Related
Source: foxck016077/apify-gmail-inbox-intel — MIT, build-log transparency, and a pragmatic path from OSS utility to a 9ドル PDF offer.
The PDF itself: Freelancer Gmail Client Tracking Pack — 9ドル on Gumroad. 12-page PDF + 30 labels + 12 filters + 5 follow-up templates + Apps Script. If you grab it and it doesn't help, the listing has a no-questions refund link — that signal is more useful to me than an upvote here.
Discussion question: If you have tried PWYW or low-ticket add-ons on top of open source, which conversion metric told you it was worth keeping?
Update (May 19): The 9ドル PDF mentioned above is now pay-what-you-want from 1,ドル suggested 9ドル — same content, every buyer also gets the 26-page bundle PDF (this 9-article series compiled). The Apify Actor that started this whole thing is free MIT at apify.com/foxck/gmail-inbox-intel — paste 3 OAuth fields, get stalled threads ranked. Affiliate program at 30% open if anyone wants to share: foxck.gumroad.com/affiliates.
Day 7 update (later May 19): I shipped a product pivot — the Gumroad listing above is now a Self-Host Bundle for engineers (full Actor source + docker-compose.yml + 5-min OAuth setup), PWYW from 5ドル suggested 19ドル. The original PDF still ships inside as a bonus. Same URL.
Day 7 write-up with the funnel audit that triggered the pivot: funnel audit found 7 of 9 articles had no buy link, then I pivoted the product.
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) →