daolf

Hi Thomas, really sorry you had a bad experience with ScrapingBee.

Would you mind sending me the account you used as I wasn't able to find anything under Thomas Isaac or Tillypa and couldn't see what was going wrong then.

I'm sure your comment has nothing to do with the fact that you share the same investor as ScraperAPI but I just wanted be sure.

Good job to the APIfy team for this, this look very interesting!

Yup, they build everything and it costed them $60m.

That’s an impressive bet. And without funding!

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/03/yep-search-engine/amp/?guc...

We've decided to go this route because based on billions of web-scraped page, Headless-based scraping is still a minority. And, it's way harder and more expensive to do at scale.

Thank you!

Agreed, this is why on the Selenium paragraph we link to this article that go much more in depth https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/selenium-python/

fair point!

"low quality".

I'm hurt :(

PS: we spend tens of hours writing those piece of content and even pay a technical editor to spot the typo and make it more readable since we're not native English. You might not like this post, but I can assure that genuine care was put into writing this!

Hi there, co-author here.

Always to improve the content we're writing here. What else would you have expected to read in such an article?

Thank you very much! That is very nice of you :)

What is preventing him from actually pushing the red button or saying "surrender or nuke?"

I know it sounds like a dumb question but what could realistically in such scenario?

Video from Office of the President of Ukraine.

"We do not encroach on others, but we will not give up our own. We have a wonderful army. Our guys have a unique combat experience and modern weapons.

This is an army many times stronger than eight years ago. We are told that February 16 will be the day of the attack.

We will make it the Day of Unity. The relevant decree has already been signed. On this day, we will hoist national flags, put on blue and yellow ribbons and show the world our unity.

We all want to live happily, and happiness loves the strong. We have never been able to give up and we are not going to learn that, ”

Volodymyr Zelensky addressed Ukrainians.

Revenue would be near impossible to do, however we could have analyzed traffic using SimilarWeb or Ahrefs API.

We could also have analyzed the sitemap to check the last update date.

Those articles are really fun to write (I haven't written this one, I'm just the editor), but at some point you have to stop otherwise you end with a 20k words essay.

I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts.

But anyway,

I thought about taking a random sample of pages who returns a "200". Let's say 150, and manually tagging them to find if they're "dead" or not.

And then reuse the "dead or alive but a 200" ratio for all the pages but I was afraid that I'd need to tag much more than 150 pages to have a significant statistical result.

Thank you!

Thanks a lot for the kind words.

Back: Python + Postgres + Flask + redis

Front: JS vanilla + a bit of Svelte

Very classic:

Python (Flask) + Redis + Postgres + a bit of JS for the front.

Yup!

Thank you very much!

That is an excellent idea, added to the roadmap!

Thank you very much!

Whole blog is built on HUGO with a custom theme.

https://gohugo.io

Here is the add-on used for the ToC:

https://tscanlin.github.io/tocbot/

Traffic didn't increase nearly as fast as MRR growth.

What happened was a conjecture of 3 things: - better conversion with better success rate and dev experience (doc / SDK etc ...) - revenue extension from existing customers - SEO rising, slowly but surely on article which converted a lot

Ahahah, merci beaucoup pour ce mot.

Ravi de voir que même sur HN on sait apprécier les belles villes!

Si tu jamais tu as des questions, surtout n'hésite pas a me contacter, je suis souvent sur Twitter (Pierre de Wulf).

Et sinon bon courage et bonne chance pour ton projet!

PS: qu'est que toi ou tes collègues font dans leur travail de tout les jours que tu n'aimerais plus faire ou plus facilement? Maintenir un cahier / ficher de toutes les tâches que tu n'aimes pas ou que tu trouves redondante peut être un bon début pour la step 0.

Sinon il se dit aussi beaucoup que partout ou dans une entreprise il y a un excel a maintenir, ou des fichiers a s'envoyer régulièrement, il y a un SaaS qui attend d'être monté ;)

Thank you for your kind words and sharing your story.

It's especially relevant today as we're really considering exploring the sales part of SAAS. Until now, everything has been more or less inbound.

Have a great week-end, good job and good luck with your projects!

This blew way out of proportion.

Misleading people was never the intent.

We just wanted to share our story and give a little more "human" touch to our about-us page by sharing the journey.

Title was amended.

Have a good week-end HN!

Thank you very much!

That is very elegantly said.

100% agree with you.

Thanks a lot.

> What growth metrics did Tiny look at?

I assume you mean during the application process. So they asked just the basic stuff, MRR, growth, churn. We were at $1k5 MRR when we applied and $3k when we got it. I think what worked for us during the process was that Kevin had been running a small Java web scraping blog + book at that time.

> Did the investment come at a time when the business was needing to "survive, sustain, or grow"?

We were slowly switching from survival to sustain mode. They allowed to make the transition and go full grow mode.

We close but different.

Browserless allows have a fleet of Chrome in the cloud that you can use to run some browsing scenario.

ScrapingBee is an API allowing to get the HTML of webpages by optionally rendering them inside a real browser, but also managing proxies, data extraction and JS scenario.

Let's say we're cousins ;)

Community:

- IndieHackers (haven't been here in a wild but I definitely recommend the funders interview)

- Microconf

- Twitter

Book:

- From Zero to Sold (Arvid Kahl)

- Hello Startup (Yevgeniy Brikman)

I hope it helps :)