I Got 250 Users on My LinkedIn Scraper Without Spending a Dollar on Ads

Back in January, I pushed a LinkedIn Employee Scraper to the Apify Store. No budget. No influencer shoutouts. No Product Hunt launch. Just me, a Node.js actor, and a lot of stubborn optimism. Three months later: 250 users, 2,665 runs, and a Rising Star badge. Here's what actually worked. The tool itself Quick context: the scraper takes a LinkedIn company URL and pulls employee data (names, titles, locations) using Puppeteer. It runs on Apify's platform at $0.005 per run through pay per event pricing. Nothing groundbreaking technically, but it solves a real pain point for recruiters, sales teams, and market researchers who need bulk LinkedIn data without sitting there copying names manually. What drove the growth 1. A README that actually helps people This sounds boring, but I'm convinced it's the #1 reason the scraper got traction. Most actors on the Apify Store have thin READMEs with maybe a paragraph and a screenshot. I wrote mine like documentation for a product: Real input/output e