I Found a Business for Sale and Rebuilt It Into $20K/Month

Adrian - Solo Developer from Austin

• Background: Moved to SF to join tech, learned coding at App Academy (code bootcamp)
• Worked as an engineer in Utah for 3 years with goal of starting his own business
• Quit with $30,000 in savings, freelanced and built courses and products
• Stumbled onto the idea of building a web scraping API after a follower DM’d him about a listing on Micro Acquire
• Pivotal moment: Found a profitable scraping API business listed for sale, but instead of buying it, decided to rebuild it himself using the same concept
• Current status: Business generates $20,000/month in revenue

Products and Offerings

• Scrape Creators: A web scraping API that scrapes social media platforms (Instagram, YouTube, Twitter) and ad libraries (Facebook, LinkedIn)
• Credit-based pricing model (pay-as-you-go, no subscription)
• Handles infrastructure, proxy rotation, and technical complexity so customers don’t have to
• Three payment plans: $10 for 5,000 credits, $50 for 25,000 credits, $500 for 500,000 credits

Metrics and Financials

• Monthly revenue: $20,000
• Total customers who have paid: 600 (but not all pay regularly)
• Core paying customers: approximately 12 customers generate the majority of revenue
• API requests: 20 million per month
• Profit margin: ~80%
• Monthly costs: ~$2,400 total ($1,500 proxies, $500 part-time developer in Philippines, $400 server costs)

Strategy and Growth

• Found the idea through Micro Acquire (online business brokerage) - saw a similar scraping API business making $30,000 MRR
• Validated by checking: skill set match (3 years of scraping experience), low customer count (under 100), SEO-only customer acquisition, proven market demand
• Built the entire product in a couple of weeks using existing scrapers from prior experience
• First customer came from Twitter - scraped a company’s site, CTO commented on the post
• Growth tactics: active on Twitter, comments on scraping-related launches offering free credits, relies on reliability and personal communication as differentiators
• Playbook for finding and replicating another business:
  • Visit Micro Acquire marketplace, filter by SaaS and asking price (at least $300K or high ARR)
  • Look for markets you have knowledge in
  • Reverse engineer the website from the listing details
  • Research how they acquire customers (most important step)
  • Build the concept (don’t copy word-for-word)
  • Execute daily - promote or improve every single day

Tech Stack and Infrastructure

• Node.js/JavaScript for all code
• Hosting: Render.com for main server, AWS Lambda for subscriptions
• HTTP requests: impit package (by Ampify)
• Proxies: Four main providers - Evomi, Core Residential, Webshare, Massive
• Database: Supabase
• Frontend: Astro + React
• Development: Cursor ($20/month)
• Documentation: Notion
• Basic website for the product

Lessons and Advice

• Don’t feel obligated to invent something completely new - copy a proven concept and execute better
• Choose one idea and focus on it every single day
• Stop bouncing between ideas and just pick something to execute on
• Personal communication and reliability can be key differentiators in a technical product
• You don’t need many customers to generate significant revenue if the product is valuable enough