Day 2: AIS#7DaysChallenge (Claude Code + Firecrawl: How I scraped my own niche in 10 minutes for $1.06 using Firecrawl MCP)

Day 2 of the 7 day challenge.

Claude Code and MCPs are already my daily drivers, so neither of those was new tonight. The new piece was Firecrawl, and to explain why it landed the way it did, I want to walk through the side of my world that has been heavy on scraping since the end of last year. A business I run called CreatorsForge (https://creatorsforge.co).

CreatorsForge is a Shadow Operator setup. I find Instagram creators who have built real, engaged audiences but who have no monetisation in place. No products, no offers, no funnel. I partner with them on a revenue share. They keep posting, and behind the scenes I build the entire business under their name. Their brand is the front. My operation is invisible.

The AI involvement is different at each price tier.

For low-ticket, Claude generates the digital product itself; the creator advertises it to their followers, who buy on my platform, and the whole thing rides on a 14-day launch strategy my Claude agents put together.
For mid-ticket and high-ticket, the creator records everything themselves. They are the expert in their niche, I am not, and that's the whole point. The videos and the 1:1 coaching live on my platform; my job is the launch strategy and the infrastructure, not the content.

None of this works without knowing two things cold. The creator's audience: where they hang out, what they actually want, what language they use. And the creator themselves: how they talk, how they phrase things, the cadence of their voice. Because every digital product Claude generates has to sound like the creator wrote it, not like a generic AI did. For both of those jobs, since early this year, I've leaned on Apify.

I use one Apify actor to find the right kind of creator: around 10,000 Instagram followers, strong engagement, comments full of buying intent and no link in bio. Once we're working together, two more actors do the heavy lifting. One pulls every Reel and Post the creator has ever published and extracts the transcript captions, which feed a Claude agent that builds a voice DNA file: vocabulary, cadence, recurring phrases, the way they open and close. The other scrapes the comment threads at scale, and a different Claude agent clusters the pain points and surfaces the audience's actual language. Voice DNA on one side, audience pain language on the other. Both feed the product design and the launch copy, which is how a low-ticket digital product can plausibly read like the creator wrote it themselves.

But Apify is platform-bound. There's an actor for Instagram. One for YouTube. One for Reddit. There is no actor for the open web. Random gym websites, regional Substacks, a registered dietitian's blog on Shopify. I used to open a tab, copy, paste, repeat. Or skip it entirely.

Tonight I asked Claude Code to use Firecrawl to scout the HYROX nutrition niche for The Fuel Lab, the Skool community I'm launching in a few weeks (https://www.skool.com/test-community-3892)

This is what came back in about ten minutes:

53 Firecrawl credits. $1.06 total spend. 502 URLs catalogued. 32 pages scraped into 8 clean buckets.

Biggest surprise: Cambridge is a HYROX hotspot, with four training clubs within walking distance of my flat that I had no idea existed. That is not a cold email list. That is a partnership ladder. I also found three active HYROX Substacks I didn't know existed, and one registered dietitian doing 1:1 HYROX consults, which tells me the niche already has paying customers.

Here is the part I didn't see coming.

The Fuel Lab newsletter (day 1 of the challenge, https://www.skool.com/ai-automation-society/day-1-ais7dayschallenge-newsletter-automation-for-my-soon-to-be-launched-skool-fitness-nutrition-community?p=ac6e8a6c) that I launched yesterday is what filters the right people into my Skool community.

Evidence-led, anti-bro-science, hybrid-athlete-coded. The quality of each issue decides who self-selects in. Until tonight, every issue I planned was built from two layers.

One: the Level 4 Advanced Sports Nutrition syllabus, which is what I studied to get the qualification. Solid, but static. Two years out of date the moment I sat the exam.
Two: what worked for me personally across HYROX events and half marathons

Neither layer tells me what a Cambridge HYROX hopeful is actually googling at 11pm three weeks out from race day, or which bro-science claim is going around r/hyrox this month. Firecrawl gives me that third layer: the audience's current reality, in a form that refreshes whenever I want. The newsletter's myth-pick prompt now reads from a folder of evidence corpora I scraped tonight.

Next week I can re-scrape, re-bucket, re-prompt, and the input is fresher every time. The Skool community gets seeded with people who recognised themselves in something specific, not generic. The right hundred members beat the wrong thousand, every single time.

The part that genuinely surprised me about the build: I never told Claude Code how to use Firecrawl. The prompt was just "use it to scout the niche." On its own, it mapped every site first (1 credit per site, no scraping), used search to fill the gaps the maps missed, wrote a Python batch against Firecrawl's REST API with 6-way concurrency because the CLI was slower at that volume, and bucketed the outputs so factcheck-grade sources stayed strictly separate from competitor signal. Then it wired the factcheck folder into my newsletter's fact-check tool as a fourth corpus root. It picked all of that on its own by reading a cost-discipline rule I had written into a markdown file weeks ago.

And the use case that hit me immediately for my AI automation agency, Sharpr Automations: client-onboarding research in five minutes instead of two hours. Every new prospect gets mapped, scraped, and turned into a structured brief on positioning and pain language. The first line of cold outreach becomes a specific reference to something the prospect published last month, instead of "I noticed your company." Building that into a Sharpr tool this weekend.

Quick shoutout to Nate and his team. Firecrawl had been on my radar for months and I never carved out the time to actually try it. The Day 2 brief made it the obvious project, and I can't see myself working without it now.

So that's the realisation. Claude Code I've had for ages. MCPs I've had for ages. Apify has been my scraping muscle since early this year. Firecrawl was the missing leg, the open-web one.

Put together: Claude Code orchestrates, MCPs handle the stateful services, Firecrawl handles the open web, Apify still handles the locked platforms. That's the stack for now.

0 comments