I Built 77 Web Scrapers in 2 Weeks — Here's What I Learned About What People Actually Need

The Experiment Two weeks ago, I set myself an ambitious challenge: build as many web scrapers as possible and publish them on Apify Store. The result? 77 scrapers. And almost nobody used them. Here's what I learned about building things people actually want. The Mistake: Building What's Cool vs. What's Needed I started by building scrapers for platforms I thought were interesting: Bluesky profile scraper Trustpilot review extractor Academic paper searchers Guess how many users? Zero. Then I built a Reddit scraper — basically the same technical complexity — and it got its first user within days. Why? Because I was solving MY problems, not OTHER PEOPLE'S problems. Nobody woke up thinking "I need a Bluesky scraper." But thousands of marketers, researchers, and founders wake up thinking "I need Reddit data." The 3 Rules I Wish I Knew Before Building 77 Products 1. Search Volume > Technical Complexity I spent 3 hours building an elegant arXiv paper scraper with citation parsing. 0 users. I