My LinkedIn Scraper Just Hit Top 20 on Apify — Here's How I Built It

I woke up last week to an email from Apify saying my LinkedIn Employee Scraper had earned the Rising Star badge — meaning it cracked the top 20 actors on the entire platform. 176 users, 2,430 runs, and counting. This is the story of how a side project built in Nairobi turned into one of the most-used LinkedIn scrapers on Apify. The Problem: LinkedIn Has No Real API for Employee Data If you've ever tried to pull employee data from LinkedIn programmatically, you already know the pain. LinkedIn's official API is locked down tight — you need partner status or a Sales Navigator license ($800–$1,200/month) just to get basic company employee info. For indie developers, recruiters building internal tools, or startups doing competitive intel, that price tag kills the project before it starts. I needed a different approach. How It Works: Playwright + Crawlee + Anti-Detection The scraper runs as an Apify Actor using Crawlee (Apify's open-source crawling framework) with Playwright driving a real C