The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2019–2020
ScrapingBee pays prospects 10,000 API calls for a 15-minute research call
ScrapingBee traded 10,000 free API calls for a 15-minute phone conversation and held about 100 customer interviews in under three months.
ScrapingBee
What it had to solve
ScrapingBee's two founders wanted to talk to as many users as possible to build the best web-scraping tool, but prospects were wary: their time was precious and most feared being trapped in an endless upsell call. Their previous SaaS, PricingBot, had already failed partly because they kept building into a niche they did not know well.
How it works
Kevin Sahin and Pierre de Wulf met in high school in the south of France and spent years inside the indie-hacker ecosystem before building ScrapingBee, a web-scraping API. Their first product, a price-monitoring extension, got traction but could not be monetised, and their first SaaS, PricingBot, reached paying customers and then stalled — the founders later admitted they had been building into a niche they did not know well.
ScrapingBee started from a flaw they spotted while building PricingBot: the scraping tools they used were hard to use, slow, unreliable and opaque about who ran them. They scratched their own itch, validated with about ten free beta-testers, and asked for money as early as possible — the first customer arrived 50 minutes after the first email. But the founders still needed real conversations to shape the product, and prospects were hard to reach.
The block was trust, not interest: most people did not like speaking to companies for fear of being trapped in an endless upsell call. Kevin Sahin's answer was to invert the deal — 10,000 free API calls to anyone willing to spend 15 minutes on the phone talking about their web-scraping needs. Instead of asking a stranger to donate time to a sales funnel, ScrapingBee offered something genuinely useful in exchange for it.
The move worked: around 100 conversations in fewer than three months, and insights the founders said were invaluable. It sat inside a wider strategy of betting on recurring revenue and content-led acquisition, and the journey post describing it — published in January 2022 after the company passed $1 million ARR — drew a 316-point, 148-comment Hacker News discussion, with founders answering questions about their stack and their TinySeed decision in the thread.
Why it lands
- Paying in API calls inverted the usual power dynamic: prospects received real value up front instead of donating time to a sales process.
- 10,000 calls was meaningful usage for a real scraping workload, so the offer attracted people who could become customers, not tire-kickers.
- A 15-minute cap kept the cost tiny for the company and the ask easy for the prospect, dissolving the 'endless upsell call' fear.
- The tactic doubled as product education: every interview left the prospect having actually tried the API.
What it did
The offer produced around 100 conversations in less than three months, which the founders credit with invaluable insights. It became a landmark move in the journey post they published later: $10k monthly recurring revenue by November 2020, about 18 months after launch, then $1 million annual recurring revenue by November 2021, with the post drawing a 316-point, 148-comment Hacker News discussion on 2022-01-21.
What you can take
When the real objection is being sold to, pay for attention with your product instead of asking for it: the call becomes a fair trade, and the interview list grows itself.
Since then
The interview offer fed the product improvements and content engine that carried ScrapingBee through 2020: $10,000 monthly recurring revenue in November 2020, a doubling to $20k MRR in the following three months, one million pageviews by March 2021, and their first full-time hire in June 2021. In November 2021, six years after their first product and two and a half years after launching ScrapingBee, the founders passed $1 million in annual recurring revenue, and in January 2022 they published the journey post that made the 10,000-calls-for-a-call move famous on Hacker News.
Sources
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card