Spider Pro
The easiest way to scrape the internet
Wow, it's only been 2 months since I released the first version and Spider Pro has made over $10k! I'm very excited, exhausted and thankful about this milestone.
Two weeks ago Spider Pro was featured on HackerNews's frontpage and it brought a huge amount of traffic to tryspider.com. Hilariously, I saw a jump from 53 users(not a typo) to 12k users and 300+ signup for the trials.
Now the traffic has slowed down a bit, I've been thinking to write about my thoughts on making an extension product and lessons learned. Long story short, I probably will not create another extension product again. Why? Please stay tuned :)
Since v.1 and first version is only 1 month apart, I couldn't launch on ProductHunt again (minimum 6 months apart). Needing some traction I figured I might just throw it on HackerNews and go to bed.
Woke up and found out I was on the front page of HackerNews and #1 of Show HN. It's crazy! The tryspider.com visitor count went from 53 to 11k (haha I know 53 is silly). I still can't believe this 🙈
1.5 months since the launch on PH, the v1 update is finally here🥳! It's the result of listening to everyone's feedback and answering to support tickets. Some big changes:
- A trial
- A license service
- A powerful point-and-click selectors that fix 99% of issues I have received
- Better scraping results
- A whole new marketing site with a live demo for people to play around
The next step is to make lots and lots of videos. Mainly I'd like to re-reply every support ticket and refund request with a video of how the v1 could solve their issues. Let's see how it goes.
Overall, I think this is an update that makes Spider Pro more usable and friendly. My favorite is the live demo on the tryspider.com - please go try it and tell me what you think!
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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I think monthly subscription only make sense when user are using it almost every day. I figured no one is going to use Spider everyday and also, personally I really dislike subscription model and try really hard to sign up for one (haha). It probably means I'd earn less but I definitely feel better that way.
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago
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Besides working on Spider full time till now, I am also a new mom. Having a 3-month-old and trying to work on a product at the same time is hard. I was constantly swamped with todos and started to get stressed out about shipping this update.
Thankfully, my husband - a way better software engineer than me - jumped in and helped me to implement a trial and license service for Spider. This allowed me to push out the v1 as scheduled. Asking for help when you need one is important!
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Hey Amy I also tried this, the trial system is really good too! Nice that it gives you a full experience
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Hi Amie,
I think your product is awesome I was just testing it and the license key for the trial went directly to my spam.
Congrats on an incredible product!
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Been there with the 'juggling business with kids' thing, it's often not easy, but remember the light at the end of the tunnel!
Spider Pro continues to sale since the launch and now making double of my goal ($4k). I couldn't be more excited!
Paying customers come with great responsibility though. This month I have been swamped with support emails and DMs - lots of things in life I decided to set aside. One experience at a time!
Launching on ProductHunt gave Spider Pro a good boost - I got the very first paying customer shortly after went live. The price was set to $38 per sale with a $10 off coupon till 8/31. By the end of the month, I had made a total of $4938 and 172 sales.
Since I launched accidentally, I didn't implement a trial. This turned out to be one of the most asked questions - which I absolutely agreed, knowing the nature of web scraping. Some people asked for a refund because it didn't work for the sites they wanted to scrape and some people actually got it working after trying my custom solutions. Working through each of these support tickets help me understand how people are going to use Spider Pro much better, and help me formulate a plan for the next update.
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Congrats and really cool product! I like that the landing page gives you an instant demo.
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Thanks! I like it too (haha) - after I did that I vowed to myself every landing page I make from now on needs an instant demo.
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Congrats on the revenue!
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Congrats! Great progress. Really interested in what you’d doing. As a non dev, tools like this can be very handy. One feature that’d be amazing is a means of dynamically scrapping/creating RSS feeds to drive other sites (eg. A job site fed from several different job sites.
I’m aware this is probably a mission to implement lent but also know I and many others would benefit a huge amount!
Import.io is meant to do this, but have found it fails miserably and has poor support.
Best of luck!
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Interesting - I will keep this in mind. Thanks for the suggestion!
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Nice Amie! :) Keep it up :)
You pay a one time fee?
Spider (the free version) helped me gather lots of use cases and valuable contacts. Armed with the new knowledge, I set out to create a much better version - Spider Pro.
Spider Pro ended up pretty close to what I imagined. It fulfilled my personal use case and made the #indiehacker in me very happy and satisfied.
I accidentally launched the Spider Pro one week earlier on ProductHunt and woke up in cold sweat from my phone buzzing like crazy. Somehow at 3 am I decided just went with it and it became #1 Product of the day and #5 Product of the week! How crazy!
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That is amazing! Congrats on the success :D
But haha how did you accidentally launch?
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Yeah also want to know how the accident happened.
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I scheduled Spider to launch on a 8/23 originally, but then changed my mind (because I think it wasn't ready) and changed the launch date to be something like 8/30. However, their site didn't seem to save my changes though everything seemedd updated on my end. That's a lesson learned - when using PH site it's better to refresh it to make sure everything is saved correctly!
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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Yes! Spider relies on user to trigger the click to scrape - so unless you intentionally wanted to scrape an empty/pre-ajax page(but why?), Spider should work just fine.
To your 2nd question, I say it's quite hard to block a browser extension... I don't really have a strategy but Spider doesn't store anything user scraped nor aware of that.
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I never thought I'd be making a web scraping product one day. I was trying to find a scraping tool that requires zero setup and costs very little for one of my projects. But all the non-programmatic tools need a hefty subscription fee and complicated setup. Needless to say, I was surprised and started asking myself how I'd want a tool of such to work.
The goal was to create something self-serviced, well designed and much cheaper. I was very much against the subscription pricing model: no one should pay recurring fees for something they only use once or twice in a month.
I worked on the design and development solely for a couple of months on the side. At some point, I decided this tool might be good enough for others to use.
The launch on ProductHunt got Spider quite some traction and helped me validate the idea. Many people told me they loved using it and would actually pay for the tool, meanwhile pointed out several use cases I didn't think of. Spider end up being #4 Product of the day with 840 upvotes. It was a great place to start.
5 Comments
Amazing @hyperyolo!
Hi @hyperyolo - great achievement. Soon will be more!
I think your experience of being featured on HackerNews can be pretty useful to other Makers. What do you think about sharing your story at Hackernoon? i'm sure people will adore it
Wow thanks, I'd love to share the story on Hackernoon. Would you mind tell me how through DM/email?
Hey @hyperyolo, huge congratulations on your incredible achievement! Your journey is truly inspiring, and I believe it has the potential to motivate so many other Makers out there. It would be amazing if you could share your story on Hackernoon—I'm sure it would resonate with a lot of people!
No problem, feel free. my email is arthur.tkachenko.netweight@gmail.com
This comment was deleted 5 years ago