Apify Store Opportunity Finder: Lead Gen Edition

Find profitable Apify Actor ideas before building another generic lead-gen scraper.

This Actor searches public Apify Store listings, normalizes Actor metadata, classifies lead-gen niches, and generates opportunity reports based on demand, saturation, ratings, weak positioning, and public usage signals.

What It Does

• Searches Apify Store with your keywords.
• Exports normalized Actor rows.
• Detects platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Google Maps, Trustpilot, and Glassdoor.
• Detects use cases like lead generation, contact extraction, monitoring, reviews, jobs, ecommerce, ads, and enrichment.
• Groups Actors into niches.
• Scores demand, weakness, saturation, and opportunity.
• Writes a markdown summary to SUMMARY.md.

Who It Is For

• Apify Actor developers
• scraping agencies
• indie hackers
• data product builders
• lead-gen operators deciding what scraper to build next

Input

{
  "searchTerms": ["lead generation", "linkedin scraper", "google maps leads"],
  "maxActorsPerTerm": 200,
  "analysisMode": "market_analysis",
  "sortBy": "popularity",
  "includeRawActors": true,
  "includeNicheReports": true
}

Dataset Output

Actor rows use record_type: "actor":

{
  "record_type": "actor",
  "search_term": "lead generation",
  "actor_id": "example/linkedin-people-search",
  "title": "LinkedIn People Search Scraper",
  "developer": "Example",
  "pricing_model": "PAY_PER_EVENT",
  "rating": 3.2,
  "review_count": 6,
  "total_users": 3000,
  "monthly_users": 180,
  "detected_platforms": ["linkedin"],
  "detected_use_cases": ["lead_generation", "contact_extraction"],
  "quality_flags": ["high_usage_low_rating"]
}

Niche rows use record_type: "niche_report":

{
  "record_type": "niche_report",
  "niche": "linkedin lead generation",
  "actors_found": 12,
  "total_users_sum": 18400,
  "median_rating": 3.6,
  "low_rating_high_usage_count": 3,
  "demand_score": 274.13,
  "weakness_score": 42,
  "saturation_score": 58.7,
  "opportunity_score": 257.43,
  "recommended_actor_angle": "LinkedIn lead generation with enrichment, monitoring, and reliability proof"
}

Opportunity Score

The score is a directional ranking, not a promise of profit.

It favors:

• visible demand from public usage and reviews
• weak competitors with poor ratings or weak Store positioning
• niches that are not completely saturated

It penalizes:

• heavy crowding
• strong single-actor dominance
• weak public demand signals

Monetization Notes

Use Apify Pay Per Event when publishing. This Actor pushes dataset rows with the store-result event name, so the simplest setup is one event charged per returned row.

Suggested starting price:

store-result: $0.001 per dataset row

Do not manually charge an Actor-start event in code. Apify provides the synthetic start event for new PPE Actors.

Limitations

• Uses public Apify Store metadata only.
• Does not guarantee demand outside Apify Store.
• Does not scrape private data.
• Does not use LLMs in v1; classification is deterministic keyword matching.
• Scores are a compass for inspection, not financial advice.

Local Development

npm install
npm test
npm run lint
npm start

For local runs, Apify SDK writes results into the local storage/ directory.