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How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR
- throwthere 5y agoLooks like things really kicked off once they joined Tinyseed. That’s amazing!
- daolf 5y agoThanks a lot! Yes, TinySeed mattered a lot.
- asdadsdad 5y agoCongrats! Lmk if you need help with anti-bot problems ;)
- noutella 5y agoWhen 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. Long live scrappingbee!
- sockpuppet69 5y ago
- daolf 5y agoCo-founder here, thanks for the kind words. 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.
- tr33house 5y agoIt'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. All the best!
- daolf 5y agoThanks a lot for the kind words.
- blantonl 5y agoBoy 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. Love it.
- sombremesa 5y ago> It's ridiculously hard to get to $1M ARR 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!
- encoderer 5y agoRight, sure, silicon valley doesn't know how to turn a profit. /s
- sombremesa 5y agoIs that what I said? I don't think that's what I said. What I actually meant to say was that SV investing has ignored profit and looked at revenue for a while now.
- yawnxyz 5y agoI absolutely love ScrapingBee, but I wonder if the TPS lawsuit will eventually affect ScrapingBee?
- niel 5y agoCongratulations on your success, Kevin and team. 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?
- babelfish 5y agoThey almost certainly don't
- blep-arsh 5y agoWould 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.
- capableweb 5y agoCongratulations! 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
- daolf 5y agoThis blew way out of proportion. 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!
- reitzensteinm 5y agoFor what it's worth, I think people are nit picking rather than crying foul. It's a great story, thanks for sharing it!
- AlchemistCamp 5y agoI hadn't commented on this thread previously, but I did flag it due to the title. It just wasn't honest. Selling a double digit % of the company to investors and then calling it bootstrapped while promoting it here is hard to defend.
- tessierashpool 5y agoseems more like a little bit of both.
- rexreed 5y agoI might speak for some of those critical by saying that you got my attention with the "bootstrap" hook but immediately lost it when I saw the funding. At that point I had a hard time believing and following the rest. This might seem like a small nit, but it comes to the honesty and intent of the piece. Good job getting our attention tho. And pay attention to the details.
- artembugara 5y agoKevin, 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/ https://tinyseed.com/
- corentin88 5y agoCongrats to the team!
- daolf 5y agoThank you!
- j0hns0n 5y agoWow, 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. Echo Chambers echo.
- daolf 5y agoWhat?
- porker 5y agoCongratulations! 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 5y agoWe close but different. 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 ;)
- nelsondev 5y agoAwesome story and congratulations! 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 5y agoMicroConf Connect is an awesome bootstrappery community: https://microconf.com/connect https://microconf.com/connect
- daolf 5y agoCommunity: - 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 5y ago> And where do “indie hackers” like you hang out on the internet, so that i can learn more about how to do this myself? https://www.indiehackers.com https://www.indiehackers.com coined the term I believe
- Xt-6 5y ago"Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big" is interesting. Most of the companies features are outside the tech industry.
- sockpuppet69 5y ago
- toeknee123 5y agoCongrats, Kevin and Pierre on the success. You've all been such an inspiration and model for us in the TinySeed community.
- daolf 5y agoThank you very much!
- wenbin 5y agoCongrats on achieving the $1m ARR milestone!
- daolf 5y agoThank you very much!
- akprasad 5y agoCongratulations! 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?
- jillesvangurp 5y agoGreat 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.
- daolf 5y agoThank you for your kind words and sharing your story. 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 5y agoThis 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. Reference: https://www.scrapingbee.com/terms-and-conditions/ 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/ 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/guidelines/automated-queries 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 5y agoIt's good that there are businesses like this testing the legality of scraping. The notion that scraping should be illegal is absurd IMO.
- karterk 5y agoThey don't respect robots.txt or have a way for websites to opt out. These might not be illegal but mighty rude.
- simonswords82 5y agoIf I'm making a $1m a year in revenue and the absolute worst you can call me is "rude" - I'm down.
- floridageorgia 5y ago@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!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- daolf 5y agoThank you very much! Whole blog is built on HUGO with a custom theme. https://gohugo.io https://gohugo.io Here is the add-on used for the ToC: https://tscanlin.github.io/tocbot/ https://tscanlin.github.io/tocbot/
- aantix 5y agoFor 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?
- daolf 5y agoTraffic 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
- devops000 5y agoI suggest to add an HTML preview page in the API playground page. It would be easier to see what the scraper see on the webpage.
- daolf 5y agoThat is an excellent idea, added to the roadmap!
- mike31fr 5y agoFélicitations 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.
- daolf 5y agoAhahah, merci beaucoup pour ce mot. 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 ;)
- dgudkov 5y agoLong story short - they tried different things, got small MRR, took money from an investor and grew up to $1m ARR in the next 2 years.
- daolf 5y agoYup!
- grwthckrmstr 5y agoHuge congrats on your success! 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?
- simonswords82 5y agoSo 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.
- plasma 5y agoTheir $1m figure is Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), so they just need $83k per month (or 333 clients paying the $249 per month).
- joexuyi 5y agoCongrats, but the grammar was off-putting :(
- frays 5y agoCongratulations. I look forward to watching where ScrapingBee will be in another few years. This is certainly a gap in the market which you can fill. This new look for your website is also great. What front end framework + back end stack are you using?
- daolf 5y agoThanks a lot for the kind words. Back: Python + Postgres + Flask + redis Front: JS vanilla + a bit of Svelte
- ammar_x 5y agoThis is an inspiring story, thanks for sharing.
- daolf 5y agoThank you!
- jay377 5y agoHi, 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