Acquiring Success: The Story of MrScraper

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Building a successful startup doesn't need to be from scratch every time. If you have some capital, it might be better to acquire one and grow it. This is the story of how Cahyo @heykaiyo acquired MrScraper, a data scraping service, and grew it to over 7 figure revenue. 🧵

Cahyo isn't the original founder of MrScraper.com. In 2024, he was building a technical writing agency called PENA Team, but realised that scaling an agency is tough. On the brighter side, that business is actually profitable and made him some spare cash to invest.

Around the same time, Cahyo discovered internet business flipping and started shopping on @acquiredotcom That's where he stumbled upon fellow indie hacker @kai_developer selling MrScraper.com at 5 figure. The product had lots of SEO traffic and sign-ups but not much conversions.

Cahyo figured that the market demand is there but users found the app hard to use. So he acquired MrScraper.com and doubled down on building a better product. It took him 3 weeks to painstakingly rebuild and launch the improved version.

That's when Cahyo realised that building a SaaS is harder than an agency because: - High cost of server to keep the operations running. - Tough to hire a good team and retain them in the startup. - Time spent on product does not equate to guaranteed revenue.

Cahyo launched on X and Product Hunt initially but got $0 revenue due to poor product-market fit. But he didn't give up and continuously improved his product based on feedback. The first traction came after he fixed fundamental issues and shared his app in relevant Slack groups.

Afterwards, Cahyo found out that his main revenue drivers were SEO and ICP outbounds from his web analytics, so he focused on them only. One day, an enterprise prospect dropped an inquiry ticket and that converted to a 7 figure contract eventually. Cahyo was over the moon 🤑

Today, MrScraper.com brings in about $150k+ MRR. The biggest lessons that Cahyo have for us are: - Good engineers does not mean expensive. - Don't try to get everything right, but at least get something right. - Know who is your Ideal Customer Profile and Ideal Employee Profile.