Primer Clientein 0 days

Acquired

Sold to Oxylabsfor (price undisclosed)as of June 2025Source

Pre-acquisition revenue: $5M ARR

Oxylabs acquired ScrapingBee June 19, 2025 for eight-figure all-cash sum. Pre-acquisition ARR $5M.

De 2 Productos Fallidos al Éxito de API: Primer Cliente en 50 Minutos

Founder

Pierre de Wulf

Co-Fundadores•Technical•France

Commitment

Full-time

Experience

Experienced

Product

ScrapingBee

API de web scraping para desarrolladores

Type

API / Herramienta para Desarrolladores

Industry

Herramientas para Desarrolladores

Model

Suscripción

Marketing Strategy

How Pierre acquired customers

Growth Channel

Product Hunt

Tech Stack

Tools used to build ScrapingBee

PythonDjangoStripe

The Full Story

Pierre de Wulf y su cofundador Kevin se conocieron en la secundaria. Después de construir ShopToList y PricingBot con éxito limitado, se enfocaron completamente en ScrapingBee.

El Pivote

Vendieron su negocio anterior a un comprador en Belgrado, dándoles pista para construir ScrapingBee.

Validación Rápida

Su primer cliente pagador se registró 50 minutos después de enviar el correo anunciando el nivel pagado.

Fracasos previos: 2 productos
Primer cliente: 50 minutos después del lanzamiento
Product Hunt: 200 usuarios, 6 clientes

Key Takeaways

Reutiliza código e infraestructura de proyectos anteriores para lanzar rápido

Vender un negocio fallido puede darte pista para el siguiente intento

Las APIs se pueden validar rápidamente con MVPs simples

Usuarios beta convirtiendo a pagado en minutos es una señal fuerte

Originally published onIndie Hackers

Founder proof brief

A one-page proof brief turns Pierre's ScrapingBee playbook into your next test.

See what it covers before you sign up: the pattern worth copying, the channel to test, and the risk to avoid when you adapt this story.

Pattern

Primer Cliente

Channel

Product Hunt

Output

Action checklist

What a proof brief covers

A one-page brief that turns Pierre's pattern into a testable plan
Channel bet: start from Product Hunt
A risk check before copying the ScrapingBee playbook

See what a proof brief covers

See what it covers first. Create an account only if you choose to unlock.

Inspired by Pierre's journey? Generate a business idea in the Herramientas para Desarrolladores space using AI and real founder data.

Pierre's Path to Primer ClientePremium

The journey, decisions, and context behind this milestone

How Pierre actually did it

7/7 funnel stages sourced

Reconstructed from Pierre's own published sources. Quoted claims are the founder's words, verified verbatim; anything marked as our analysis is exactly that.

Where the idea came from

Pivot from prior productPivot from PricingBot, a B2B e-commerce price-monitoring SaaS Pierre and Kevin built and ran for about 9 months (idea sourced from usage patterns in their earlier product ShopToList); PricingBot never got past roughly $1,000/month and was sold off to fund the pivot to ScrapingBee.

ScrapingBee came directly out of the failure of Pierre and Kevin's prior product, PricingBot. While building PricingBot they relied on several third-party web scraping tools and kept running into the same problems with all of them, so they decided to build the scraping API they wished they'd had.

“we noticed that all of them shared common flaws: hard to use, slow, not reliable, not transparent about who operates the business”

ScrapingBee company blog: "The journey to a $1 million ARR SaaS without traditional VCs"

Validation

Built first, validated after

MvpValidated10 signups

Built a scraping API MVP and recruited around ten free beta testers from web scraping forums and growth marketing communities to iterate on before charging anyone.

The MVP was tested with a small group of free beta users sourced from online communities the founders were already part of, before any payment was introduced.

“Leveraging some friends we made on web scraping forums and growth marketing communities, we get around ten free beta-testers to try our product.”

ScrapingBee company blog: "The journey to a $1 million ARR SaaS without traditional VCs"

Talking to usersValidated100 interviews

Offered 10,000 free API calls to anyone willing to spend 15 minutes on a call discussing their web-scraping needs, and used that to interview roughly 100 people over about three months.

Trading free API credits for short calls let the founders talk to about 100 prospective users in under three months, well after the first paying customer already existed.

“This move allowed us to talk to around 100 people in less than three months and learn invaluable insights.”

ScrapingBee company blog: "The journey to a $1 million ARR SaaS without traditional VCs"

First test users

Online community~10 usersFree testersweb scraping forumsgrowth marketing communities

The first roughly ten people to use the ScrapingBee API were free beta testers recruited through contacts made on web scraping forums and growth marketing communities, before the product was built out further.

“Leveraging some friends we made on web scraping forums and growth marketing communities, we get around ten free beta-testers to try our product.”

ScrapingBee company blog: "The journey to a $1 million ARR SaaS without traditional VCs"

First paying customer

Online communityFree to paid upgrade

After a few weeks of free beta, the founders closed the beta and emailed the existing testers that continued access now required a paid subscription. The first paying customer converted 50 minutes after that email went out.

“the first customer comes 50 minutes after sending the first email”

ScrapingBee company blog: "The journey to a $1 million ARR SaaS without traditional VCs"

Acquisition channels, and whether they worked

Product HuntLaunchWorked

The founders ran a Product Hunt launch after their beta period, expecting a niche web scraping API to do poorly there.

“I didn't think a web scraping api would do that well on PH, I thought we were too niche, but it ended up in the top 5 for the day and got us a few thousand visitors.”

Indie Hackers: "The story of ScrapingBee with Pierre De Wulf" (Pierre's own Q&A answers, interview post by Anthony Castrio)

SEO / Content · long-form technical guides on the company blogScalingWorked

Their first major in-depth guide ('Web scraping without getting blocked') was shared widely and picked up tens of thousands of views, becoming the template for their acquisition strategy going forward.

“We shared it a bit all over the place, and it quickly got 20,000 visitors.”

ScrapingBee company blog: "The journey to a $1 million ARR SaaS without traditional VCs"

The founders optimized their content for genuinely teaching web scraping well rather than for conversion, on the theory that quality, in-depth content ranks organically.

“If you post this kind of content, it will rank well organically because it's high quality.”

Indie Hackers: "The story of ScrapingBee with Pierre De Wulf" (Pierre's own Q&A answers, interview post by Anthony Castrio)

Communities · Reddit, Dev.to and language-specific programming subredditsScalingWorked

They syndicated their long-form guides to Reddit and Dev.to, targeting general and language-specific programming subreddits.

“For us, we posted to subreddits like /r/learnprogramming and /r/webscraping plus all of the programming-language specific subreddits.”

Indie Hackers: "The story of ScrapingBee with Pierre De Wulf" (Pierre's own Q&A answers, interview post by Anthony Castrio)

Ranking well on Reddit tends to generate backlinks automatically, compounding the SEO effect of the same content.

“Reddit can easily backfire, but ranking well there is great because you'll automatically get lots of backlinks when you do well.”

Indie Hackers: "The story of ScrapingBee with Pierre De Wulf" (Pierre's own Q&A answers, interview post by Anthony Castrio)

Paid AdsFirst customersAbandoned

As a fully bootstrapped, cash-constrained team, they judged paid search too expensive for a competitive term like 'web scraping' and never seriously pursued Facebook or Google ads.

Per Failory interview: "ScrapingBee: From 2 failed startups to $3,000/month in 4 months"

What didn't work

Audience segmentFirst customersCost: both

PricingBot, a B2B price-monitoring tool for e-commerce sellers, failed to convert trial users into paying customers at a meaningful rate over about 9 months.

“we have to face that people don't want to pay for our product”

ScrapingBee company blog: "The journey to a $1 million ARR SaaS without traditional VCs"

The founders attributed the failure to building into an e-commerce niche they didn't understand well enough, which showed when they talked to prospective customers.

“we are building into a niche that we don't know well (e-commerce), which shows a lot when talking to potential customers”

ScrapingBee company blog: "The journey to a $1 million ARR SaaS without traditional VCs"

What they did instead: Sold PricingBot and pivoted to ScrapingBee, a developer-tool niche (web scraping) both founders already knew deeply from hands-on technical experience.

PositioningLaunchCost: both

ScrapingBee originally launched on Product Hunt under the name "ScrapingNinja." About a month later a French company asserted a prior claim to the name and the founders had to rebrand under legal pressure.

Per Failory interview: "ScrapingBee: From 2 failed startups to $3,000/month in 4 months"

What they did instead: Rebranded to "ScrapingBee" with a new name and logo within about a month, despite losing the SEO equity already built under the old name.

ChannelScalingCost: both

After their first content success, the founders spread thin across several untested acquisition channels at once, trying to accelerate growth.

“we start trying a lot of other acquisition channels to try to speed the business up”

ScrapingBee company blog: "The journey to a $1 million ARR SaaS without traditional VCs"

Spreading across channels diluted their effort and burned budget without a clear payoff.

“It was a mistake, making us lose focus and waste money.”

ScrapingBee company blog: "The journey to a $1 million ARR SaaS without traditional VCs"

What they did instead: Returned to focusing solely on long-form content, expanding their web scraping guides into five more languages (Python, Ruby, PHP, C#, NodeJS).

How it changed as they grew

At launch: 2 people (2 co-founders (Pierre and Kevin), both full-time and both from a purely technical background, initially splitting product and marketing work evenly.)

First 10k mrr: 2 people (Still just the 2 co-founders, but with roles formally split: Kevin took over marketing, Pierre took over product/tech.)

Bootstrapped

Accelerator · 2020-05

What broke as they grew

Early on, ScrapingBee's Chrome-based scraping requests were CPU-intensive and the founders could not handle more than about 10 concurrent connections without a large infrastructure bill, which pushed them onto a (still expensive) serverless AWS Lambda architecture bridged by a Product Hunt AWS credit grant.

Per Failory interview: "ScrapingBee: From 2 failed startups to $3,000/month in 4 months"

Sources (2 in the founder's own words)

ScrapingBee company blog: "The journey to a $1 million ARR SaaS without traditional VCs" · founder-authored
Indie Hackers: "The story of ScrapingBee with Pierre De Wulf" (Pierre's own Q&A answers, interview post by Anthony Castrio) · founder-authored · 2020-11
Failory interview: "ScrapingBee: From 2 failed startups to $3,000/month in 4 months" · third party · 2020-01

Persistence

Projects attempted before finding success

failed projects before this one worked

Learned from a previous attempt

Launch Strategy

How they introduced the product to the world

Redes Sociales

Initial go-to-market approach

Validation

How they tested demand before building

MVP

Method used to confirm market interest

Most common approach — build and learn fast

Launch Pricing

Price point when the product first launched

$20-50/mo

Initial pricing strategy

Starting Audience

Whether they had followers before launch

Existing Audience

Leveraged existing followers

Having an audience accelerates early growth

Time Investment

Average weekly hours during building phase

40 hrs

per week on average

Full-time dedication

Initial Investment

Capital required to get started

$500

in startup costs

Minimal investment — software and domains

Biggest Challenge

Escalar mientras se mantiene la calidad

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Frequently asked questions

Who acquired ScrapingBee?

ScrapingBee was acquired by Oxylabs for an undisclosed price on June 2025. Pre-acquisition revenue was $5M ARR. Oxylabs acquired ScrapingBee June 19, 2025 for eight-figure all-cash sum. Pre-acquisition ARR $5M.

What is ScrapingBee?

API de web scraping para desarrolladores. It operates in Herramientas para Desarrolladores.

How long did it take ScrapingBee to reach primer cliente?

Pierre de Wulf took 0 days to reach primer cliente with ScrapingBee.

Was Pierre de Wulf a solo founder?

No. Pierre de Wulf built ScrapingBee with co-founders.

What marketing channel did ScrapingBee use to grow?

ScrapingBee grew primarily through Product Hunt.

What industry is ScrapingBee in?

ScrapingBee operates in Herramientas para Desarrolladores.

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The Full Story

Pierre de Wulf y su cofundador Kevin se conocieron en la secundaria. Después de construir ShopToList y PricingBot con éxito limitado, se enfocaron completamente en ScrapingBee.