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Open report April: We are joining TinySeed 🎉

Disclaimer: we forgot to publish the March open report. The variation you are seeing below a computed from March.

🎉 Seed Round: 1
🔎 Visitors: 9,302 (- 25%)
👋 New Users: 202 (+ 5%)
🤝 New Customers: 5 (-75%)
💔 Churn: 11 (-45%)
💰 MRR: $4038 (-10%)
💵 Revenue: $4759 (-6%)

First, let's talk about TinySeed 🌾.

We are thrilled to join TinySeed batch 2 and to spend the year with such good company. With ScrapingBee the goal has always been to build a strong, sustainable (understand profitable) mid-size company. This vision does not align very well with traditional VC but it does with those new kinds of funds such as TinySeed.

(If you want to learn more about this new way of doing venture capitalism, you can read this nice article: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/345866)

I'll probably go deeper about the how, why, and what of that fundraising in a future blog post but basically it all comes down to two things.

💰 First, this fundraising multiplied by 4 our runway. Meaning that we are now managing the company with much more serenity and less stress than 3 months ago. For example this month, we did -10% MRR, I know a few months ago this fact would have taken a big toll on my sleep quality.

Now we can take our time and think mid-term/long-term. The peace of mind that comes with this fundraising is invaluable to us.

😮 Then there is loneliness. Since we've began our Indie Hacking journey 18 months ago it's been hard to find external help. Sure you can always ask for some advice about very particular topic here and there, IH being a cool place to do that, but with TinySeed this is different as you are now part of a group of people strongly incentivized in your success (investors). Basically we:

  • have access to top-notch mentorship. If we have trouble, a question, we just ask to be put in touch with the relevant mentor and boom, we can have a 30 minutes / 1 hours private mentorship class.
  • are part of a batch of eleven other companies having the same problems as us. Being part of this smaller community is really great. The Slack channel is the perfect place to ask advice, give advice, or just hang around talking about the weather or your weekend plans.

That's is about the TinySeed 🌾, let's now talk about the 🐝.

Basically everything looks good beside trial to paid conversion rate. This one as completely plummeted in April. The simplest explanation is COVID19 and we know for sure that at least 3 "would be" big customers have not paid because of this.

We'll see in May how things go.

Product-wise March was a "tidy-up" month. The initial version of ScrapingBee has been built in less than 6 weeks and of course, some parts of the product were far from being perfect.

Before going further in the development of the API we felt it was a good time to clean things up a bit, and so we did:

  • refactoring the whole core API
  • tests, tests, tests, and a bit more tests
  • brand new documentation
  • brand new knowledge base
  • request builder in seven languages
  • usage graph
  • new marketing emails flow

We've also decided about our next 4-6 months marketing strategy and it feels good to have a precise vision of what we want to do. This I can't share right now for obvious reasons, but soon enough I will 😉.

Next month we will go back improving and adding features to our products.

And that's it,

Happy Scraping

  1. 2

    😊 Excited to have you on board at TinySeed!

  2. 1

    Awesome! Keep pushing Pierre

  3. 1

    Congratulations. Do you mind if I video roast your landing page as a good example of a well executed landing page and post it to my twitter @Daolf

    1. 1

      Thank Olly.

      No problem at all, roast it as much as you want 😁.

      1. 2

        Here's what I thought. It was fun to do something a bit different: https://www.loom.com/share/5ac0d3a1044142f1bf12b93ab3f84ce8

    1. 1

      We don't because you haven't linked to ScrapingBee.com but to our Marketing Material gist 😅

      1. 1

        That's the link I had...

        1. 1

          Sorry about the misunderstanding then, our marketing gist is here to help you write a small paragraph introducing the company to your readers.

          Here is your affiliate link: https://www.scrapingbee.com?fpr=michael-10 :)

  4. 1

    Hey Pierre, great news! Can you explain in a few words the difference between these new small VC funds and the traditional ones?

    1. 1

      Thank you.

      In a few words, traditional VCs make 1000 bets and they expect 1 of them to bring them more than 1000 times their money.

      What it means is that they expect your endgame company to make 9, 10 or 11 figures.

      Those new VCs want sustainable companies, making healthy profits. They don't put pressure on you to grow fast at all costs. To give you a better idea, this is what you can read on the TinySeed.com about page:

      "To venture capitalists, a company doing $10m in annual revenue is a miss. To us, it’s a great business. "

      This is really simply put, you can read more about it here https://tinyseed.com/faq :)

      1. 1

        Got it. Oh cool, I’ll have a look!

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