It's been over 3 years that I've been running this service by myself and the journey has been a roller coaster ride but a very fulfilling one at that. Unwrangle now has 800 signed up users dozens of paying customers and gets 3-10 new sign ups every week. All while being a super niche service that's priced well above alternatives and has never been marketed really.
My top takeaways from the journey have been:
I have plans to keep improving the service and turn it into a general purpose no-code web scraping tool a little like Octoparse but with my own twist to it. I think AI is useful in parsing HTML/JSON and distributing expert level anti-bot services purchased at bulk pricing packaged into a value added parsing tool designed for medium scale use really does pass on benefits worth paying for to a developer or researcher looking to write their own scraper or parser for a personal or business research project.
Meanwhile, I have been cooking up another tool as well—yeah I know it's silly to spread my focus thin and I really do think it is silly but you know us lot have a bug, I still have around 50 domains for which I would love to ship products one day. Anyhow, this is the year that I hit some revenue targets and start building a small team for my little business as well. I gave this a shot late last year and while I had to fire the team mate I really did learn something about managing so I look forward to giving it another shot.