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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.