Growing ScrapingBee to $1m ARR - Pierre De Wulf, ScrapingBee
Pierre De Wulf is the co-founder of ScrapingBee a web scraping API that grew to $1M ARR in 2 years. Before starting ScrapingBee, Pierre and his co-founder Kevin had quit their jobs to follow the indie dream. 9 months later, their product PricingBot couldn’t generate the traction they were hoping for so they sold the business and pivoted to ScrapingBee.
What we covered in this episode:
- Pierre's background; inspiration from his father
- Running a business within World of Warcraft
- Meeting his co-founder, Kevin
- Starting a project for his girlfriend
- Leaving his job to work on something for 9 months
- Knowing when to stop and move on
- Starting and selling PricingBot
- How to sell a failed company
- Using SEO as a marketing channel
- How to write SEO content effectively
- Starting ScrapingBee
- How ScrapingBee grew so quickly
- Taking TinySeed funding
Recommendations
- Book: Hello Startup
- Podcast: My First Million
- Indie Hacker: Matt Wensing
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Sponsor - Ahrefs
Thank you to Ahrefs for sponsoring Indie Bites. Ahrefs is the most complete and valuable SEO tool on the market. Bootstrapped companies such as VEED and Transistor have used Ahrefs extensively to understand how to craft their SEO strategies, which have been such a pivotal part of their growth.
If you want to get more traffic from Google on your side-project, I’d recommend first trying out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. You’ll see what keywords your pages are ranking for, understand how Google sees your content and discover what changes you need to improve your search ranking. You should also check out their YouTube channel to understand both the basics of SEO and some more advanced techniques.
To try out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, head to ahrefs.com/awt.