Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How we bootstrapped our SaaS to $1M ARR

scrapingbee.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 159 posts

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

#2

Post by noutella »

When people ask me why I like being the founder of a company, I often reply with a small story: when we built our first saas for SMB, we billed .50€ per API call and we plugged those calls to a Slack bot. Man how great it felt in the firsts weeks when this bot would send a message around 20 times a day: the sound of finally having built something valuable that would generate value even if I'd be out of my computer, running or anything else really.

Long live scrappingbee!

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

#3

Post by tr33house »

It's ridiculously hard to get to $1M ARR. ScrapingBee seems to be in the sweet spot where you don't have to work as hard to keep things running so it can be ran `forever` with a small team. This is no small feat and should be celebrated.

All the best!

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

#5

Post by niel »

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?

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

#6

Post by daolf »

noutella wrote: post #2

When people ask me why I like being the founder of a company, I often reply with a small story: when we built our first saas for SMB, we billed .50€ per API call and we plugged those calls to a Slack bot. Man how great it felt in the firsts weeks when this bot would send a message around 20 times a day: the sound of finally having built something valuable that would generate value even if I'd be out of my computer, r…

Co-founder here, thanks for the kind words.

I totally agree, the $1 dollar you make online is really special.

I know that, as a computer engineer, it really made us shift our whole mindset about what we do.

We thought all we were able to do was to write code for someone else, we discovered that we could also sell a product and make a living out of it.

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

#7

Post by capableweb »

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

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

#8

Post by daolf »

tr33house wrote: post #3

It's ridiculously hard to get to $1M ARR. ScrapingBee seems to be in the sweet spot where you don't have to work as hard to keep things running so it can be ran `forever` with a small team. This is no small feat and should be celebrated. All the best!

Thanks a lot for the kind words.

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

#10

Post by artembugara »

Kevin, Pierre: congrats! And thanks for all your help to the NewsCatcher team.

We use ScrapingBee's SEO progress as a benchmark of growth.

Also, to the HN crowd, we found out about TinySeed from ScrapingBee, and applied and got in for the next batch. We've grown from ~4k MRR to 16k MRR in 10 months.

So, to anyone who consider apply to YC, I'd recommend to take a look at TinySeed: https://tinyseed.com/

Post reply on HN