Episode 783 | Bootstrapping ScrapingBee to $5M ARR and an 8-Figure Exit

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Management, Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.8 • 792 Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When is the right time to sell your profitable SaaS? In this week's episode, Rob Walling talks with Pierre de Wulf, co-founder of ScrapingBee, about how they mostly bootstrapped their web scraping SaaS to $5 million ARR and an eight-figure all-cash exit. They explore the pivotal shift that took them from $7K MRR to nearly $1M ARR in just 15 months, what Pierre splurged on post-exit, and the emotional, legal, and strategic complexities of selling a company. Topics we cover: (3:31) – Why they chose to sell (5:41) – Post-exit emotions and celebrations (9:57) – Lessons from failed startups before ScrapingBee (13:16) – From 8k to $1m ARR in 15 months (17:14) – Building a scalable SEO content engine (29:19) – Handling a major cease-and-desist Links from the Show: MicroConf Connect MicroConf Talk by Pierre de Wulf The Java Web Scraping Handbook ScrapingBee Blog TinySeed Discretion Capital Pierre de Wulf (@PierreDeWulf) | X Pierre de Wulf | LinkedIn If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Startups for the Rest of us. I'm your host Rob Walling. In this week's episode, I talk with
0:06.1	Pierre de Wolf, the co-founder of Scraping Bee, about how they mostly bootstrapped to $5 million
0:12.8	in ARR and an eight-figure all-cash exit. It's an incredible story. We talk about some of their early struggles growing. What
0:23.4	changed when they went from growing, I think, 7K of MRR in a year, and then suddenly
0:30.7	grew almost to a million ARR over the next 15 months? And something changed there. We dig
0:36.9	into that early in the episode.
0:38.9	We find out any trophies that Pierre bought with the proceeds from their exit. We talk about
0:46.5	their thought process for deciding when to sell, why to sell, as well as some of the
0:51.8	inner workings of the exit and just how hard it can be to sell a company.
0:56.3	If you know Pierre from X-Twitter,
0:58.6	you've seen his very thoughtful tweets about bootstrapping and indie hacking,
1:03.4	and he has what I consider a pretty insightful thought process
1:07.4	about what it takes to be successful in this game.
1:12.6	Before we dive into the conversation, I am doing a live Q&A on Thursday, July 17th. You will only get access to that if you are a member
1:22.3	of MicroConf Connect. MicroConf Connect is our amazing online community for bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped
1:29.7	founders. Inside Connect, we have founder-to-founder discussions about what's working today in SaaS.
1:35.1	We have live workshops and AMAs, including the one with me on July 17th, and we have access to our
1:41.4	content vault with recordings from every previous microconf event.
1:46.6	MicroConf Connect is $50 a month, and we charge for it to keep the quality up.
1:51.6	It's a gate that keeps the quality of the founders inside very high,
1:56.2	and it allows us to afford to pay a moderator to keep the conversation going
2:00.4	and to make sure it's super high signal to noise.
	...

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