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How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

scrapingbee.com

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Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#121

Post by blep-arsh »

niel wrote: post #5

Congratulations on your success, Kevin and team. I couldn't find this on your website - does Scrapingbee respect robots.txt directives, or is there any other method for a website owner to limit or even just slow down your scraping?

Would be surprised if they do. My service is on the receiving end of these scrapers and it gets annoying when some "growth hacker" decides to flood the service with meaningless CPU-heavy requests with a bunch of typos in parameter values. The scraping service gets a $.0001 for every $1 of damage they help inflict, so yay, bootstrapped business.

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#122

Post by [deleted] »

daolf wrote: post #11
capableweb wrote: post #7

Congratulations! But maybe "bootstrapped" is not a 100% correct. > MAY 2020 - Joining Tinyseed > And this is precisely why we never decided to raise money. However, a few years ago, [...] An accelerator designed precisely to help people grow their business [...] The money and the support we got from the program helped us grow ScrapingBee into what it is now

Co-founder here, I was waiting for this comment to be honest. So in essence, if you consider that bootstrapping is building a business without external funding, you're correct. But to me, bootstrapping VS "VC road" is much more nuanced than this. Going the VC road forces you to have crazy growth and raise more round because the VC model only works if they fund unicorn 1 time out of 100(0). TinySeed works even if they…

[deleted]

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#123

Post by daolf »

capableweb wrote: post #7

Congratulations! But maybe "bootstrapped" is not a 100% correct. > MAY 2020 - Joining Tinyseed > And this is precisely why we never decided to raise money. However, a few years ago, [...] An accelerator designed precisely to help people grow their business [...] The money and the support we got from the program helped us grow ScrapingBee into what it is now

This blew way out of proportion.

Misleading people was never the intent.

We just wanted to share our story and give a little more "human" touch to our about-us page by sharing the journey.

Title was amended.

Have a good week-end HN!

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#124

Post by rkk3 »

btown wrote: post #96
jasode wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, it's really important that the tech community define "bootstrapping" as [...] With TinySeed's round at "$120k for the first founder, $60k for the second, and $40k for the third" ( https://tinyseed.com/program#program-faq ) this is very much along those lines. But when YC invested $120k for 7% equity, we typically didn't call all those startups like Dropbox/AirBNB etc "bootstrapped companies". And $180k for 2 found…

You're eliding the most important part of the definition IMO: a plan to reach profitability with the initial investment alone. YC never expects its companies to become profitable with their investment alone, nor should it - it's designed for growth companies that will receive multiple rounds of funding over time!

? I thought a major component of YC was getting to Default Alive & Ramen Profitability.

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#125

Post by daolf »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #73

Great pitch and inspiring story. I've been involved with a few startups that failed. So, I know a lot about humility and hard work. Basically, my first starup we were naive. It ended with an acquisition which was ultimately worth nothing. The startup that acquired us raised a lot but ultimately failed as well and I personally turned off the lights (by means of shutting down our AWS stuff). After that, I consulted for…

Thank you for your kind words and sharing your story.

It's especially relevant today as we're really considering exploring the sales part of SAAS. Until now, everything has been more or less inbound.

Have a great week-end, good job and good luck with your projects!

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#126

Post by daolf »

mike31fr wrote: post #113

Félicitations les gars ! Très jolie photo de Castres. Signé un ingénieur informatique toulousain passionné d'APIs et expert JS dont le but ultime est de vivre la même aventure que vous : aider les gens à résoudre un problème grâce à un SaaS qui me permette d'en vivre. Actuellement bloqué au step 0 : trouver une douleur à résoudre dans une niche. Respect, et merci pour l'inspiration. Bravo.

Ahahah, merci beaucoup pour ce mot.

Ravi de voir que même sur HN on sait apprécier les belles villes!

Si tu jamais tu as des questions, surtout n'hésite pas a me contacter, je suis souvent sur Twitter (Pierre de Wulf).

Et sinon bon courage et bonne chance pour ton projet!

PS: qu'est que toi ou tes collègues font dans leur travail de tout les jours que tu n'aimerais plus faire ou plus facilement? Maintenir un cahier / ficher de toutes les tâches que tu n'aimes pas ou que tu trouves redondante peut être un bon début pour la step 0.

Sinon il se dit aussi beaucoup que partout ou dans une entreprise il y a un excel a maintenir, ou des fichiers a s'envoyer régulièrement, il y a un SaaS qui attend d'être monté ;)

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#127

Post by daolf »

aantix wrote: post #106

For the "Growth finally kicks in" section - what was the primary driver of your traffic at that point? The increase is fairly pronounced, I wouldn't think that it was just a result of your content ranking higher?

Traffic didn't increase nearly as fast as MRR growth.

What happened was a conjecture of 3 things: - better conversion with better success rate and dev experience (doc / SDK etc ...) - revenue extension from existing customers - SEO rising, slowly but surely on article which converted a lot

Re: How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

#128

Post by daolf »

floridageorgia wrote: post #97

@daolf and team: Congrats on this significant milestone and thank you for being so candid about your growth journey. I'm a bootstrapping founder, have a question about your amazing blog. Love the scrolling table of contents on the left and title/cta that appear on the top as you scroll. Do you mind sharing what cms/theme you use for your blog? Unless I missed it completely, a suggestion I have for your blog is to hav…

Thank you very much!

Whole blog is built on HUGO with a custom theme.

https://gohugo.io

Here is the add-on used for the ToC:

https://tscanlin.github.io/tocbot/

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