$12k/month SaaS scraping social networks’ data
Published in 2019, this chronicle by @richclominson details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $12k/month.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 37 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 20 comments
funny, i build a basic little script that did this back in like 2015 so i could give my GF at the time a copy of all her instagram, which she was trying to do via scrolling + screenshots. I was thinking about expanding it but didnt. Thought it would be cool if you could order a literal physical book with all your IG photos in it. Kinda a gag gift but probably worth the cost of a modest gift (im thinkin like 20-100 bucks). Never got to the book part. Def would have run into legal troubles, but I guess if youre abroad (Ukraine?) then the US judicial system is not too much a concern.
A common trend I've seen recently on HN/Reddit is that due to the ruling of the HiQ vs. LinkedIn court case (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21241395 ↗), data scraping cannot be against the ToS of a given service.
That is not universally correct. And even if it is, selling the data is an easy way to an expensive lawsuit.
https://github.com/victorqribeiro/scrap/blob/master/scrap.js ↗
I wrote a Script that does something similar. In this case it is getting peoples name and image address (from facebook). I don't remember why I did this, but I never thought of making money out of it
@dang are we ok with this? This account is basically an automated submission script for this website. Submission history is nothing but. I dont mind people promoting themselves or their work, but i do not come to HN for ad aggregation or an RSS feed.
Not the first to do it and the last one I know of that did got a severe beating in court and they lost a lot of money.