

Ask HN: How can I market my web scraping service? - notastartup

I have a site http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrape.it and basically I am looking to create web scrapers and web scraping tools.<p>I need some suggestions on how I can find some work with this, how to get leads, and who to target.<p>I have used adwords but I ended up paying $2 a click and ripped through quite a bit of money.<p>Any advice or feedback would be greatly appreciated.
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not_kurt_godel
A few thoughts...

\- I think you'd do well to have some sort of interesting demo on the page.
You've got a pretty UI but there's nothing to demonstrate the quality of the
product. Could be screenshots, video, whatever. Some sort of live demo would
be ideal.

\- You're in a weird gray area in addressing your target audience. My guess is
most people who are familiar with the term "web scraping" are probably
competent enough to write their own for whatever purposes they need. You need
to clearly communicate the value proposition to non-technical people. "Data
acquisition"?

\- "Paid webscraping service" screams scammy and spammy to me, even if your
website doesn't. You need to be up-front about your policies on robots.txt,
respecting privacy/copyright/not (accidentally) DDoSSing/good Internet
citizenship, etc. etc.

