50
34 Comments

๐Ÿคฏ 100 Customers in over 12 months

It took us more than one year but ScrapingBee has finally reached 100 recurring customers.

1 year ago, I never thought that this would be possible. With our previous project, PricingBot, the best we achieved was 6 customers after nine months.

And now, every day, we have more than 3 people paying monthly to use something we built.

We probably could have reached that milestone sooner, but in February we got rid of the $9 plan for several reasons.

We would like to thank the IH community for being so awesome and supportive since day one.

Now, let's reach 200!

Happy Scraping.

, Co-founder of Icon for ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee
on July 24, 2020
  1. 4

    Nice job Pierre! Could you share the reasons why you got rid of the $9 plan?

    1. 2

      Thank you!

      The main problem was support.

      Those people accounted for 5% of our revenue but 80% of our support ticket.

      Of course, you could tell me "then don't do support with those people".

      But we don't want that:

      • an angry $9 customers can create as much damage to your reputation as a $900 one
      • it did not feel right to not answer support request from people who had a problem

      Ultimately we thought that getting rid of the $9 was the only logical thing to do.

      There is only Kevin and I running ScrapingBee and we have to be careful on how we spend our time an reducing the number of customers we have, while increasing ARPU is a good way to do this.

  2. 2

    Like they say...

    The first 100 customers are almost impossible to get. The next 100 are no sweat.

    1. 5

      Ahah who's saying that? Because I'm definitely still sweating!

      1. 2

        Obviously not me, Iโ€™m at 28 customers right now for BuildFaster.co. I donโ€™t know how Iโ€™ll get to 200 ๐Ÿ˜‚

  3. 1

    Congrats @Daolf, amazing milestone to reach! Upwards and onwards! ๐Ÿš€

    1. 1

      Thank you very much!

  4. 1

    Congrats to getting traction from search engines and forums such as Product Hunt and IH.
    Not sure whether you are open to partnerships, but I'd like to invite you to partner up with our startup conveythis.com We have products that complement our audiences.

  5. 1

    Congratulations

  6. 1

    Great job! I specially like your one upcoming product, Product API. Signed up to get notified ;)
    I tried to build a product search engine in the past! So I may revive the site with your API, if the pricing is on the cheap side. :)

    1. 1

      Thank you!

      Coming soon ๐Ÿ˜‰.

      1. 1

        Great! looking forward to it :)

  7. 1

    Congratulations,
    More power to Scrapping

    1. 1

      ๐Ÿ๐Ÿ’ช

  8. 1

    Congratulations ๐Ÿพ

  9. 1

    Congratulations! I've been following your updates, it's great to see things are paying off for you.

    1. 1

      Thank you so much !

  10. 1

    Nice ! Keep going guys !

    1. 1

      Thanks for the support Fabrice :)

  11. 1

    Hey Pierre good job! What's the reason Scraping Bee is doing so well compared to PricingBot ?

    1. 1

      Thank you Andrea!

      Many things but the main reason is this one.

      With PricingBot we tried to sell a product to an audience we did not know and understand. It was a price monitoring system for e-commerce and we knew nothing about e-commerce.

      But we know a lot about web-scraping and are developers ourselves which mean that:

      • we know how to appeal to our users
      • we know how to reach out to them
      • we can write content that our audience will like and leverage
  12. 1

    Great! Have been following your journey :)
    What channel has helped you the most with customer acquisition?

    1. 1

      Thank you very much!

      SEO and word of mouth mainly.

      We've also been very active on IH for the last 2 years and people started to notice us.

      1. 1

        Yes, have seen a lot of post from ScrapingBee, I believe it was called something different earlier.

        What kind of SEO strategy is working out for you guys? Link Building? Guest Blogging? How many posts do you do per week/month?
        SEO has been our main acquisition channel too for Draftss.com and we are trying to double down on it.

        1. 1

          Ping me on Twitter @pierredewulf or by email: [email protected] with your questions and I'll let you know what worked for us.

          I can't share everything here ๐Ÿ˜‰

          1. 1

            Perfect ๐Ÿ‘

  13. 1

    Good Job, growing slowly but steadily

    1. 1

      Exactly! Thank you very much.

      1. 1

        if you are interested in working in more projects we can discuss maybe?

        1. 1

          I'm currently very busy but I'm always happy to learn what other people have in mind [email protected] ๐Ÿ˜‰

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