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Open Report July: 1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ customers edition 🤯

💰 MRR: $7875 +24%
💵: $8290 +5%
🤝: 18
😊: 103
💔: 7 (vs 11)
👋: 651 (vs 287) <- Pirate flagHeavily inflated
🔎: 24,800 +35% Rocket

Firstly, this month we crossed the 100 customers mark.

When we built our first SAAS, at the top, we only managed to have 6 customers at the same time.

The number was so small that we could name all our customers on the top of our head.

We can't do that now 😊

📈 On the marketing side of things, our content marketing strategy continues to pay off with a 37% MoM increase in organic traffic.

And we have multiplied by 3️⃣ our traffic from this channel since the beginning of the year.

We prefer quality over quantity regarding our blog posts.

Hence why we have only posted 2 in July.

One comparing all the free proxy tools available, with a detailed benchmark for each:

https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/best-free-proxy-list-web-scraping/#benchmark

And another, written by Ari, explaining in detail how to use Scrapy with JavaScript.

A technical subject that could only be written by an experienced developer.

https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/scrapy-javascript/

The same Ari developed our Scrapy integration, now available on Github Down pointing backhand index
https://github.com/ScrapingBee/scrapy-scrapingbee

We've also tried new things.

Like this tweet:

It was sponsored, cost us $500, and brought us a whopping 1️⃣ customer.

So I guess we'll break even in about 18 months 😂.

👋 Regarding signups, we had at least hundreds of spam account looking to take advantage of our free plan.

It is annoying as it's really mess up with all our statistics/reporting but we might have found a solution.

🐝 Regarding the product, we haven't pushed a lot of features.

We're currently not in our most productive phase.

We're trying a lot of new things here and there and probably need to organize ourselves a bit better 🤓.

For example, regarding marketing, there are so many opportunities out there that it's hard to keep focus.

We also need to clearly decide what should be the next step for ScrapingBee product-wise and execute 🏗

Until next month.

  1. 2

    Great product man, I have tried ScarpingBee and ScraperAPI. The consistency with your endpoints is much better.

    1. 2

      Thank you very much. It means a lot!

  2. 1

    Congrats on the milestone!

    We also have an issue with the "spam signups" - curious to know how you are planning to handle yours

    1. 1

      Thank you, DM on Twitter and I'll let you know. I don't really want to talk about it in the open.
      It's nothing fancy but I hope it works

  3. 1

    Heyyyyyyy congrats on 100! Big milestone 🙌

  4. 1

    $500 for a tweet and only 1 customer 😲

    When you say there are so many opportunities regarding marketing you mean different channels?

    I'm curious, what else have you tried?

    1. 1

      Ahah yes.

      Actually, since yesterday, it's 2 customers 🤷‍♂️.

      We have a rather long time to signup -> customer.

      By many opportunities I'm talking about:

      • blog sponsorship
      • newsletter sponsorship
      • Facebook / Google / Twitter ads
      • influencer sponsorship
      • marketing by side-project

      There are many other channels but those are the ones we talked about the most with Kevin.

      We haven't really begun experimenting, hopefully soon :)

      1. 1

        I think I saw retargeting ads from ScrapingBee so that's good. That should with making that Signup to Customer conversion window shorter.

  5. 1

    Congrats Pierre & team. Great post and very inspiring. I checked your app and I think we can use it at our company too. 👌🏼

    PS. I love the “hack the planet” reference

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