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 fatherRunning a business within World of WarcraftMeeting his co-founder, KevinStarting a project for his girlfriendLeaving his job to work on something for 9 monthsKnowing when to stop and move onStarting and selling PricingBotHow to sell a failed companyUsing SEO as a marketing channelHow to write SEO content effectivelyStarting ScrapingBeeHow ScrapingBee grew so quicklyTaking TinySeed funding

Recommendations

Book: Hello StartupPodcast: My First MillionIndie Hacker: Matt Wensing

Follow Pierre

TwitterPersonal site

Follow Me

👉 Listen to my new podcast, No More Mondays.

TwitterIndie Bites TwitterPersonal WebsiteBuy A Wallet2 Hour Podcast CoursePodPanda (hire me to edit your podcast)

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.