Apify Buying Signal Detection

Buying-Signal Detection

Turn an ICP description into a recurring pipeline that surfaces companies showing buying intent across three signal types — job postings, fundraising events, and LinkedIn content — and appends them to a single deduplicated leads.csv you can pipe straight into your CRM.

What this skill does (and what it deliberately does not)

This skill sets up and runs a scheduled workflow. It does not draft cold emails, score leads by fit, or push rows into a CRM. Its output is a clean, evidence-linked leads.csv — the input to whatever outreach process you already have. Cold outreach drafting for these leads is deliberately a separate concern (that's what apify-link-prospecting-outreach and similar skills exist for).

Three design commitments worth knowing before you start:

1. The Apify side and the Claude side run on separate schedules. Apify runs the Actors on its own cron; Claude runs the aggregation on its own cron. Claude Code doesn't need to be up when the Actors run. This decoupling is what makes the pipeline actually recurring, not just "you have to remember to trigger it."
2. Weekly idempotency is enforced at aggregation time. If the leads CSV already has an entry from the current ISO week, the aggregate script exits early with no HTTP calls made. The Claude-side schedule can fire more often than weekly (safety net) without cost impact.
3. First-seen wins on dedup. A lead surfaced by the jobs signal on Monday stays a jobs-signal lead even if the same company shows up in the funding feed on Wednesday. The signal that first surfaced a company is the more useful one.

Prerequisites

• Apify account (sign up)
• Authentication via one of:
  • apify login (OAuth, if using the Apify CLI)
  • APIFY_TOKEN environment variable
  • Token from Apify Console → Settings → Integrations
• Python 3.10+ (for scripts/aggregate.py and scripts/setup_apify_tasks.py; only stdlib is required — requests is used when available but has a urllib fallback)
• Optional: a way to trigger the Claude-side aggregation on a schedule — the local scheduled-tasks MCP is the recommended path when you're on Claude Code; cron / Task Scheduler / GitHub Actions all work too if you'd rather run it headlessly

Workflow

Copy this checklist and mark items done:

Task Progress:
- [ ] Step 1: Collect ICP inputs (block on these)
- [ ] Step 2: Write icp.json + blacklist.csv (if any)
- [ ] Step 3: Provision Apify Actor Tasks (setup_apify_tasks.py)
- [ ] Step 4: Verify Actor picks in the Apify Console
- [ ] Step 5: Register the Claude-side aggregation schedule
- [ ] Step 6: First manual run of aggregate.py — sanity check the output

Step 1: Collect ICP inputs (block on these)

Ask the user for all of the following before writing any file. The setup script needs every field to route correctly, and reworking a scheduled task after it's provisioned means either editing it in the Apify Console or re-running setup — both worse than asking once.

1. Campaign name — a short slug (lowercase, dashes). Used as the prefix on every Apify Task name (e.g. emea-saas-hiring-aes-bebity-linkedin-jobs-scraper). If the user already runs multiple campaigns, prevent collisions upfront.
2. Signals to track — subset of ["jobs", "funding", "linkedin_content"]. Rarely will a campaign want only one; the strength of the workflow is the intersection of signals per company. Recommend all three unless there's a specific cost concern.
3. Geo (ISO country codes) — uppercase two-letter codes. Drives regional Actor routing (Stepstone for DE/AT/BE, Seek for AU/NZ, France Travail for FR, Maddyness for FR-funding). Global campaigns should list every country the user actually sells into — passing ["US", "GB", "DE", "FR", "AU"] will fan out to five regional job Actors, which is 5× the weekly cost. See references/gotchas.md.
4. Industry keywords — the category descriptor. Passed to funding trackers as industry, to LinkedIn as keywords when no explicit content search terms are provided, and to job scrapers as a fallback when no persona titles are given.
5. Persona (if jobs signal enabled) — job titles the ICP hires for. Concrete titles beat categories: "Account Executive", "SDR", "BDR" are hits; "sales" is noise. Optional seniority (entry, mid, senior, manager, director, vp, cxo) and company-size bands ("11-50", etc.) get applied post-hoc in the aggregator.
6. Funding config (if funding signal enabled) — stages (seed, series_a, series_b, etc.) and max_days_since_announcement (default 90). Fresh cash → open budget → tighter window is better.
7. LinkedIn content config (if linkedin_content signal enabled) — search phrases. This is the biggest quality lever; broad terms ("sales") waste budget. Specific pain-point phrases beat category names — see references/actors.md. Plus min_reactions (default 5) and posted_within_days (default 14) for post-filtering.
8. Where to store leads — path to a CSV file. Default ./leads.csv inside the campaign directory. This file is the pipeline's memory across runs; keep it under version control (or at least back it up) so the dedup guard survives disk resets.
9. Blacklist CSV path — optional. CSV with columns domain,company,reason. Rows matching either the exact domain or the normalized company name get dropped before append. If the user doesn't have one, ask if they want to start with obvious exclusions (existing customers, their own domain, top competitors).
10. Schedule — apify_side_cron (when Apify runs the Actors) and claude_side_cron (when Claude aggregates). Default: 0 6 * * 1 (Apify Monday 06:00 UTC) and 0 8 * * 1 (Claude Monday 08:00 UTC). Two hours of buffer between them absorbs slow Actor runs.

The full schema is documented in references/icp-config-schema.md. A worked example lives at examples/icp.example.json.

Step 2: Write icp.json and blacklist.csv

Write the campaign directory contents:

<campaign-dir>/
  icp.json           ← the config from Step 1
  blacklist.csv      ← optional; columns: domain,company,reason
  leads.csv          ← created empty; the aggregator will populate it

Start leads.csv with just the header row (schema in references/csv-schema.md) so the aggregator doesn't have to handle a missing-file case on first run:

detected_at,company,domain,signal_type,signal_detail,signal_source_actor,signal_date,evidence_url,geo,notes

Step 3: Provision Apify Actor Tasks

Run the setup script:

APIFY_TOKEN=$APIFY_TOKEN \
python ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/setup_apify_tasks.py \
  --config ./icp.json

What this does:

• Reads icp.json and picks Actors per the routing tables in references/actors.md — global Actors always, plus regional Actors matching the geo list.
• For each pick, upserts an Apify Actor Task named <campaign>-<actor-slug> with the input payload derived from the ICP. Re-running the script updates existing tasks in place; it does not create duplicates.
• Writes a sidecar <campaign-dir>/.<campaign-name>.tasks.json recording the task IDs. aggregate.py reads this to know which tasks to pull dataset items from.
• If schedule.apify_side_cron is set in the ICP (default is), creates or updates a single Apify Schedule that fires all the tasks on that cron.

Useful flags:

• --dry-run — print the pick list and payloads without making any API calls. Always do this once when authoring a new campaign.
• --no-schedule — provision tasks but skip Schedule creation (useful when you want to trigger runs manually while calibrating).

Step 4: Verify Actor picks in the Apify Console

Open console.apify.com/actors/tasks. Filter by the campaign prefix. Sanity-check three things:

1. The right Actors were picked — the regional ones (Stepstone / Seek / France Travail / Maddyness) fire only for the intended geos. If you see Seek but no ANZ country in the ICP, something's off.
2. The input payload looks right — click each task, view its input JSON. Keywords, titles, and stages should be populated from the ICP; nothing should be null.
3. The Apify Schedule is enabled — under Schedules, find <campaign>-schedule, confirm it's on and lists every task.

If anything looks wrong, edit icp.json and re-run setup_apify_tasks.py — it's idempotent.

Step 5: Register the Claude-side aggregation schedule

Register a scheduled task that invokes the aggregator on the campaign's claude_side_cron. Pick whichever runner matches your environment:

Option A — scheduled-tasks MCP inside Claude Code. The MCP exposes mcp__scheduled-tasks__create_scheduled_task. The concrete call to make:

{
  "name": "<campaign-name>-aggregate",
  "cron_expression": "<value of schedule.claude_side_cron from icp.json>",
  "timezone": "UTC",
  "prompt": "Run the buying-signal aggregator. Execute exactly: python ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/aggregate.py --config /abs/path/to/icp.json. Requires APIFY_TOKEN env var. On non-zero exit, surface the stderr in the notification body — do not attempt to reinterpret the error."
}

Substitute the real values for <campaign-name> and /abs/path/to/icp.json before making the call. Verify the task landed with mcp__scheduled-tasks__list_scheduled_tasks and confirm the cron matches icp.json.

Option B — headless cron / Task Scheduler / CI. Add a plain OS-level scheduler entry:

# Linux crontab entry
0 8 * * 1 APIFY_TOKEN=$APIFY_TOKEN /path/to/python /path/to/aggregate.py --config /path/to/icp.json >> /path/to/aggregate.log 2>&1

Or a GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/aggregate.yml):

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 8 * * 1'
jobs:
  aggregate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with: { python-version: '3.11' }
      - env: { APIFY_TOKEN: '${{ secrets.APIFY_TOKEN }}' }
        run: python scripts/aggregate.py --config icp.json

Either runner is safe to invoke more often than weekly — the weekly-idempotency guard skips runs that already have this-week entries. Use --force only during calibration.

Step 6: First manual run of aggregate.py

Before waiting for the schedule to fire, run once manually to confirm the wiring. This also seeds leads.csv so the week-guard has something to compare against next week:

APIFY_TOKEN=$APIFY_TOKEN \
python ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/aggregate.py --config ./icp.json

Expected output shape:

{
  "summary": {
    "appended": 47,
    "fetched_by_signal": {"jobs": 320, "funding": 88, "linkedin_content": 210},
    "dropped": {"blacklist": 2, "dup_domain": 156, "dup_url": 401, "post_filter": 12, "unmappable": 0, "linkedin_no_domain": 8},
    "linkedin_profile_lookups": 142,
    "linkedin_profile_resolved": 134,
    "linkedin_company_lookups": 118,
    "linkedin_company_resolved": 112,
    "linkedin_domain_resolved": 128
  }
}
wrote 47 new rows to /abs/path/to/leads.csv

The linkedin_*_lookups / linkedin_*_resolved counters report each hop of the LinkedIn author-domain enrichment chain (see below). linkedin_domain_resolved is the count of LinkedIn rows whose domain column was successfully filled in. linkedin_no_domain is the number of LinkedIn rows dropped because the chain couldn't resolve a domain — those rows cannot be blacklisted or deduped safely.

If fetched_by_signal is all zeros, either the Apify tasks haven't run yet (check the Console) or the sidecar task registry is missing. Wait for the first Apify run to complete, then rerun.

Use --dry-run to see what would be appended without touching the CSV, and --force to bypass the weekly guard during calibration.

Actor routing

The full catalog with per-signal PICK rules lives in references/actors.md. Condensed summary:

The routing logic in setup_apify_tasks.py::pick_actors mirrors this table — if you edit one, edit the other.

Why the LinkedIn enrichment runs on-demand, not scheduled — and why it's a two-hop chain

harvestapi/linkedin-post-search returns the author's name and headline but not the employer's website. Without a domain, the aggregator cannot check the blacklist or dedup against previously seen companies for this signal — meaning blacklisted competitors could slip in via LinkedIn posts.

Resolving that domain takes two additional Actor calls, chained inside aggregate.py::enrich_linkedin_domains:

1. harvestapi/linkedin-profile-scraper on the deduplicated set of author profile URLs whose post rows came back without a domain. Returns currentPosition[0].companyLinkedinUrl and companyName — but not the company website. Input: {profileScraperMode: "Profile details no email ($4 per 1k)", urls: [...]}.
2. harvestapi/linkedin-company on the deduplicated set of company LinkedIn URLs returned by step 1. Returns website. Input: {companies: [...]}.

The chain is the aggregator's only synchronous Actor call path — all other data comes from pre-scheduled Task runs. It's the deliberate exception because both enrichment inputs (author profile URLs, then company URLs) can only be known after the previous hop's dataset is read.

Cost.

• Profile scraping: $4 per 1000 profiles (chose the "no email" tier — email lookup isn't needed for domain resolution)
• Company scraping: pay-per-event on harvestapi/linkedin-company
• Combined effect: for a campaign of 500 LinkedIn posts averaging 3 posts/author, expect ~170 profile lookups + ~150 company lookups (many authors work at the same company)

Three knobs bound the cost:

• Canonical profile URL dedup — N posts by the same author cost one profile lookup (canonical_linkedin_profile_url strips ?miniProfileUrn=… so the same author across sample posts collapses to one key)
• Company-URL dedup at the company-scraper hop — N authors at the same company cost one company lookup
• The whole pass is skipped entirely when every LinkedIn row already has a domain

Calling Actors — choose your interface

setup_apify_tasks.py uses the Apify REST API directly (no Actor call — it provisions Tasks and Schedules). aggregate.py uses the REST API to pull dataset items from the last successful run of each task. If you want to trigger an Actor manually during troubleshooting (e.g. Step 4 verification), use one of these:

Option A: Apify CLI (recommended for portability)

Three flags on every call (--json, --user-agent, 2>/dev/null):

# Manually trigger one campaign task
apify tasks run <task-id> --wait 300 \
  --json \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/apify-buying-signal-detection \
  2>/dev/null

# List tasks provisioned for this campaign
apify tasks list --json 2>/dev/null | \
  jq '.[] | select(.name | startswith("<campaign-name>-"))'

# Peek at the latest dataset for a task
apify tasks last-run <task-id> --dataset --format json \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/apify-buying-signal-detection 2>/dev/null

# Fetch an Actor's input schema (when you're deciding whether to add it to the routing table)
apify actors info "<actor-id>" --input --json \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/apify-buying-signal-detection 2>/dev/null

Option B: Apify MCP connector

Hosted MCP server at mcp.apify.com. Full docs at docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/mcp.

Option C: MCP client of your choice (e.g. mcpc)

Standalone CLI client. See github.com/apify/mcpc.

Troubleshooting