I Bought a Data Scraping Business and Grew It to $1.7M/Year
Who are you and what business did you start?
Hiya! I'm Cahyo, the founder (and occasional firefighter) behind MrScraper.com. Think of us as Zapier, but for data scraping. Our mission is to provide everyone with more access to data from the internet.
We make anyone, including your grandmother and your 5-year-old kid, turn a webpage into an Excel sheet or summarize it for them.
Right now, we bring in around $150k+ per month by helping companies automate their mundane tasks and get high-quality data from the internet.
So, if you’re tired of copy-pasting like it’s 1999, check us out!
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Founder-Market Fit
Skills
What skills did Cahyo Subroto have that led to their success?
How do you come up with the idea for MrScraper?
I actually did not start with MrScraper at first. I bought it from an Indiehacker named Kai. It happened in 2024 when I had plenty of cash sitting around from my profit from running my technical writing agency, penateam.com, and realized that scaling an agency is a pain in the butt.
I was googling on the internet and got hooked on the idea of flipping businesses instead of starting from scratch. Then, after interviewing many sellers from acquire.com. I decided to acquire MrScraper because it serves a big chunk of the market compared to other businesses I talked to and it was listed only for five figures back then, so I had nothing to lose.
After I acquired it, I realized that it had so much SEO traffic and people signed up, so I knew that people wanted this but could not figure out how to use it. So that is an "aha" moment that demand is there. I just need to make a better product.
How did you build the initial version of MrScraper?
Since I already have the first version of the product and an existing customer base, I already have some users to perform A/B test. I used a profit that I got from my agency, penateam.com, to hire a bunch of engineers from Asia to improve the product even more by looking at data from customers daily.
It took about 3 weeks to rebuild and launch our first improved product, and it was more painful than I thought. I need to step away a lot more from my agency and focus more building MrScraper.
At this moment, I realized that building SaaS is harder than building an agency. With an agency, you get guaranteed revenue every time you deliver a service. For SaaS, there is a high chance that no one would use your product even if you put in 100+ hours into it! And you also need to spend a lot of $$ for server, hiring a good team, convincing them to join and stay working with you, and many other headaches. It's completely different than the agency business model, where you can just simply run a business by yourself and stay profitable for as long as you want.
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How did you launch MrScraper and get initial traction?
I initially launched MrScraper via X and ProductHunt, but it generated $0 revenue.
Back then, the main issue was that people signed up but no one willing to pay because our product sucks and did not provide the data that the users wanted.
So I know that we need to improve our product to give an immediate result that the visitors want at the time they sign up.
Once we fixed this fundamental issue and I posted on X and StarterStory Slack group, we finally hit our first customer!
It was at this moment I knew that we were on the right track!
What was the growth strategy for MrScraper and how did you scale?
We tried almost every channel possible, including SEO, X, Reddit, Facebook, etc. I even posted a desperate post on Reddit that went viral but was embarrassing, lol. I truly wanted to give up back then due to the high cost of employees and almost minimal revenue. This post made me an additional $500/month.
Then I checked all the data again, and the main revenue drivers were actually SEO and outbound to our ICPs; I understood that I could not serve all customers, so I doubled down on that and neglected all channels.
Andd thenn suddenly an enterprise client submitted an inbound ticket inquiring about a SEVEN FIGURES contract, and my MRR goes BRRRR!
This is also why I wrote this post: to get a high-quality backlink while sharing my journey. Thanks to Pat for this!
We're still pretty small compared to other players, though, and I am still trying to figure out the best and scalable strategy to grow the business, but so far, SEO and outbound are the best revenue drivers for MrScraper.
What were the biggest lessons learned from building MrScraper?
I made a lot of mistakes but there are two main mistakes that gave me the best lesson:
- Not having a clear understanding of who is my Ideal Customer Profile
- Not having a clear understanding of who is my Ideal Employee Profile
As a startup, I realize that my back is always against the wall with limited resources, so I need to super focus on what I want to target and who I want to be with.
I realized that I could not hire FAANG engineers and competed with them to hire better engineers, so I went overseas instead and hired good engineers at a fraction of the cost.
As a founder of an early company, my advise is that you should not try to get everything right but get something right. It's important to get the initial traction to validate right away if you're doing the right thing or not whether it's hiring, marketing, sales, etc.
What platform/tools does MrScraper use?
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More about MrScraper:
Who is the owner of MrScraper?
Cahyo Subroto is the founder of MrScraper.
When did Cahyo Subroto start MrScraper?
2024
How much money has Cahyo Subroto made from MrScraper?
Cahyo Subroto started the business in 2024, and currently makes an average of $9.07M/year.
