Pierre de Wulf (@PierreDeWulf), the founder of Scraping Bee, transformed himself from a frustrated developer into a SaaS success story. Here’s what you’ll learn from this episode:
1/ 🐝 Pierre’s journey began with a subpar web scraping tool, sparking the idea for Scraping Bee. Discover how he bootstrapped his company in a crowded market, emphasizing lean operations and strategic growth.
2/ 🚀 Overcoming growth plateaus in SaaS can be challenging. Pierre shares insights on experimentation with new marketing channels, leveraging user feedback, and balancing traditional and fresh approaches for sustainable innovation.
3/ 🌐 The complexities of web scraping and the untapped potential of data are vast. Pierre discusses logistical challenges, the importance of bandwidth, and the value of data as a modern-day resource.
4/ 🇫🇷 Running a business in France vs. the U.S. offers unique challenges and opportunities. Pierre reflects on French bureaucracy, startup incentives, and how services like Stripe Atlas can simplify global expansion.
5/ 💡 Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned SaaS veteran, Pierre’s story offers valuable lessons on innovation, growth, and the power of data. Tune in to get inspired and learn from his experiences!
00:00 – Arvid (Host)
Hey, it’s Arvid and you’re listening to the Bootstrap Founder. Today I’m talking to Pierre de Wolff, the founder of Scraping Bee, and I’m fascinated with this business. It allows people to reliably get information from all kinds of websites, many of which don’t really like people grabbing their valuable data. But in this industry, pierre has built a trustworthy and, more importantly, trusted brand around this very technically challenging business, and we’ll talk all about dealing with abusive customers, the impact of the AI revolution on content and scraping, and how to differentiate your business in an entrenched landscape. Whatever Pierre and his team are doing, I think it’s working really well. And it’s working well for me and my own scraping needs. And, just like with Scraping Bee, I’m a customer of Paddlecom, the sponsor of this episode.
00:55
Pierre will talk about the technical complexity of scraping and getting the right people to pay for your service easily, and that’s exactly what Paddle is great at taking on the nitty gritty details of charging money so you can keep building your business. So go out and check out Paddlecom if you’re looking for a payment provider that works for you. And now here’s Pierre. Thanks so much for being on the show. You went from being a developer to running a company that processes billions of web requests and what I assume a month, a week, a day must be a lot of web requests on that side. What was the first moment where you realized this whole scraping thing that you were building could actually be a real business? And then, maybe, what made you bootstrap it, despite there being a lot of people already in a pretty crowded space out there in the world of scraping?
01:47 – Pierre (Guest)
Thank you, Arvid. Thank you so much for having me there. So glad to be here. That’s a very good question. I think it all comes down to the previous product we bootstrapped with Kevin, my co-founder and lifelong friend where we use actually a web scraping API, and lifelong friend where we use actually a web scraping API. We use the web scraping tool that we knew was somewhat successful, but it was honestly not that good in terms of performance and speed, and so at that point we knew, okay, there’s something to be done in the web scraping space. We also knew there were lots of very big companies out there I’m talking hundred millions a year companies.
02:29
So we thought, okay, even if we managed to build something that captured, you know, a slight, a small cramp of the market, there’s something there, you know. I mean, the market was there, the need was validated. Why did we bootstrap it? Because I think that’s the only things we knew to do. We didn’t want to raise money, for all the reasons people don’t want to raise money for that were talked, I assume, extensively on this podcast already. But then there is also a part of we weren’t sure we would be able to raise anyway. You know, we didn’t have the connection. We didn’t want to make a business plan. We didn’t know if our idea would be interesting enough for people willing to invest it. So, yeah, that would be the answer to this question.
03:27 – Arvid (Host)
Did you ever consider it as the business was growing Like? Did you ever think, okay, I could use like half a million dollars right now?
03:33 – Pierre (Guest)
So half a million dollars? Definitely not, but we ended up raising, you know, a small amount with a tiny seed. You know the bootstrapper-friendly fund. We ended up not choosing any of the funds we raised, but it was awesome to first get into some kind of so it’s not really an incubator, but let’s call it that way for the connection for the community, the crowd, the help, the mentoring out there. And then the money. Even if you don’t spend it, knowing that you have this kind of money really helps a lot, especially in the early days when you count every euro, when you create tens of Ahrefs trial accounts at $7 a week I think they removed it, but I remember we used every email we could at that time and when you you just don’t want to take any risks, because then if you lose $200, $200, that’s 10% of your bankroll vanished, and when you have hundreds of thousands in the bank account, it definitely changed everything. That’s so cool.
04:47 – Arvid (Host)
Like the bootstrapper’s mindset that I hear. That’s so palpable. Right, you have a lot of money but you’re not even using it. That is so rare in the world of founders, where everybody’s just talking about, like, spending money on marketing, spending, spending, spending, to hear you saying, okay, I don’t need this. That’s such a fresh breath of air. It’s really cool.
05:06 – Pierre (Guest)
I think it all comes down to one big thing, and it’s not necessarily a good thing that bootstrappers they don’t want to hire you know, and what’s the biggest cost, what’s the most expensive? And if you want to grow as a team, to hire a developer, a very experienced one, or start building a support team and all and so, if you remove that, there’s not that much money you can spend in a month, like once you have changed your MacBook, when you are already spending 5, 10k a month on Google Ads.
05:40 – Arvid (Host)
I mean, you know, yeah, that makes sense, like if you remove a lot of expenses, obviously you’re not going to spend as much. But I do wonder, like, what’s the team like right now? Because you have grown a team, right, yeah.
05:50 – Pierre (Guest)
So now the team is like six full-time employees. So it’s like let’s say, okay. So Kevin, co-founder, he does all the ops thing, marketing stuff. I’m doing the whole tech product side. We got Etienne who is doing development for basically a lot of things. There’s a web app, a bit of ops stuff, a lot of things like Swiss Army Knife kind of dev. We have two support guys, Sahil and Nizar 24, not 24-7, not what I meant, but full-time on this. And we have Peter, our head of SEO. So this is a core team and we’re also working with freelance. So, for example, etienne would be working with some DevOps people specialized in one thing. I’m working with a front-end designer and developer integrator and Peter is probably the one working with most freelance out there to manage the whole content of the website.
07:04 – Arvid (Host)
That sounds very lean, like very, very constricted. That’s awesome, and it’s also surprisingly small. I think you tweeted about this recently that people a week ago or so, everybody was asking you how do you run an operation this big with just six people?
07:20 – Pierre (Guest)
Yeah, we went to a web scraping conference in Austin organized by Zyte, a big web scraping company based in Dublin, and yeah, it feels like lots of people knew about Scraping Bee, especially at this conference, because it’s a very small world. And, yeah, everyone was surprised how small the team is. I don’t think it’s. I mean, you can be proud about it, of course, because you’re like, yeah, people think we should be bigger, we’re small, but in the end it might not be the flex you think it is, because it has a big cost to be very lean, especially for Kevin and I, in terms of energy, time spent and also quality. Like, when you do a bit of everything, it’s hard to be great at everything. I mean, it’s impossible. So I’m telling you this because that’s something we want to fix this year, you know to grow the company a bit bigger, to, to sacrifice a bit of profitability, to, to make the the company more smooth. You, you know, yeah.
08:27 – Arvid (Host)
I have to ask, like, how profitable are we talking, like when people say, hey, six people is way too few people for how much you’re making? How much are you making?
08:36 – Pierre (Guest)
For various reasons, we don’t share how much we’re making a year, but we’re making several millions of profit per year.
08:42 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, I remember back in 2020, when you were posting your first tweet about hey, we just hit 2.5K MRR, right? That was a different day and that’s so cool.
08:53 – Pierre (Guest)
That was a different day definitely, and even as this time I mean when we were doing 2.5K we were not paying us any money we was getting, so of course we were profitable, but yeah, so yeah, we’re pretty profitable and now we’re ready to sacrifice a bit of profitability to improve the operation.
09:14 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah. So I do wonder, because what I’ve heard you say is hey, if you have something that works, why change it? Right, that’s been also something that you’ve been very publicly talking about. So what is it that you want to accomplish with a bigger team that you cannot accomplish with the team right now?
09:32 – Pierre (Guest)
So I think we’ve come to the end of doing the same thing that works. For example, let’s talk about SEO. We did lots of SEO, we’re still doing a lot of SEO, and it worked and it still works. But at some point I don’t know if you’ve read the post about the I think it’s from Jason Cohen, you know, and he’s talking about like when you have an acquisition strategy that works, like the chart would look like an elephant. And SEO was the same for us First it’s slow, then you’re good, then you hit the plateau for various reasons. Let’s call it churn, let’s call it algorithm change, let’s call it competition and so the only way to find big growth again is to add a new chart on top of it, and so in this case, it would be a new acquisition channel. So we feel like we’re in a phase, or maybe we did a bit too much of the same thing and now we need to start experimenting other things.
10:41 – Arvid (Host)
That’s very interesting. Yeah, I guess I mean that’s the plateau that every SaaS founder is afraid of, right when things stop working, but still kind of work. It’s like always this balance between well, what is the next thing, how do you find the next thing? Like, what is your approach to getting to that next plateau?
11:01 – Pierre (Guest)
hopefully so this is really exploratory, you know. So, for example, this year we went to two conferences. We went to the web briefing one in Austin. We learned a lot of things. We also went to the Ahrefs one in Singapore about SEO, and there we had lots of ideas, lots of things to test we can talk about.
11:27
You know, sponsoring short form video content, free eBooks course, webscraping University, webscraping video long form channel. You know, there’s so many things out there to do. So how do we choose what we do? It’s just a cost-reward balance we try to find with Skavian, like, okay, if we want to try this, how long should it take before it works? How long should we give it before we scrap it?
12:03
You know because, for example, youtube it’s well known that YouTube is a very long game. You have people like Pat Rolls, for example, who created their channel this year I mean, they restarted it this year and they managed to have very high growth from zero. And then you have people who just created 500 videos in the last three years and it will still have hundreds of views per video, you know. So the goal is, yeah, to find the right balance between those two extremes and to say, okay, if we don’t hit those numbers at this time, we scrap it and to kind of find, find the slope. You know, it doesn’t matter if your number are still low after a few months, but you need to find a bit of momentum, you know.
12:57 – Arvid (Host)
Are you going to make this choice about when to re-evaluate it, on a different timescale for every experiment, or is it going to be like, hey, we’re going to give it a month for each of these and then we’re going to see?
13:10 – Pierre (Guest)
Usually I think we’re going to give it a month for each of these and then we’re going to see Usually I think we’re going to give it at least three to six months. But then if after four months, for example, you see that nothing’s working, either because you’re not working with the correct person or because your idea was bad, or because the execution is bad we re-evaluate things constantly with Skin, so beforehand we’d be like, okay, let’s give it six months. But if after three months we see red flags everywhere, we don’t have a hard time saying, okay, we should get things short here, it’s not working, it won’t work.
13:49 – Arvid (Host)
Okay, that’s good to know. And this is the marketing side of things and the sales side of things which is interesting. I I wonder do you have the same approach for feature development, for product improvements, because you recently released this really really cool ai feature that I’ve been using like since before it was public. I don’t know, like I, I, I saw it, I, yeah, I started using it and you were like, hey, this is new, we’re going to launch it tomorrow. But yeah, do you approach building new features the same way, like you give it some time and you check? So for features.
14:19 – Pierre (Guest)
It’s a bit different because, since we have lots of users, we have lots of feedbacks, we have thousands of support conversations where people are asking for things. We have also competitors we have, so it’s very different. But in the same way, before each feature or big feature, we’re like, okay, how much time will it take to build which is much easier to anticipate than the marketing side of things how much will it cost to run, how much people should use it before we call it a success and, most importantly, how much will it cost to maintain? And same if a feature is hard to maintain and no one’s using it, we don’t have a hard time scrapping it. We were lucky enough that we haven’t had to scrape a lot of things from our feature run map, also because our product is quite simple. Currently, you know, it’s just a simple API. So what we call a feature or basically API parameters.
15:23 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, but that’s the thing, right. You have to expose them to people. You have to educate them about them being present. They have to use it. They have to figure them out. People. You have to educate them about them being present. They have to use it. They have to figure them out. And then they have to use it reliably. That must be hard to track. How do you do that?
15:38 – Pierre (Guest)
So to track so basically to track usage of new features we use Datadog. So basically all the API requests arrive to Datadog and then for every new feature we launch, I create a dashboard when I see percentage of new user using it, percentage of actual user using it and growth of this usage, and we also release feature gradually. So basically, the first thing we would do is like we develop it, we don’t document it anywhere. So basically no one thing we would do is like we develop it, we don’t document it anywhere. So basically no one knows about it, except if we’re going to send a message to a particular customer hey, by the way, we just added these parameters. Here’s a quick doc. It’s not documented yet. Play with it, let us know what you think about it, which is exactly what happened with the ASTAT. Then I’m going to write the documentation about it.
16:33
So still, only either the new user or the hardcore users heard about it because they like to read our documentation. Then, third step, we would update the request builder. So we have basically an HTTP visual request builder on the dashboard and here we can emphasize on some new features by saying hey, by the way, we have this new feature. And fourth step, we send an email to everyone and update the marketing website. So it’s like a staircase approach which allows us to catch the problems beforehand. So, for example, when you start using the AI feature we developed, it was a time where I was reading every single request that was sent and the answer and to try to see if people understood, if the documentation was clear enough, and it was not, and so it’s an opportunity to learn without having to ask lots of questions to our users.
17:40 – Arvid (Host)
That is such a cool approach. I love the fact that you keep an eye on this stuff. Like that is just. I mean, that is expected of a founder, right Like, founders need to understand what’s going on in their business, but doing this on the granularity of an API request level, that’s top notch. I love this. By the way, I want to point out, your request builder is probably the reason that I’m a customer. Oh Like, that thing is just.
18:01
The easiest way for me to just see if and how it works was to put in the URL, click all the little things and see which combination of them actually gave me the result.
18:13
Right Like, I’ve been trying to scrape, particularly like podcast related information, because that’s what PodScare needs A lot of information about ratings and reviews from all over the place, and I need information from bigger platforms and I wanted to see can I get this information? Because I tried with other scraping services and I couldn’t. So I went in there, put in my URL and then just clicked the kind of proxy that I needed and the kind of data that I wanted and the kind of request it was going to be until I saw the result. And once I had the result, I just copied that URL and put it right into my application and just kept churning out information. That is a really cool engineering as marketing, I guess, or as engineering as customer retention or acquisition tool. It’s such a smart idea to make it easier for me to get to my moment of value almost immediately, just with a little bit of clicking.
19:06 – Pierre (Guest)
Thank you so much. Yeah, I spend. I say I because I developed it and we developed it very quickly after we launched, like probably six months after the launch, and I think we were one of the first to do it in the web scraping space. You know, having a query builder was not a very brand new idea you had this elsewhere but in the web scraping space definitely not and what we wanted to achieve is like to get the smallest time to copy paste possible yes, for a developer, because you know it was pre-AI and all and we felt like when I’m using an API, I don’t want to read out to instantiate the SDK or to put my secrets, what kind of configuration variable name I need to put if this parameter accepted dict or Boolean and all.
19:59
I just want to request this resource and get a response and then, if I need to tweak the request, I’m smart enough to read the code. So, yeah, this is why, also, on the documentation, for every single parameter, we generate a snippet in six languages and it seems useless because you’re going to generate one if you want to add a weight parameter, then another one if you want to add a renderJS parameter. But people love it, just copy-paste in their script or whatever it works, and then they can start working on it and iterate. So yeah, and the good news is like a brand new version of it is coming out, I think probably Friday.
20:44 – Arvid (Host)
Wow, I’m excited. I mean, the one you have is already good enough to get me to sign up, but hey, it’s always room for improvement. Yeah, current version is good, but hey, there’s always room for improvement.
20:51 – Pierre (Guest)
Yeah, current version is good but it’s not great for disk configurability. You know we have so much feature here and the hierarchy of feature is very bad currently because I just get added feature over features and so we’ve, that’s what I noticed.
21:05 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, I remember this. I remember looking at it and was like, hey, this remember this.
21:08 – Pierre (Guest)
I remember looking at, it was like hey, this item is here.
21:10 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, this related item is down there. They probably were built in this order exactly.
21:13 – Pierre (Guest)
That’s why the exactly, it’s a bit of a clutter, and so we’ve worked with a UI designer. You know, here you can be great at everything. So we’ve worked with someone very good at UI UX and he rebuilds the whole thing and it’s being developed and integrated and that’s, yeah, really a matter of days.
21:35 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, I love it and I love the AI feature. Let’s talk a little bit about this, because to me, in the world of, let’s just say, the overlapping world of SEO and scraping and content, ai plays a big role in every single part there. Right, like? I posted something yesterday on Twitter I think I was talking about the debt internet theory where it’s all about bots are talking to bots and bots are writing articles for bots to read and then those bots make a summary that another bot reads and then does something. It’s just computers talking to computers all the time, and I think the prevalence of AI has helped this become a problem even more. Right, because now, when I look about what I’m actually doing, it’s like I’m using an AI to scrape a website that has probably some parts that were created by AI, so now it’s really just a computer talking to a computer and extracting information.
22:25
It feels like AI is a problem in this space. How do you deal with this? Because you probably also know that the big AI, the LLM companies, the big model companies that you can open AI and Anthropic and all these places they are using scraping quite significantly and if scraping had a problem before, it has exacerbated the public opinion of scraping in the first place. So how do you deal with the wave of AI? If scraping had a problem before, it has exacerbated the public opinion of scraping in the first place. So how do you deal with the wave of AI, both tools and content in the world of scraping?
22:57 – Pierre (Guest)
So the way I see it is like a signal vs noise problem. So, and what’s interesting with AI is like first I’ve only thought about AI, about allowing people to extract signal from noise, to extract information from data. So basically, you have e-commerce page, you want to extract structure information. But then with LLM, the other thing happens, like people add noise to signal. So let’s say, you know, the most basic thing is like I craft a very nice email to this person asking for a refund. You know, the most basic thing is like craft a very nice email to this person asking for a refund. You know you’re just adding noise to signal and so you’re right. It’s like so we’re currently in an ever ending loop of this.
23:42
No, some people add clutter, other filter it In terms of scraping. I mean, what’s cool is that people will, I think, always need scraping because everyone wants to own their own data and so TransEasy, the only way to do it at scale. It’s to either pay some website lots of money, the way Google paid Reddit, for example, or you scrape publicly available data and so that way you can work on the same data as everyone else, but on the signal and your added value will be there, or you clean this data, treat it, train it and more. And of course, llm has made this easier in a way to extract signal from data, and also harder because there are much more noise out there. But yeah, that’s how I see it currently.
24:43 – Arvid (Host)
I like this perspective on scraping in the first place, and I don’t think it’s surprising. Like you operate a scraping company, you have a nuanced perspective on this, but I think you’re absolutely right. You’re dealing with publicly available data that is just hard to aggregate If you don’t have the direct connection, like a direct API access or something like this, and everybody wants to protect it because I don’t know why, really. But I have the same thing with PodScan. I also want to protect all my information because that has been accumulated and, like you said, cleaned and examined and analyzed, which was why there is an API in the first place.
25:20
But scraping is something that is just a thing, that’s just normal, and everybody kind of uses it to a certain extent. We certainly use it when we use tools like Ahrefs or anything like it. There’s a lot of scraping behind the tools that we use as well.
25:34 – Pierre (Guest)
I think Ahrefs, I think they say they are the second biggest web-shipping company behind Google, and it’s probably true and you know the way. I told you that. So you get the data, you search information. So this is your gold, you know your treasure, and you can get in multidimensional because you can have history there. This is exactly what Ahrefs has. Ahrefs, they have a snapshot of the internet for the last I don’t know 15 years probably and this is awesome. And then so you can have a time dimension, get history and then you can have other, you can add other dimension, try to cross-reference stuff and there you can cross reference for you. Let’s say, yeah, you could probably build the ahref of podcast. You know like those kind of words are trending a lot and get lots of users.
26:30 – Arvid (Host)
It’s quite literally what I’m building. Yeah.
26:33 – Pierre (Guest)
So, yeah, I think this is a very interesting way and probably is the most not efficient but sure way to value the data you’re extracting from the web.
26:46 – Arvid (Host)
I think that’s right. I think you kind of compared it to the modern gold right. It’s like data is the value. Data contains the web. I think that’s right. I think you kind of compared it to the modern gold right. It’s like the data is the value. Data contains the value. You still have to kind of mine it to extract it. You have to kind of boil it down, you have to, you know, melt it into its shape and then reform it into something maybe more pure.
27:05
But the data, the potential of information, is in the data, and I think you have to understand that almost every single business has something like this. Every single business has some kind of data that can be analyzed for even more value in some way for somebody else. Even if you’re just a B2B SaaS, the information is contained in what your customers do, like how they aggregate their own projects, how they structure their data, what they pull in, what they get out of the product. There’s always something in it. I wonder one thing, because you were saying like Ahrefs, gigantic company, google, gigantic company, they have like millions, billions of requests probably per hour. How do you deal with your own clients with just a sheer amount of data that flows through the system. What is your infrastructure like? I really wonder, like I have no idea how big, like the Scraping Bee back end the distributed proxies and all of this is how much can you divulge? Like what does it look like?
28:04 – Pierre (Guest)
Honestly, it’s not as complex as people would think of in terms of. You know, if I had to draw a diagram of the ScreenFingery infrastructure, it would be quite small. What’s hard definitely is to work on the pipe Like. Because we have lots of network bandwidth, we need to ensure that connectivity and speed between each rigs of our infrastructure works well. We probably have custom conversation with engineer at all the club provider we use, to ensure that first, they are okay with us doing lots of web scraping and, second, that they allow us to use as many bandwidths as we need, let it be paid or free, because once you start scraping at scale it can start triggering lots of internal alarm. You know, yes, yeah. So how does that work? You need to be careful about that.
29:06 – Arvid (Host)
How do you get into these conversations with these hosting providers, with these cloud providers?
29:11 – Pierre (Guest)
So I mean, at first we didn’t get into those because Scriptingbe was too small. And then we would start receiving some emails about. We started noticing some weird metrics about your application. Can you please let us know about it before we completely shut down your account? And then you start explaining you know, we’re scraping B, we’re incorporated in France, we’re a regular web-shipping company. No worries, we’re going to scrape a legal website and all. And now we’re at the size where, when we want to work with another provider, we go the big sales team route and all and so the door I kind of opened for us and they understand our problems. So it’s much easier right now than it was, let’s say, one year or 18 months ago.
30:02 – Arvid (Host)
What did you do to gain trust? Because to me, the world of scraping, there’s always bad actors, there’s always good actors. So how can you convince the people you want to work with that you try to only find good actors and try to actively combat the bad ones? How do you build that trust?
30:20 – Pierre (Guest)
So honestly, a lot comes down from the fact that since day one, we put our faces on our website. You know, and it seems very, let’s say, anecdotical right now, but 10 years ago, seven years ago, you couldn’t find any name on any web scraping company. They were all incorporated in Eastern Europe Russia, Cayman Islands, things like that. You would have to pay by Bitcoin or stuff like that. You know, it was not bad per se, but it was. They had also red flags, and so we’re like, yeah, and for us it seems like it was not logical. So we’re like you know what? We’re going to use Stripe like any regular business. We’re going to put our face on it. We’re going to publicly state face on it. We’re going to publicly state that we’re incorporated in France. We’re going to put our company address on the website. And people were like okay, first it’s real humans, so that’s a start. And then for people who are doing regular web scraping, they don’t really care that you’re a bad actor to do it. The only way to know that we’re trustworthy would be to do bad thing using sweeping B and getting banned. And so not a lot of actor do this. You know, we haven’t had any regular good company doing bad stuff to check if we were doing good stuff, but we’re still highly incentivized to do it.
31:56
First, regarding our relation to Stripe and, of course, regarding legality, and also what’s cool with Scraping Bee is that Scraping Bee is too expensive to for very bad actors to use it at scale. So, for example, if you wanted to launch a DDoS attack using StripingV, it would be two order of magnitude more expensive than by renting a botnet on the dark web. So basically, there’s two very bad actors in the web stripping space DDoS and Credit Card Tester. And so, for Credit Card Tester, what you do is like you’re highly cautious about any scraping regarding endpoints. That looks weird, you know. So, for example, you can scrape any Stripe endpoint using scraping B with POS requests and many other things we do. That I’m obviously won’t share here, but you know you were surprised that we monitor things at a request level and it’s also one of the reasons why we do this, Gotcha.
33:05 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, makes sense, makes absolute sense. I wonder. It reminds me a bit of Stripe’s radar system, right, where they have this kind of preemptive checking for bad actors. Are you implementing similar AI-based heuristics in your system to figure out if people might do something bad?
33:23 – Pierre (Guest)
So it’s not as advanced as Stripe, but we have a lot of heuristics out there and lots of things that are blocked by default if we don’t know you.
33:32 – Arvid (Host)
Okay, oh yeah. What does that mean? What does it mean that you don’t know me, like when do you know me? What’s your know, your customer strategy, like?
33:40 – Pierre (Guest)
So, first, we’re never going to know you if you don’t want to know us. So basically, the way it happens is you have specific web scraping needs. You see you can do it by default. You see you have to talk to us. So, for example, if you need very big concurrency, and then we’ll start asking okay, who are you, who do you work for, what’s your use case? And then we’re going to check if what you’re telling us is true with what you’re doing, because we know everything you’re doing.
34:13
We have lots of things in place that we developed at scale that we can add some web scraping rules for every domain that are scraped. So, basically, we can block every domain in 20 seconds. No one will be able to scrape them, and on a per-account basis too. So we can say, okay, no one will be able to scrape this domain. Okay, this user let’s say it’s a security researcher we trust him or her, they are working in a university and all they have the university email stuff. We had a call Okay, we’re going to whitelist this domain for this user.
34:51 – Arvid (Host)
That sounds so hard to do with just six people on a team.
34:55 – Pierre (Guest)
It’s hard, definitely, and this is also why we want to expand the team a bit. You asked us how do you know your customer? I feel we feel we don’t know them well enough and we should proactively engage more with them. So that’s definitely something we’re going to invest in next year.
35:19 – Arvid (Host)
So when you mentioned the names of the people you work with, that kind of sounded like a lot of French people. So is that a local company? Are you globally distributed or are you mostly based in France? How does it work?
35:31 – Pierre (Guest)
So basically, I co-founded the company with Kevin, with French. We’re actually in the same high school. Oh wow. Our first employee was Etienne, who is also French, who was also a high school friend. That’s awesome. But we’re the only French guy in the company. Okay, we also have Nizar, who is in Morocco, Sahil in India and Peter in England, in London, and then lots of freelance in Spain, Germany, Canada, probably US. That’s cool.
36:12 – Arvid (Host)
So I assume Scraping Bee is a French company, though right.
36:14 – Pierre (Guest)
Yeah, it’s incorporated in France. Did you ever feel you?
36:18 – Arvid (Host)
might want to have, like a US company for a business like this. Or but you know, I’m German, I know Europe and the VAT and the like mini one-stop shop.
36:28 – Pierre (Guest)
Yeah, especially if you’re German.
36:29 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, I know the weird tax stuff, I know the privacy stuff, the legal stuff. There’s a lot of red tape and a lot of complexity to running a company like this. So has that ever? Have you ever thought about maybe taking it somewhere else? Definitely.
36:45 – Pierre (Guest)
So there is two things here. First, when we started the company with Skedding, our goal was okay, we need to reach 10K MRR to make a living so we don’t have to go back to work for someone else. This was the number one goal, and so we were young, inexperienced, and so you don’t think about all that. You know you’re like ScriptingView will never be big enough for us to add those kinds of issues. And even if it’s at some point big enough to add those kinds of issues, then good for us. You know we were wrong. Uh, should we do it again? Of course we would have done the guns probably the straight atlas way much easier. Uh, for example, I mentioned tiny seed uheed.
37:33
We were the first French company they invested in, and so what was funny is like I think it took only three 15-minute calls and a couple of lawyer emails to sign the agreement. So all in all it took I don’t know, two days maybe, but then all the paperwork related to us being French took, I think, five weeks. Like we started the program we hadn’t received the money yet, so definitely it was very complex. To be perfectly honest, there is lots of issues with doing business in France, but one good thing is like if you start a company, you get lots of incentive and help in a way. So it’s like a bit of water in this entrepreneurial hell that is France. But when you start out honestly, it’s good. Honestly it’s good, and so this is also one reason we incorporated in France.
38:36 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, and you made it work right, like the company is there, it is profitable, you have employees, it’s all right. But I just wonder sometimes right it is costing?
38:47 – Pierre (Guest)
a lot.
38:48 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah.
38:49 – Pierre (Guest)
But yeah, we made it work.
38:52 – Arvid (Host)
Europe. I remember when we, when we sold feedback panda back in the day and I looked at the the amount of taxes I had to pay just for selling the company.
38:59 – Pierre (Guest)
It was like and then you learned that in the us like I think, uh, the first 10 million like are tax-free. And you’re like, oh my god, and you start yeah, right making the running, the number in your head. But you know for PodScan, podscan is in the US, right.
39:19 – Arvid (Host)
That’s exactly why because I also got funding from the Calm Company Fund, which you know, tinyseed and Calm are very similar in that regard and even to be able to do this quickly, I was just like I’m not going to turn this into a Canadian company, I’m just going to go through the Stripe Atlas route, or was it Firstbase in my case, which is also a company fund company? But it was so easy to set up this company and the money was there like the next morning. How easy can it be? Yeah, it’s crazy, yeah that’s what it is.
39:48 – Pierre (Guest)
It’s crazy. I mean there is some talk here and there for European Union, you know, to create kind of European LLC with a standardized way for foreign investor and European investor to invest in a European company in one way. It would be great but, yeah, definitely not the wisest choice we’ve made. But you know, you made the decision based on what you know at that time and our world at that time was very different from what it is now.
40:21 – Arvid (Host)
So I think that’s the most important thing to highlight here. Like you were at a stage of your entrepreneurial journey and you did the best you could then, and if you were to do it again now, obviously you learned a lot along the way, but you had to learn it first. Right, you had to first go through the hell that is French entrepreneurial life to understand it’s fine anyway, and that’s the thing. When I think about European companies like yours, you kind of see that reflected in the prices too, Like things are just a bit more expensive because people have to deal with a lot of more things. So if it has the benefit for you to kind of shoo away all these bad actors because it’s too expensive for them, that’s a win-win in my book.
41:03
Yeah, exactly, how did you get to the pricing scheme? I’m always interested when it comes to a system like a pricing model like what you have. When it comes to a system like a pricing model like what you have which is credit-based, I wonder, because it has multiple layers you have the price per credit and the credit cost for each action Did you just kind of balance them out over time? How much did that change over time?
41:26 – Pierre (Guest)
So I think we never change the credit per request. So if you scrape using a browser, the credit per request you know like. So if you scrape using a browser, a real browser instances so we call this a JS rendering option it costs five credits instead of one. I think it does always in that way. We did iterate a lot on the pricing tier, especially in the early days. I think we changed our pricing six to seven times in two years, yeah. So, to be honest, when we launched, we had one competitor, and so we didn’t want to be more expensive than them, because our infrastructure was much more lean. We were actually able to divide prices by four on some option, and so we wanted to be. You know, you run the number. We wanted to be profitable enough for it to make sense, and so that’s how we came up with a number.
42:27 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, that’s how it works. That’s perfectly fine, yeah, yeah.
42:31 – Pierre (Guest)
I mean not very complicated things here with Kevin. We’re always like, okay, let’s launch it this way. If too many people tell us we’re too expensive, okay, we’re going to work again about this, Do you?
42:44 – Arvid (Host)
expect to go upmarket like most companies do. That’s kind of the story of SaaS, right, the moment they get to this elephant and then there’s another elephant on top. All of a sudden stuff gets more expensive and the product gets more expensive and more elaborate, more enterprise-y. Is that where you want to go? Do you want to kind of always try to stick in the niche like stay with the developers that you already serve?
43:05 – Pierre (Guest)
So I think we can do both. I mean, we will never be able to attract to the lower end of the market. So, for example, for scraping, for me it’s anything no-code web scraping tool this is a very low end in the market. When I say low end in terms of RRPU, because it’s only user who are non-technical, who probably needs only to scrape 10,000 pages months max and it’s scraping. The real money is when people are scraping lots of pages per month. So we still want to be able to talk to people scraping around.
43:45
You know 100,000 a month and definitely those people iChurn Medium RPU and so if you want to gain growth and growth and growth, you need to move upmarket. But you can move upmarket while keeping the same user base. So this is why two years ago we scraped the $9 a month plan and the $29 a month plan, which makes scraping be probably scraping be cheapest here is probably one of the most expensive in the wave scraping world. But this is what allows us to. You know, this is a good balance for us, because otherwise we would have needed way more support people or no support at all, which I don’t believe in at all and you can also build a team to work, you know, on the custom contract stuff and all and working with a with a big money up there.
44:42 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, that makes sense to me and I think there’s a strong signal value in this too. Like when I look at the pricing page and I see like a hundred bucks, that’s like okay, this is a serious business, right, this is not like bottom of the barrel, like cheap as you can be. This is like okay, the quality is supposedly here, and then you sign up and you check out and then you actually find the quality. So I think it’s very well reflecting what you offer. It’s really cool. I really like the product, Thank you. Thank you, Ali, Big fan. Well, okay, Now we talked a lot about you know where you want to go, how you’re going to get there. If anybody wants to join you on this journey and figure out more about you and your business and you personally and your socials, because you share a lot of good stuff where do you want people to go? Where do you want people to follow you and your journey?
45:29 – Pierre (Guest)
So I’m currently only active on Twitter, basically. So Pierre Deville on Twitter and for Scraping Me, just go on scrapingmecom and you’ll learn everything you need to know about it. Yeah, that’s where I share all the stuff I want to share online currently.
45:50 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, I really appreciate it. I think I mean I’m a paying customer. This is not a paid advertisement, should be, but isn’t. But I love the product. I really enjoy how easy you make it to scrape to get information. I think the website is well done. Like shout out to your SEO people that they know what they’re doing, like they get the content right. And shout out to you for building a really, really cool product. I I really like it. And again, thank you for being so active on twitter in the entrepreneurial community. I think that’s a very, very big thing. Like you, from a position of having had this success already and building continuously, building a company that’s just getting better and bigger and more reliable and more stable, I think you’re giving a lot back to the community. I really really appreciate that. So thank you for all you do and I hope you get to do it for as long as you want to do.
46:36 – Pierre (Guest)
Thank you, alvid. Thank you for all those nice words. It was awesome being here finally talking to you.
46:46 – Arvid (Host)
Yeah, that’s right, it took a while.
46:49 – Pierre (Guest)
After reading your content for so much time on Twitter, your books and all. So, yeah, and I hope we can help Postcan grow as much as possible and I really wish you the best with this new product.
47:02 – Arvid (Host)
Thank you so much, pierre. It was a pleasure, and that’s it for today. Thank you so much for listening to the Bootstrap Founder. You can find me on Twitter at Abid Kal A-R-B-I-D-K-A-L. You can find my books on my Twitter course there too, and if you want to support me on this show, please tell everybody you know about PodScanfm. Leave a rating and a review. It makes a massive difference if you show up there, because then the podcast will show up in other people’s feeds. Any of this will help the show. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye-bye.
