Congratulations! But maybe "bootstrapped" is not a 100% correct.
> MAY 2020 - Joining Tinyseed
> And this is precisely why we never decided to raise money. However, a few years ago, [...] An accelerator designed precisely to help people grow their business [...] The money and the support we got from the program helped us grow ScrapingBee into what it is now
Co-founder here, I was waiting for this comment to be honest.
So in essence, if you consider that bootstrapping is building a business without external funding, you're correct.
But to me, bootstrapping VS "VC road" is much more nuanced than this.
Going the VC road forces you to have crazy growth and raise more round because the VC model only works if they fund unicorn 1 time out of 100(0).
TinySeed works even if they fund 8/7 figures businesses, and this was our goal. We had no money when we began (we went through most of our savings during our first venture), no family to raise an angel round and this solution was perfect for us.
The amount of money we got was nothing near what we could have had raising traditional money, but it allowed us to stay independent and grow at our own pace.
Looking at their MRR growth, it seems that they had ~$5K MRR in Spring of 2020, at the time they joined TinySeed.
So perhaps a more technically accurate post would be: "How we bootstrapped to $60K ARR, then took a small investment and grew the company to $1MM ARR" ?
When, in the lifecycle of the company, can you sell a small stake of it and still call it bootstrapped? Basecamp sold a bit of equity in 2006 to Bezos[1], and is still considered the epitome of the bootstrapped company.
Additionally, if one has a couple hundred K after working at MANGA or wherever, or has wealthy parents/friends and uses that money to build their own start-up, is that still bootstrapping?
To me, their journey is much closer to bootstrapping, and is quite an impressive achievement. Congrats, guys!
The biggest problem most people have with traditional VC and thus prefer to "bootstrap" is the pressure to grow too fast. TinySeed has none of that pressure. Boostrapping vs VC is a spectrum and Scrapping Bee is clearly on the bootstrapped side of that spectrum.
When people ask me why I like being the founder of a company, I often reply with a small story: when we built our first saas for SMB, we billed .50€ per API call and we plugged those calls to a Slack bot. Man how great it felt in the firsts weeks when this bot would send a message around 20 times a day: the sound of finally having built something valuable that would generate value even if I'd be out of my computer, running or anything else really.
It's ridiculously hard to get to $1M ARR. ScrapingBee seems to be in the sweet spot where you don't have to work as hard to keep things running so it can be ran `forever` with a small team. This is no small feat and should be celebrated.
Boy this resonates. Not every business needs to "change the world" and IPO with a valuation of $10 Billion.
There are thousands of small businesses out there that provide a quality service, and generate good revenue, and pay their founders and employees amazing sums of money.
Kevin, Pierre: congrats! And thanks for all your help to the NewsCatcher team.
We use ScrapingBee's SEO progress as a benchmark of growth.
Also, to the HN crowd, we found out about TinySeed from ScrapingBee, and applied and got in for the next batch. We've grown from ~4k MRR to 16k MRR in 10 months.
So, to anyone who consider apply to YC, I'd recommend to take a look at TinySeed: https://tinyseed.com/
I couldn't find this on your website - does Scrapingbee respect robots.txt directives, or is there any other method for a website owner to limit or even just slow down your scraping?
Would be surprised if they do. My service is on the receiving end of these scrapers and it gets annoying when some "growth hacker" decides to flood the service with meaningless CPU-heavy requests with a bunch of typos in parameter values. The scraping service gets a $.0001 for every $1 of damage they help inflict, so yay, bootstrapped business.
Congratulations! Really wonderful to see small businesses and small teams succeed.
As an aside, I'm curious if anyone has thought through the ethics of scraping through rotating proxies. Clearly the scraped website doesn't want mass scraping to occur, hence the need for proxies in the first place. What are the strong arguments in favor or against this?
Great pitch and inspiring story. I've been involved with a few startups that failed. So, I know a lot about humility and hard work. Basically, my first starup we were naive. It ended with an acquisition which was ultimately worth nothing. The startup that acquired us raised a lot but ultimately failed as well and I personally turned off the lights (by means of shutting down our AWS stuff). After that, I consulted for a while to make money and then got involved again with another startup. But this time with the wisdom of hindsight.
I've got a good feeling about my latest effort (tryformation.com) where I am the CTO. For the first time, I have a combination of talent around me, a market that is showing actual interest in what we do (and paying us), and a level of control over our product, tech, and road map that means it is really my job to not mess this up. It's still super risky but there's a good chance I can make it work this time. I rebooted the product (rebuilt it from scratch), I've defined our product and vision and took ownership of the product roadmap. And it's working. We are closing deals and getting positive feedback from our early customers. This year is critical for us.
Early revenue is super hard without significant funding. Accepting pizza money from some accelerator helps a little but it's really not about the money usually but about getting some coaching, advice, and building a network around your company of people that can help you. If you are doing SAAS, you need sales people. And not just any people but good ones. A warm introduction can make all the difference you need.
Of course the trick is picking the right accelerator. YC, Techstars (for which I have mentored), and a few others stand out as being awesome. In our case, we actually joined the Bosch Startup Harbour program in Berlin, which helped us build relationships with German industries. Some of those are now becoming customers and a few others might follow. So, good value for us. We did not give away equity and we did not receive a lot in terms of cash. But it helped us a lot.
This is almost cool, unfortunately the product itself (a network of bots to allow websites to be scraped when they obviously don't want to be) seems a little shifty. For example, put these three exhibits together:
Exhibit 1: The ScrapingBee terms and conditions state "We assume that you use the Website Platform and Services legally and ethically and that you have obtained permission, if necessary, to use it on the targeted websites and/or other data sources." This is even backed up with an indemnity clause in which the user has to cover ScrapingBee for any third-party legal claim arising out of their use of the product.
Exhibit 2: ScrapingBee explicitly advertises a feature allowing you to get Google search results via an API call. These results are presumably generated by scraping Google's search pages:
Exhibit 3: Google's own documentation explicitly states that automated querying is prohibited, so if you use this advertised ScrapingBee service, you are naturally violating Google's terms, and could be liable to cover ScrapingBee's legal costs if Google decide to come after them.
$1MM in ARR is all well and good, but there's a limit to how large this business can grow without being pursued by the websites whose scraping they are enabling, and in the case of Google, explicitly promoting.
Hi, would you say most of your clients come from organic currently? Can you give an idea of your customer source splits, organic, paid ads etc? Im guessing the content marketing and organic traffic currently drives the majority of your revenue? thanks
For the "Growth finally kicks in" section - what was the primary driver of your traffic at that point? The increase is fairly pronounced, I wouldn't think that it was just a result of your content ranking higher?
Traffic didn't increase nearly as fast as MRR growth.
What happened was a conjecture of 3 things:
- better conversion with better success rate and dev experience (doc / SDK etc ...)
- revenue extension from existing customers
- SEO rising, slowly but surely on article which converted a lot
@daolf and team: Congrats on this significant milestone and thank you for being so candid about your growth journey.
I'm a bootstrapping founder, have a question about your amazing blog. Love the scrolling table of contents on the left and title/cta that appear on the top as you scroll. Do you mind sharing what cms/theme you use for your blog?
Unless I missed it completely, a suggestion I have for your blog is to have a search feature.
That said, genuinely inspired by your story and grateful for your transparency on how you made it happen. All the best!
So if your highest pricing tier on the website is $249 that means you've got circa 4,000 clients right? Or do you have one big client that owns you a little bit because they contribute such a large percentage of your revenue?
Not saying I don't believe the numbers, would just love to understand the makeup of your client base.
Q: Does ScrapingBee differ to Browserless.io? Or do they do the same thing? I've been out of the scraping scene for years (BeautifulSoup was new when I was doing it).
Browserless allows have a fleet of Chrome in the cloud that you can use to run some browsing scenario.
ScrapingBee is an API allowing to get the HTML of webpages by optionally rendering them inside a real browser, but also managing proxies, data extraction and JS scenario.
Félicitations les gars !
Très jolie photo de Castres.
Signé un ingénieur informatique toulousain passionné d'APIs et expert JS dont le but ultime est de vivre la même aventure que vous : aider les gens à résoudre un problème grâce à un SaaS qui me permette d'en vivre. Actuellement bloqué au step 0 : trouver une douleur à résoudre dans une niche.
Respect, et merci pour l'inspiration. Bravo.
Ravi de voir que même sur HN on sait apprécier les belles villes!
Si tu jamais tu as des questions, surtout n'hésite pas a me contacter, je suis souvent sur Twitter (Pierre de Wulf).
Et sinon bon courage et bonne chance pour ton projet!
PS: qu'est que toi ou tes collègues font dans leur travail de tout les jours que tu n'aimerais plus faire ou plus facilement? Maintenir un cahier / ficher de toutes les tâches que tu n'aimes pas ou que tu trouves redondante peut être un bon début pour la step 0.
Sinon il se dit aussi beaucoup que partout ou dans une entreprise il y a un excel a maintenir, ou des fichiers a s'envoyer régulièrement, il y a un SaaS qui attend d'être monté ;)
Wow, what a clever commerical. Yes, $1m can help you grow your business and quibbling about where it comes from and what it means says a lot about where we're at and how trivial it is to win $1m.
capableweb|4 years ago
> MAY 2020 - Joining Tinyseed
> And this is precisely why we never decided to raise money. However, a few years ago, [...] An accelerator designed precisely to help people grow their business [...] The money and the support we got from the program helped us grow ScrapingBee into what it is now
daolf|4 years ago
Misleading people was never the intent.
We just wanted to share our story and give a little more "human" touch to our about-us page by sharing the journey.
Title was amended.
Have a good week-end HN!
daolf|4 years ago
So in essence, if you consider that bootstrapping is building a business without external funding, you're correct.
But to me, bootstrapping VS "VC road" is much more nuanced than this.
Going the VC road forces you to have crazy growth and raise more round because the VC model only works if they fund unicorn 1 time out of 100(0).
TinySeed works even if they fund 8/7 figures businesses, and this was our goal. We had no money when we began (we went through most of our savings during our first venture), no family to raise an angel round and this solution was perfect for us.
The amount of money we got was nothing near what we could have had raising traditional money, but it allowed us to stay independent and grow at our own pace.
dreig|4 years ago
When, in the lifecycle of the company, can you sell a small stake of it and still call it bootstrapped? Basecamp sold a bit of equity in 2006 to Bezos[1], and is still considered the epitome of the bootstrapped company.
Additionally, if one has a couple hundred K after working at MANGA or wherever, or has wealthy parents/friends and uses that money to build their own start-up, is that still bootstrapping?
To me, their journey is much closer to bootstrapping, and is quite an impressive achievement. Congrats, guys!
[1]: https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-deal-jeff-bezos-got-on-baseca...
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
mritchie712|4 years ago
The biggest problem most people have with traditional VC and thus prefer to "bootstrap" is the pressure to grow too fast. TinySeed has none of that pressure. Boostrapping vs VC is a spectrum and Scrapping Bee is clearly on the bootstrapped side of that spectrum.
YPCrumble|4 years ago
noutella|4 years ago
Long live scrappingbee!
daolf|4 years ago
I totally agree, the $1 dollar you make online is really special.
I know that, as a computer engineer, it really made us shift our whole mindset about what we do.
We thought all we were able to do was to write code for someone else, we discovered that we could also sell a product and make a living out of it.
sockpuppet69|4 years ago
[deleted]
tr33house|4 years ago
All the best!
blantonl|4 years ago
There are thousands of small businesses out there that provide a quality service, and generate good revenue, and pay their founders and employees amazing sums of money.
Love it.
daolf|4 years ago
sombremesa|4 years ago
This is a blanket statement and it’s very wrong.
Know better than to look at revenue versus profit. Then again, Silicon Valley seems to have long since given up on that idea!
artembugara|4 years ago
We use ScrapingBee's SEO progress as a benchmark of growth.
Also, to the HN crowd, we found out about TinySeed from ScrapingBee, and applied and got in for the next batch. We've grown from ~4k MRR to 16k MRR in 10 months.
So, to anyone who consider apply to YC, I'd recommend to take a look at TinySeed: https://tinyseed.com/
daolf|4 years ago
Wishing you all the best with NewsCatcher and happy that TinySeed is living up to your expectation.
ksahin|4 years ago
niel|4 years ago
I couldn't find this on your website - does Scrapingbee respect robots.txt directives, or is there any other method for a website owner to limit or even just slow down your scraping?
blep-arsh|4 years ago
babelfish|4 years ago
akprasad|4 years ago
As an aside, I'm curious if anyone has thought through the ethics of scraping through rotating proxies. Clearly the scraped website doesn't want mass scraping to occur, hence the need for proxies in the first place. What are the strong arguments in favor or against this?
jillesvangurp|4 years ago
I've got a good feeling about my latest effort (tryformation.com) where I am the CTO. For the first time, I have a combination of talent around me, a market that is showing actual interest in what we do (and paying us), and a level of control over our product, tech, and road map that means it is really my job to not mess this up. It's still super risky but there's a good chance I can make it work this time. I rebooted the product (rebuilt it from scratch), I've defined our product and vision and took ownership of the product roadmap. And it's working. We are closing deals and getting positive feedback from our early customers. This year is critical for us.
Early revenue is super hard without significant funding. Accepting pizza money from some accelerator helps a little but it's really not about the money usually but about getting some coaching, advice, and building a network around your company of people that can help you. If you are doing SAAS, you need sales people. And not just any people but good ones. A warm introduction can make all the difference you need.
Of course the trick is picking the right accelerator. YC, Techstars (for which I have mentored), and a few others stand out as being awesome. In our case, we actually joined the Bosch Startup Harbour program in Berlin, which helped us build relationships with German industries. Some of those are now becoming customers and a few others might follow. So, good value for us. We did not give away equity and we did not receive a lot in terms of cash. But it helped us a lot.
daolf|4 years ago
It's especially relevant today as we're really considering exploring the sales part of SAAS. Until now, everything has been more or less inbound.
Have a great week-end, good job and good luck with your projects!
manmanic|4 years ago
Exhibit 1: The ScrapingBee terms and conditions state "We assume that you use the Website Platform and Services legally and ethically and that you have obtained permission, if necessary, to use it on the targeted websites and/or other data sources." This is even backed up with an indemnity clause in which the user has to cover ScrapingBee for any third-party legal claim arising out of their use of the product.
Reference: https://www.scrapingbee.com/terms-and-conditions/
Exhibit 2: ScrapingBee explicitly advertises a feature allowing you to get Google search results via an API call. These results are presumably generated by scraping Google's search pages:
Reference: https://www.scrapingbee.com/features/google/
Exhibit 3: Google's own documentation explicitly states that automated querying is prohibited, so if you use this advertised ScrapingBee service, you are naturally violating Google's terms, and could be liable to cover ScrapingBee's legal costs if Google decide to come after them.
Reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
$1MM in ARR is all well and good, but there's a limit to how large this business can grow without being pursued by the websites whose scraping they are enabling, and in the case of Google, explicitly promoting.
twox2|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
jay377|4 years ago
aantix|4 years ago
daolf|4 years ago
What happened was a conjecture of 3 things: - better conversion with better success rate and dev experience (doc / SDK etc ...) - revenue extension from existing customers - SEO rising, slowly but surely on article which converted a lot
nelsondev|4 years ago
You recommended Rob Walling’s book, Start Small, Stay Small, but what else can I read?
And where do “indie hackers” like you hang out on the internet, so that i can learn more about how to do this myself?
Any other resources worth sharing?
limedaring|4 years ago
daolf|4 years ago
- IndieHackers (haven't been here in a wild but I definitely recommend the funders interview)
- Microconf
- Twitter
Book:
- From Zero to Sold (Arvid Kahl)
- Hello Startup (Yevgeniy Brikman)
I hope it helps :)
cercatrova|4 years ago
https://www.indiehackers.com coined the term I believe
Xt-6|4 years ago
floridageorgia|4 years ago
I'm a bootstrapping founder, have a question about your amazing blog. Love the scrolling table of contents on the left and title/cta that appear on the top as you scroll. Do you mind sharing what cms/theme you use for your blog?
Unless I missed it completely, a suggestion I have for your blog is to have a search feature.
That said, genuinely inspired by your story and grateful for your transparency on how you made it happen. All the best!
daolf|4 years ago
Whole blog is built on HUGO with a custom theme.
https://gohugo.io
Here is the add-on used for the ToC:
https://tscanlin.github.io/tocbot/
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
simonswords82|4 years ago
Not saying I don't believe the numbers, would just love to understand the makeup of your client base.
plasma|4 years ago
grwthckrmstr|4 years ago
I'm really curious to know what happened between $10k MRR and $1mn ARR. That growth happened in a span of 1 year which is just amazing.
Any pointers for others who are at a similar phase of their business looking to grow from 10k->83k MRR in a short span?
yawnxyz|4 years ago
frays|4 years ago
This new look for your website is also great. What front end framework + back end stack are you using?
daolf|4 years ago
Back: Python + Postgres + Flask + redis
Front: JS vanilla + a bit of Svelte
porker|4 years ago
Q: Does ScrapingBee differ to Browserless.io? Or do they do the same thing? I've been out of the scraping scene for years (BeautifulSoup was new when I was doing it).
daolf|4 years ago
Browserless allows have a fleet of Chrome in the cloud that you can use to run some browsing scenario.
ScrapingBee is an API allowing to get the HTML of webpages by optionally rendering them inside a real browser, but also managing proxies, data extraction and JS scenario.
Let's say we're cousins ;)
dgudkov|4 years ago
daolf|4 years ago
devops000|4 years ago
daolf|4 years ago
toeknee123|4 years ago
daolf|4 years ago
joexuyi|4 years ago
throwthere|4 years ago
daolf|4 years ago
Yes, TinySeed mattered a lot.
asdadsdad|4 years ago
ammar_x|4 years ago
daolf|4 years ago
wenbin|4 years ago
daolf|4 years ago
corentin88|4 years ago
daolf|4 years ago
sockpuppet69|4 years ago
[deleted]
mike31fr|4 years ago
daolf|4 years ago
Ravi de voir que même sur HN on sait apprécier les belles villes!
Si tu jamais tu as des questions, surtout n'hésite pas a me contacter, je suis souvent sur Twitter (Pierre de Wulf).
Et sinon bon courage et bonne chance pour ton projet!
PS: qu'est que toi ou tes collègues font dans leur travail de tout les jours que tu n'aimerais plus faire ou plus facilement? Maintenir un cahier / ficher de toutes les tâches que tu n'aimes pas ou que tu trouves redondante peut être un bon début pour la step 0.
Sinon il se dit aussi beaucoup que partout ou dans une entreprise il y a un excel a maintenir, ou des fichiers a s'envoyer régulièrement, il y a un SaaS qui attend d'être monté ;)
j0hns0n|4 years ago
Echo Chambers echo.
daolf|4 years ago