How I Built A Successful Web Scraping Software Business [India]

Sreejith Sreekumar

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Published: April 4th, 2022

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Sreejith Sreekumar

Founder, WebHarvy

$7K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

WebHarvy

https://www.webharvy.com/

from Kochi

started January 2010

$7,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Hello! My name is Sreejith Sreekumar and I am the founder of SysNucleus/WebHarvy. I am an independent software product developer from the city of Kochi in India.

I started working on WebHarvy in early 2010. WebHarvy is currently my main product and source of revenue. It is a visual web scraping software using which large amounts of data can be easily extracted from websites using a simple point-and-click user interface. WebHarvy’s customers are both consumers and businesses who require data from the internet for their unique purposes like marketing, sales, lead generation, academic/market research, eCommerce price monitoring, real estate, machine learning, etc.

Since its launch, WebHarvy has acquired thousands of happy customers. I try to achieve two main goals with all my software projects. First is that it should provide great value for its users, helping them in making their work or lives easier. What comes to my mind as I write this is the quote “Life is too short for bad software”.The second goal is to provide good after-sales support to customers by improving the software, answering their queries, and creating content that helps them use the software better.

i-made-web-scraping-software-for-companies-and-make-7k-month-india

Beyond a level of profitability I do not strive hard to attain any sales figures, nor do I keep any targets. I just try to enjoy my work and make sure that each of our customer interactions ends on a positive note. I guess this takes care of the rest.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I am a computer science graduate and coding was my main hobby during my college days. I developed a lot of software utilities and distributed them for free from my website. This was during the early 2000s. After college, I worked for a few major software companies here in India. Working a few years in the industry made me a software engineer from a rookie programmer.

I was a windows device driver developer at work and my main job was to develop device drivers for various USB devices. Several tools were required in this process and my first product idea (USBTrace) was based on such a requirement. USBTrace is a perfect example of a ‘scratch your own itch’ product idea.

I went full-time with USBTrace in 2007 and sold it to most of the major tech companies around the world. This includes companies like Intel, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Samsung, LG, etc., to name a few. Encouraged by its success I developed another product within the same domain (USBShare), but that was not very successful.

Time is invaluable. It is time that we are converting into money when we effectively use it. So make the best use of your time. Learn to be productive.

As my third product, I wanted to do something different. Something which has a wider target audience compared to my previous products which served niche customers.

Now I will tell you how I got the idea for WebHarvy. I was doing some consulting work during that time and used to regularly check the job posts at various freelancing websites like Upwork. I saw requirements for web scraping tasks regularly in new job postings. I took this as a cue and noted to explore this idea further. I have the habit of noting down new ideas whenever it comes to my mind using online note-taking tools.

A common misconception among founders trying to build their first product or startup is that they should come up with a unique and innovative idea to be successful. But the truth is that an idea is only as good as its execution. For example, many of the features introduced in a newly launched iPhone would have already been implemented first in an Android phone. But as Apple says, they do it better, and that is what matters in the end.

For every new idea, the first thing which you should do is to search for companies and products which have already solved the same problem. In 90% of the cases, you should be able to find already successful products catering to the same problem. This should not discourage you. Rather, it should encourage you to pursue the idea further. What you should think about is how to build a product which is better than the existing ones. For this, we need to research the market.

When I researched the web scraping software market in 2010, I found 2 main things. Either, the software was very simple to use but not powerful enough, or it was very powerful but too complicated to use. The powerful ones were enterprise-level expensive, which small businesses could not afford. I saw an opportunity here. What if I could build an affordable web scraper, which is very easy to use for most basic requirements, but has powerful features under the hood to tackle even the most complex web scraping scenarios. My software should enable normal users to scrape data from the web without paying for a freelancer and without requiring them to learn scripting or programming. Thus was born WebHarvy.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

The first thing which I do before pursuing an idea is to do market research. I researched and tried products of companies that provided similar services. I documented their strengths, weaknesses, uniqueness, and pricing (kind of like a SWOT analysis). Competition success is one of the major validation metrics on which I rely, for most of my product ideas. The chances of success with a new product are higher if the market for it is not too crowded, but has successful competitors.

WebHarvy’s User Interface

I aimed to build a product that is as good as the best software available in the market but with a twist. I had to differentiate. For WebHarvy it was ‘ease of use’. The metric which I used for this is the number of clicks that users needed to perform to select a column of data from a web page. The design philosophy which I use here is to keep user interaction to a minimum. If the software can decide something on its own, no need to ask the user for the same.

It is the usefulness of the product that will bring paying customers. It is the way you treat them that retains them.

My idea of an MVP is slightly different from the general perspective. For me, it's more of a medium viable product than a minimum viable product. I spend a lot of time designing the software by identifying the core systems and subsystems required, the flow of data between them, the interfaces which they expose, and how everything is wired together. Because most often, this foundation is not going to change throughout the lifetime of the software.

Even though I am a solo developer I make sure that I write functional specifications, high and low-level design documents, and related diagrams. This way, once I start coding there are no roadblocks. It took me around 5 months to design, develop and test the first version of WebHarvy.

These days, I build a website, start marketing and capture leads even before starting building the MVP. But in 2010, I developed the software first, tested it thoroughly, then built a website, and finally started marketing. It used to work in those days.

Describe the process of launching the business.

Since WebHarvy was my third major software product launch, I knew that the saying ‘build and they will come is not true. More than 50% of the time spent on launching a new business is not on building the product but on marketing it. The first thing which you need to market your product is a website. Being a programmer, I built the website myself. I used a free HTML template for the design and wrote the content for the site myself. Building the website took me only a couple of weeks. The product was finally launched at webharvy. Initially, I used Godaddy to register the domain and buy the hosting. But currently, the website is hosted using Amazon’s AWS LightSail. For handling online purchases I used the payment gateway provided by MyCommerce.

My customer acquisition has always been mainly through organic search. So, once the first version of the website was launched, I concentrated more on search engine optimization techniques (SEO) to make my website rank on the first page for relevant Google searches.

I also started a YouTube channel where I regularly uploaded demonstration videos of the software, showing how it can be used to scrape data from various websites. Along with textual content (articles and blogs), we should also concentrate on creating long and short-form videos which can bring in a lot of quality traffic to the website.

It was 2010 and I was not very knowledgeable about content marketing. But the web scraping software market was not very competitive then. Slowly, WebHarvy began to rank well for keywords like ‘Web Scraping’ and ‘Web Scraping Software’.

Website Home Page

I got my first customer within a few months after launch. The first sale of a product is always special. It means a lot of things, including real-world validation of your idea and the feeling that all the hard work has finally paid off. I got a lot of feedback from early customers of WebHarvy. I worked closely with any customer who was willing to give feedback to improve the product. It was a win-win situation for both of us since I would be updating the software within days as per their requirement and feedback. Slowly via internet marketing as well through word of mouth publicity I started getting a constant influx of new users.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

It is the usefulness of the product that will bring paying customers. It is the way you treat them that retains them.

The product must add value to users' work or life. They should feel satisfied and justified for the amount of money which they have to spend to buy the product. During the initial years, I had done only 3 things to attract and retain customers.

Customer support for maximum customer satisfaction
Frequent updates of the software based on customer feedback
SEO techniques to make the product website rank better for search

Of the 3 above, let me stress the importance of the first point - customer satisfaction. We offer a 15 day free trial of WebHarvy and 15 days no questions asked refund policy which is mentioned on our product purchase page. If a user is not happy with our product, we don’t need his/her money. We get very low refund requests because we do everything we can to help and retain customers.

WebHarvy Reviews at Capterra

Whenever a customer reports a problem or requests a feature, if it is something that we can implement in a day or two, we do it without any delay and provide him/her with a software update. This often surprises them. I like surprising customers. Simple things like replying to a customer query within minutes of them sending it and providing detailed instructional videos have always been helpful.

SEO is a vital part of digital marketing. It helps to rank the product website on the first page of search results for relevant keywords. I am no SEO expert, but I learned the basics while building and marketing multiple products which are sold online.

The following are some simple, easy-to-implement SEO tips that have worked well for me.

Write detailed, well-researched, long-form articles rather than short blog posts.
Write for the users, and not for the search engine bots.
Research keywords before writing articles. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner for keyword research. Google Trends also helps you compare search volume traffic for various keywords.
Do not stuff your articles with keywords, but use them naturally in headings. within paragraphs and alt text of images.
Creating useful infographics for articles will return rich dividends. Free online tools like Canva can be used for this.
Include essential meta tags for search engines (schema markup) and social media (Facebook, Twitter meta tags).
Create meaningfully and organized internal links between pages/articles on your website.
Website performance (page speed) plays a vital role in its search rank. Google PageSpeed Insights tool can be used to monitor this. Another option is gtmetrix.

If you are not sure about how to improve SEO for your website, I recommend heading

over to Website Grader and get a free report. I am currently using a paid plan of Niel Patel’s Ubersuggest to monitor and improve SEO.

We also get a lot of requests from students, educational institutions, and universities for free or discounted licenses of WebHarvy to be used in research projects and courses. We have a policy of supporting educational and charitable institutions by offering free licenses whenever we can. It also helps us increase awareness regarding WebHarvy.

Above all, you will be successful only if you enjoy doing this every minute. Hard work should not feel like hard work but like a lot of fun.

Generating quality content in the form of articles and videos on topics related to your domain is also very important. We have an articles/blog section on our website where we regularly write about various web scraping topics.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

WebHarvy is my main focus currently and the web scraping market has been growing all these years. As per market research the global web scraping software market is set to grow by 13% annually to around $950 million by 2026. For the same reason, there is high competition in this market today. I have a lot of new features planned for WebHarvy which should make web scraping easier and more efficient for our customers.

WebHarvy has a single point of sale and distribution. We also have affiliate partnerships with a dozen resellers and distributors, but the bulk of our sales are direct. Customers mainly find us via search and for the same reason, we have invested significantly in creating quality content related to web scraping.

I also plan to introduce more products in the same market space. Most of such new ideas come from feedback received from existing customers, which is why you should not waste any opportunity you get to interview or talk to your customers directly as a founder.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

The first thing which I have deduced from my startup journey is that if you do enough market research, you can improve your product’s success rate. This may not apply to products that are completely innovative with no competition. My approach has always been to make a better offering in an already competitive market.

One thing which I regret not doing early enough is content marketing. My product was one of the earliest tools in the market for its segment. Since I was primarily a developer I concentrated more on the technical aspects of the product in its early years. I wish I had started generating content earlier.

I feel lucky that I started working on this idea during a time when the market for web scraping software was beginning to rise. It is something like ‘riding a wave.

Many people have asked me why I am not growing my company by adding more employees. Building a big software company has never been my dream. I just wanted to develop good products. I am a big fan of Steve Wozniak, the less talked about Steve who co-founded Apple along with Steve Jobs. Years ago I read his autobiography iWoz and the following line influenced me very much.

"If you're that rare engineer who's an inventor and also an artist, I'm going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is to work alone."

Staying lean also helps me less stressed when the sales are not doing well. It gives me the agility to change when things are not working to plan. If I wish to start working on a new idea or drop something which I have already worked on for months, the only person to convince is only myself.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

WebHarvy was built using C# / Microsoft .NET / Microsoft Visual Studio.
Our payment gateway is by Digital River MyCommerce which handles orders and billing.
We use MailChimp for our mailing list management and email marketing.
Our website is hosted on Amazon AWS and emails on Zoho.
Freshdesk is our support/ticketing platform.
Aiveo is used for bug tracking.
GitHub for version control.
Analytics by Google Analytics.
Snagit & BandiCam are used for screen recordings for customer support and our YouTube channels.
We use Notion, Trello, OneNote for project/task management and documentation.
Ubersuggest for SEO monitoring.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

During the mid-2000s, I was a big fan of writings at Joel On Software and essays of Paul Graham. I also frequented the old ‘Business of Software’ forum which was the main place where most solo software founders would discuss their product ideas and everything related to building and running a successful software business online.

While building my first product, I remember reading the iconic book Masters of Doom which inspired me a lot as a software programmer. The book is about the journey of 2 Johns - John Romero and John Carmack, how they founded iD software and built popular and revolutionary games like Doom and Quake. John Carmack, who now works for Oculus/Meta, was (and still is) like a programming idol to me. Though I have read other popular titles like Zero to One, Lean Startup etc. nothing has inspired me like Masters of Doom.

The videos at various Business of Software conferences have also helped me a lot. I like this video from Peldi - the founder of Balsamiq software titled ‘Coding is the easy part!’.

I listen to most of the Indie Hackers podcasts and also read their discussions forum.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

For somebody trying to escape a 9-5 job to full-time independent software development, the focus is everything. I had a job while working on the initial version of my first product. It was challenging because I used to put in 3-5 hours on my product on weekdays (after my regular job) and the whole weekends. Of Course, it will be more challenging if you have family and kids.

Apart from focus, you should also cultivate the habit of learning continuously. Because technology changes drastically every 5 years. New programming languages, tools, and frameworks come up. You should keep yourselves updated with the latest trends in the software market and development technologies. Product ideas usually come up when you learn something new.

Above all, you will be successful only if you enjoy doing this every minute. Hard work should not feel like hard work but like a lot of fun. I started this because of my love for programming and not since I was good at business. I started my own business since I enjoyed working on my own.

But having said that, you will also need to learn ‘the business part of software’ which may not be your core interest. For example, marketing. Luckily, I developed an interest in internet marketing (SEO, content generation, etc.) down the way. If the skill which you need to master is not your innate interest, try to find some way to make it interesting. The advantage of today's time is that there is a lot of content and videos which helps you learn even the most boring stuff in a fun way. Make use of it. YouTube is a free platform where you can either waste your time or learn about everything under the sun.

And the last thing which I would like to share is that the biggest asset which we have is time. Time is invaluable. It is time that we are converting into money when we effectively use it. So make the best use of your time. Learn to be productive.