ScrapingBee

✅ $200k ARR

💰 MRR: $17,549 (+51%) 🤯
💵 Revenue: $21,129 (+69%) 😱
😀 Customer Count: 185 (+ 20%)
💔 Churn: 13 (vs 20)
👋 New Trial: 950 (vs 840 )
🔎 Visitors: 41k (+24%)

Here is what @Daolf and I did this month 👇

First of all, we reached $200k ARR. 🔥

The next stop is at $300k ARR.

At this stage, we will be able to pay ourselves better salaries than what we were paid at our full-time jobs two years ago 🎉

The revenue growth was insane 😱, it is by far our best month 🚀

We got "lucky" by signing several big customers on enterprise subscriptions in the same month.

📈Our content is still ranking better and better every month.

✍️In terms of content, we spent a lot of effort on a piece about Web Scraping with Charles proxy: https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/charles-proxy/

We got a lot of shares and backlinks from this one, but the keywords are not that easy, hope it will rank 🤞

I recently started to answer some HARO queries: helpareporter.com

Here is what my inbox looks like now 😱

It takes a LOT of time to filter out the noise, but we got featured on a few media outlet/company blogs.

Any tips on making this more effective?

About the product, @Daolf worked on scaling our infrastructure and fixed a lot of things with our hosting provider.

It can be a bit frustrating on this part, not having the time to do as much as we would like to. 🤷‍♂️

But it should change!

Support was sometimes insane: https://twitter.com/SahinKevin/status/1334142247290482688

💵 We also increased our salaries to 2500€/mo

It feels great 👍

And that's it.

See you next month, happy scraping 🐝 :)

August Open Report for @ScrapingBee

💰 MRR: $8890 (vs $7875 )
💵 Revenue: $9200 (vs $8290)
🤝 New Customers: 31 (vs 18)
😀 Customer Count: 127 (vs 103)
💔 Churn: 7 (vs 7)
👋 New Trial: 634 (vs 651)
🔎 Visitors: 28,800

Here is what @Daolf and I did this month:

Our content is ranking better and better on Google, more traffic, more sign-ups, and more paying customers 🎉 So even the traffic increase is not as impressive as last month, the content strategy is still working well.

This month we didn't have a lot of requests for enterprise plans (>$99/mo), and since we almost rely exclusively on inbound traffic, I guess we didn't have much luck with that.

We've tested different ad channels:

Facebook ads retargeting 😐 - It could work but the cost per sign up is high. We could probably tweak the copy/creative to improve it.

Reddit ads 👎 We didn't find how to target people interested by web scraping. Didn't convert AT ALL
3
Google Display Network retargeting 👎 - The CPC was really high and conversion rates really low.

Reddit Ads 👎- CPC was low, but the traffic didn't convert. The targeting options are limited on Reddit. You cannot target every sub, and the interesting subs for us have very low impressions.

The next step is to test Twitter / Linkedin. 🔥

Ideally, we'd like to leverage our existing traffic to retarget people.

Regarding content marketing, we are working on lot of content but we didn't publish anything this month.

Two articles were updated, like this one:

https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/web-scraping-without-getting-blocked/

👋 Last month we had a HUGE problem of sign-ups abuse (people signing up with disposable email addresses ) and it seems to be solved.

We used a third-party API to detect those emails.

@Daolf added Google Auth and Github Auth to our sign up page... and 50% of new sign-ups are now using either Google or Github Oauth 😱

It also increased our conversion rate on the signup page 🎉

We are soon going to work on our copywriting, both on the landing page and email campaign. I think it is even more important because we are not native English speakers.

Regarding the next marketing steps, there are still too many things we want to try so we need to focus... 😀

🐝 On the product side, we didn't do a lot this month. But lots of things are coming!

And that's it, thanks for reading this far.

--

Kevin & Pierre

After 14 months ScrapingBe is now a 6-figures company 😊

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50% of $200k ARR.

A highly symbolic goal for me.

When Kevin and I left our full-time job, 2y ago, we were making approximately $50k per year (🇫🇷 salaries).

So with taxes, we were costing our companies ~ $100k per year each.

So assuming they were not losing money on us, we were "creating" around $100k per year of "value"

Reaching $200k ARR means that with ScrapingBee we're creating as much value as when we were employed.

I'm glad we're halfway to that point, it means we've made up for 1 full-time salary.

Looking forward to completing that goal, and then go as far as possible. 🤞

At ScrapingBee we wanted to know what were the marketing channels that brought the most 💰.

GA makes it very easy to know where do your visitors/users come from.

But when it comes to customers, and their values, it is harder.

Here is our very simple attribution system that takes 1 minute ⏱ to integrate

First, store in a cookie UTM tags and referrer.

It's important to set up the domain of the cookie if you use a subdomain for your app. And it's also important to set the expiration date otherwise the cookie would disappear on each session.

Here is the snippet we added on every page of our marketing website.

https://gist.github.com/daolf/e66ec71c603cec4e502190788e75a2f6

Then, on your signup pages, add those 2 things:

hidden fields for the info you want

this snippet that will populate those fields with your cookie 👇

https://gist.github.com/daolf/a93371c414aadc0ce7f77b3098acfa31

Store those in your DB, subscription analytics and that's it!

It's not perfect, but it takes 5 minutes to implement and will help us a lot with understanding what marketing channels are worth focusing on 📈.

Curious to know how you do it.

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.

🔎 Visitors: 13,900 (+49%)
👋 New Users: 273 (+ 35%)
🤝 New Customers: 15 (+140%)
💔 Churn: 5 (-54%)
💰 MRR: $4937 (+22%)
💵 Revenue: $5100 (+7%)

What did we do this month?

As we mentioned in previous open reports, we are really focused on SEO.

What this means is that we want to write more quality content on different topics around web scraping / extracting data from the web.

Pierre has a strong Python background, and I have a Java background. The thing is, we wanted to write about web scraping with R, Node.js , Ruby…

So in May, we decided to hire our first freelancers to work on technical content.

We posted a listing on dev.to , asked our friends / Linkedin / Twitter, and we were surprised by the number of emails we received.

🤝 After a few Zoom interviews, we hired three different content writers, and we are really happy about the content they wrote. Time will tell if these blog posts perform well, both in terms of traffic and conversion. Here is an example of a blog post: https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/web-scraping-r/

The other big milestone this month was the migration of our infrastructure from Heroku to CleverCloud.

Heroku is great and saved us a lot of time in the beginning. But there are some annoying technical limitations, for example, the HTTP requests have a 30 seconds timeout on the Heroku router, and we needed to increase this timeout to at least 60 seconds.

🇫🇷 CleverCloud is a French company, and it’s like the French Heroku. Their support is great, it’s flexible, and the price is much more competitive than Heroku. The setup is very Heroku-like, Pierre did this alone in a few days 💪

In terms of metrics, we made a lot of SEO progress this month, old articles rank better, and new ones are starting to rank too so that’s great. The sign up also increased significantly, which means that the visitors we’re bringing to the blog are converting.

About the trial-to-paying conversion rate, we were really worried in April because it was really low (~2.4%), this month is more than double this number at (~5.4%).

We don’t really explain these numbers, is it Covid-19 related, did we broke something…?

In March 1st we increased our minimum monthly pricing from $9/mo to $29/mo, and we didn’t see any effect on the conversion rate. It’s possible that the effect was delayed since our average sales cycle is 18 days. 🤷‍♂️

There will be some exciting things coming in June, new content, new proxy offer, and maybe a new product… 🙈 Stay tuned!

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