The Story
Adrian Horning is a solo developer from Austin who built Scrape Creators - a social media scraping API that generates $20K/month. But here's the twist: he didn't come up with the idea himself. He found a successful scraping API listed for sale on Acquire.com (formerly MicroAcquire), saw it was making $30K MRR with less than 100 customers, and decided to build his own version instead of buying it.
Adrian's background: he moved to San Francisco wanting to be in tech, learned to code at App Academy (a bootcamp), worked as an engineer in Utah for 3 years, then quit with $30,000 in savings. He freelanced, built a course, and tried various products without success until Scrape Creators.
A Twitter follower DM'd him about the Acquire.com listing because Adrian already had a product related to social media. When he saw the numbers - $30K MRR, only SEO for customer acquisition, less than 100 customers - he knew he could replicate it. He had been studying scraping for 3 years and already had the technical skills.
The MVP took just a couple of weeks because he already had scrapers built from previous experience. He hosted them on Render.com, put documentation in a Notion doc, built a basic website, and got his first customer a few weeks later.
Key Insights
Why This Idea Worked
- •Pre-validated market (existing business making $30K MRR)
- •Technical skills already developed (3 years of scraping experience)
- •Small customer base meant room for competition
- •SEO-based acquisition meant he could compete with his Twitter presence
The Copying Framework
- •If something is working, you have a "moral obligation" to copy it
- •Don't copy word for word - copy the concept and idea
- •Find the website by Googling parts of the listing description
- •Look for "[competitor] alternative" blog posts
9-Step Playbook for Copying Ideas
- •Visit Acquire.com marketplace
- •Filter by SaaS
- •Filter by asking price ($300K+) or ARR - looking for pre-validated ideas
- •Look for markets you know - niche down to your expertise
- •Find the actual website - Google the listing description or search "[competitor] alternative"
- •Reverse engineer customer acquisition - How are they getting customers? SEO? Ads? Content?
- •Build the product
- •Don't copy literally - Copy the concept, not the exact implementation
- •Do something every day - Promote or improve the product daily
Business Model
- •Credit-based system (pay as you go, no subscription)
- •600 paying customers
- •~20 million API requests per month
- •Pricing: $10 for 5K credits, $50 for 25K credits, $500 for 500K credits
- •~80% profit margins
Tech Stack
- •Node.js/JavaScript (everything)
- •Impit package by Apify (HTTP requests)
- •Proxies: Evomi, Core Residential, Webshare, Massive (~$1,500/month)
- •Render.com (hosting)
- •AWS Lambda (some scripts)
- •Cursor ($20/month)
- •Supabase (database)
- •Astro + React (frontend)
- •Developer in Philippines for overnight monitoring (~$500/month)
- •Server costs: ~$400/month
Resources
- •Follow Adrian: https://x.com/adrian_horning_
- •Scrape Creators: https://scrapecreators.com/