Pierre de Wulf
@PierreDeWulf
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Bootstrapped @ScrapingBee to $millions ARR. Sharing what I'm learning about growth, SEO & tech. And sometimes dumb jokes.
Tarn, 🇫🇷
Joined August 2014
I've built several SAAS and side-projects those last 5 years 🛠. Not all succeed, but I learned a lot 🤓. Today I'm not sharing great life lessons and business tips. Today I'm sharing ten practical tips that will help you save time and money on your #IndieHackers journey. 👇.
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Google just launched its alternative to And let me tell you, it's nowhere near as good.
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EU: we don’t want any company to abuse monopoly on our soil. Paris 2024 Olympics:
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Newly hired developer setting up their local development environment on their first day at work:
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People spending hours a week on YouTube and refusing to pay YT premium tells you everything there is to know about B2C SaaS.
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🇫🇷 Ok let's play a game. In France when the company pays 300,000€ per year, . our employee only gets 118,000 €. Post income tax. 60% effective tax rate. What does it look like in your country?
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Stripe becoming the bad guys. Microsoft being the new cool. Google losing grip on search. Apple forced to open iOS to everyone soon. Twitter offering long-form tweets. 🤯. And it's only February.
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People spending hours a week on YouTube and refusing to pay YT premium tells you everything there is to know about B2C SaaS.
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Engineer leaving their $300k/y job to build a $50/mo side project and updating their LinkedIn with "CEO".
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Some people are crazy. Interviewed a guy for head of web scraping. Told him that he's falling a bit short in anti-scraping knowledge for the "head of" position. Tells me "I don't have to prove anything to anyone regarding knowledge" then hangs up. 2 days later, sends this to
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which is literally, a word counter, has around 7m visitors per month!. At $6 CPM that's $500k a year for a website that tells you how many words there is in the text you just pasted!. Wild!
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DallE is amazing!. "build a SaaS, with random product option, nice UI, complicated offer, aggressive upsell, and exorbitant pricing"
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4 years ago, our first product couldn't even pay for half my rent. Yesterday, ScrapingBee allowed me to buy my first house 🐝. Feeling happy 😀.
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Reflecting on 2 years Bootstrapping. In July 2018 I quit my job and tried to build a profitable SAAS with @kevinsahin. And we failed, hard: $600 MRR after 1 year. We tried again and had a bit more luck: $75k ARR within 12m. Here's what I wish I knew when I began, a thread:
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☝️If people can resell a $6 watch bought on Alibaba for $300 on Shopify. You can resell a GPT-4 API wrapper for $49/mo. The end of the "product moat" doesn't mean the end of moats. But it does mean people will need to focus on marketing and distribution more than ever.
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When you finally reach $1k MRR:. IndieHackers: "Awesome 💪". Facebook: "Niiiice 👍". Your family: "MRR?? 🤔". Twitter: "Good job! 📈". HackerNews:
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When you're writing SaaS alternative pages for your own SaaS.
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People will pay $10 for your product and literally expect you to be their 24/7 servant. B2C is a really different game for sure.
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Maybe GTP-3 will be what kills Google. Microsoft invested $1b in OpenAI in 2019. Now imagine if all Bing queries first results looked like this. G A M E - C H A N G I N G.
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"Hey, $99/mo is a bit much for us, can you do something?" . * check LinkedIn *. - Emma, engineering manager at a 12,983 employees tech company.
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One @stripe radar rule that's a real game changer:. Blocking all payment from IP who tried to use more than 4 different credit card. Haven't had a single fraudulent dispute in 4 weeks since I've enabled it. 100% recommend.
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When you're writing SaaS alternative pages for your own SaaS:
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Back at it again. This time I wanted to know what were the most recommended programming books ever 🏆. So I've compiled more than 1200 recommendations from 68 lists and came up with this top 25 most recommended programming books of all-time📕. THREAD👇.
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I’ve started saying no to people who wanted custom plan and features for $49 / mo. This is the kind of answers I get. It’s almost like entitlement is inversely correlated with budget. Every single time.
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We refuse any custom plan for $49/mo customer. And this is the kind of answers we get. It's like entitlement is inversely correlated with budget. Every. Single. Time.
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@yolaplace If you're natural reaction to "I've heard something mean" is "I'll say something mean in return" then you don't belong in a professional setup. We're not here to teach basic emotional intelligence.
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ScrapingBee is 5 years old, makes millions per year, and I'm still fixing dumb bugs like this:
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AWS: "Get bankrupt scaling your infra". Salesforce: "Ugly UX for sales team". Intercom: "Support system with enigmatic billing". Slack: "Reduce company productivity with GIFs". Notion: "Knowledge-base with load times".
Every founder should be able to communicate their value proposition in no more than 5 words. It’s a great exercise. For example mine for Zero to Marketing is “learn marketing from case studies”.
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My favorite perk of being a bootstrapped company now that ScrapingBee makes good money:. Being able to fly the whole dev team to a web scraping conf in business class without having to answer to anyone.
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🎉 ScrapingBee just reached 🍣 profitability: $10k MRR. Meaning @SahinKevin and I can afford each month:.- €2k salary (each).- €3k taxes.- $2k servers, etc. and not lose money. Our runway just became infinite, a great relief. Next stop: $200k ARR, a symbolic goal for me🤞
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📣 Today, @ScrapingBee is 3️⃣, and just reached $1,500,000 ARR!. Year 1️⃣ was sweaty: we tried everything to go from 0 to 1. We loved it. Year 2️⃣ was magical: we had traction for the first time ever and reached a mythic milestone: $10k MRR. Now, let’s talk about Year 3️⃣ 👇
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We've made it to $1M ARR ✅. 2.5 years after launch, @SahinKevin and I finally reached that milestone. But it hasn't been an easy road, @ScrapingBee was far from being our first try at making money online. It all started a little over 14 years ago 👇
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Developers: "I love my job, and I'm paid $600/day". Also developers: "No way I'm paying $10 a month for something allowing me to save 1h per week".
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🥷 Funny ways famous services exploited loopholes to get their first users!. My favorite one is probably WhatsApp.
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📅 Today marks 6️⃣ years since I left my job to start my indie-hacker journey. We're now making millions a year but we started from 0, many times. Here’s a list of semi-controversial beliefs I have about bootstrapping a successful product:. • Don’t waste time on a rebrand. You.
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🎉 ScrapingBee just reached $200k ARR! . Phase 1 completed ✅. 3️⃣0️⃣ mo after quitting our job.1️⃣8️⃣ mo after we tanked our first SAAS.1️⃣5️⃣ mo after the first customer .9️⃣ months after joining @tinyseedfund. What a journey with @SahinKevin 🍻. Why is this goal that special? 👇 1/3
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I know it's basically a startup meme now, but here's a real-life example:
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@JamesIvings Definitely glad it happened live for sure, but that whole email thing was something next level.
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Me: <Explains bootstrapping to my uncle-in-law who founded a successful local bakery>. Him: "Ok, so it's just building a regular business right?". Me: "Actually yes, yes it is . ".
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This whole startup thing is often a mix of gut feeling + data. Marketing: 20% gut feeling / 80% data.Product: 50% gut feeling / 50% data.Hiring: 80% gut feeling / 20% data.Pricing: 90% gut feeling / 10% data. Bootstrapping is closer to astrology than I'd like to admit.
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PS: I asked the cashier and she confirms AMEX and Mastercard doesn’t work on any Olympic venue.
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1/ Finding a business idea in 1min ⏱. Too many times I hear: "I don't know what to build" 🤔. 1: Go on / 2: Search for the most successful SAAS out there.3: Read the bad reviews. You now have a business idea. 👇 Examples
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✅ Bootstrapping milestone. This month, I was finally able to pay myself more than what I would have earned if I had kept my old software engineering job. It took almost 3 years. This whole SAAS thing takes time.
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🐝 A few years ago we almost sold ScrapingBee for $7m. 15 days before closing the deal the buyer dropped off. It was a bit of a shocker for Kevin and I. Then we went into "Fine, we'll do it ourselves" mode. Then it happened. 90% of M&A deals fail, act accordingly.
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@kevanmacgee You can provide as much value as you want, people are just too cheap to pay or don’t value their time a lot.
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When you left your $200k/y job to build your $50/mo side project, but you're updating your LinkedIn with "CEO" anyway!
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"Copying is the highest form of flattery". "Copycats means you're onto something". "It's the best kind of validation". "They can't beat you cause they're not YOU". You know, I doubt Notion CEO said any of these to himself today.
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I just discovered that Microsoft offers a 100% free alternative to HotJar 🔥.
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🔥 Growth-Hack of the day!. The easiest and quickest way I know to increase your growth is to simply reduce the width of your MRR chart 📈. Thank me later!. #indiehackers
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Microsoft 100% free alternative to Hotjar is really amazing 🔥.
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When you finally reach $1k MRR: . IndieHackers: "Awesome" . Facebook: "Niiiice" . Your friends: "So happy for you!". Your family: "MRR??" . HackerNews:
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"We want to buy the $99/mo plan. Can you please fill out:.- Data privacy policy form.- Custom T&C.- 120 questions online security check. Otherwise, we can't use your product". Me: "Sure, but we can only do all this if you take the $20,000/year enterprise package.". "Ok,.
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The new ScrapingBee website is finally here!. It only took:. 📅 6 months.📩 150 emails.🕰 ~100 hours of integrations.🗑 90% of old code removed.🕵️♂️ ~15 hours of QA. But we did it! . So, what's the fuss about this new website?
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AI generated Roadmap with roadmap. sh. No more excuse to not be a millionaire.
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How to become a millionaire in the next 2 years:. 1- Pick a SaaS in any crowded market.2- Build the same SaaS but for one specific niche .3- Build a community serving that specific niche.4- Grow your SaaS to $40k in MRR.5- Sell your SaaS for 7 figures on Microacquire.
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Spending ~$3m/year on a SaaS and having to write a support ticket to get help is wild. What's going on at Stripe?. Are there really any better alternative out there?. Between this and all the overnight biz cancellation, we're starting to consider other options.
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"I didn’t know my monthly subscription would automatically renews, can you please refund me the last 18 invoices"
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When asking for some feedback about your product or your idea, assume that everyone behaves like an American.
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I know it’s not Bali, but I love my little "southern France" indie-hacking open office.
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The average app security of developers opting for a VPS to save $10 a month.
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In 2017 I decided to quit my job to go the bootstrapped way. Today I'm grateful that @ScrapingBee is doing well. But our first attempt was a complete failure, reaching only $700MRR after one full year. I've made a lots of mistake during that time, time to share all of them👇
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It's copycat Saturday!. This one loved our documentation so much, they forgot to remove mention of ScrapingBee 🐝 in it. So I couldn't help but ask for a backlink. 🤞. (last screenshot is 🐝 doc)
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"I love SEO because it’s completely free". Founder spending 150h/mo writing and promoting content.
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Damn did I wish Lex Friedman asked Pieter about web scraping.
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🎉 @ScrapingBee just reached $500k ARR!. 3️⃣6️⃣ mo after quitting our job.2️⃣5️⃣ mo after we tanked our first SAAS.2️⃣4️⃣ mo after the first commit.2️⃣1️⃣ mo after the first customer .1️⃣2️⃣ mo after joining @tinyseedfund . What a journey with @SahinKevin 🍻. Next stop, two-commas club🤞
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On average an 🇺🇸 if almost twice richer than a 🇫🇷, yet if you pick randomly one American and one French, the French will most likely be richer. The US vs EU table that sums it all. Europe minimizes loss if you're poor. US maximizes gain if you're rich.
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Japan is the perfect place to deep-work. Everyone stuck at $10k MRR should move here. - calm music everywhere.- no ones speaking loudly.- minimalistic interior.- beautiful scenery
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- How we were a few days away from being settled from life -. Last summer, we almost sold ScrapingBee for a high 7 figures amount. SPOILER alert: it didn't happen. The experience was both nerve-wracking and very valuable. Here's what happened:.
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Having worked with many freelancers, it's amazing how simple things can make you stand out:. ‧ answering emails in < 48h: you're in the top 10%.‧ delivering on time: top 5%.‧ notifying when having delay: top 2%.‧ being clear about what you can and can't do: top 1%.
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We've made $2,000,000 online!. It took @SahinKevin and I, 5y and 4+ products to make our first $1m. And 6m for the second one. I'm not a "small bet" person. I'm not a "never ever give up" person either. I'm on the "once you've found something that works, go 1000% all-in" team
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After 14 months @ScrapingBee is now a 6-figures company 😊. 🥂 @SahinKevin . ██████████▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ 50% of $200k ARR. A highly symbolic goal for me 👇 1/3
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Twitter, July 2006. At that time the company was 4 months old. "The art of MVP"
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Are we allowed to say that were slowly building a brand when Upwork mentions ScrapingBee to explain web scraping? 😎
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Youtube is testing displaying 5 to 10 unstoppable ads!. Reminder: you can get 1 year of Youtube premium for 12$ if you subscribe with a VPN in India 😉.
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Developpers:. "Marketing bad 👎👎👎". Also developers:. "🎉🍾📣GitHub just sent me a t-shirt!! I don't know which one I love the most, this one or the one Stripe sent me last month".
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This summer we almost sold ScrapingBee for a LIFE-changing amount of $. After 3 long mo of negotiations, convos and due diligence the deal went off. Buyers eventually thought that we’d never grow past $ X m ARR because of churn. We’ll, it’s been 7 mo and we’re 10% above this.
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Exclusive shot of the Intercom billing department offices:
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Have a good weekend everyone. Except the person who decided that a trailing "," is not JSON valid, I wish a very bad week-end to this one.
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