The storyHow they got there
Adrian Horning spent 2–3 years building an Instagram presence as "the Web Scraping Guy." His content was unapologetically weird: scraping stupid things, building pointless automation, showing off absurd datasets he had assembled just because he could. The audience grew because it was genuinely entertaining.
The first real giveaway was scraped data itself: Adrian would post datasets he had assembled and let people download them for free. Followers who wanted the data would share the posts. Over two years, the audience self-selected into exactly the people who would pay for a web scraping course.
When Adrian built the course in approximately two weeks and launched it on Gumroad at $247, the pre-validated audience bought immediately. $20K in the first three days. The course became ~$7K/month in passive income.
Channel MixWhere the growth actually came from
Most case studies hand-wave channels. Here's the rough allocation — not in dollars spent, but in users acquired — across the routes that actually mattered.