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

Welcome to startups for the rest of us. I'm your host Rob Walling. In this week's episode, I talk with Pierre de Wolfe, the cofounder of scraping bee about how they mostly bootstrapped to $5,000,000 in ARR and an 8 figure all cash exit. It's an incredible story. We talk about some of their early struggles growing. What changed when they went from growing I think seven k of MRR in a year and then suddenly grew almost to a million ARR over the next fifteen months. And something changed there. We dig into that early in the episode. We find out any trophies that Pierre bought with the proceeds from their exit. We talk about their thought process for deciding when to sell, why to sell, as well as some of the inner workings of the exit and just how hard it can be to sell a company. If you know Pierre from x twitter you've seen his very thoughtful tweets about bootstrapping and indie hacking and he has what I consider pretty insightful thought process about what it takes to be successful in this game. Before we dive into the conversation, I am doing a live q and a on Thursday, July 17. You will only get access to that if you are a member of microconf connect. Microconf connect is our amazing online community for bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped founders. Inside connect, we have founder to founder discussions about what's working today in SaaS. We have live workshops and AMAs, including the one with me on July 17, and we have access to our content vault with recordings from every previous microconf event. Microconf connect is $50 a month, and we charge for it to keep the quality up. It's a gate that keeps the quality of the founders inside very high and it allows us to afford to pay a moderator to keep the conversation going and to make sure it's super high signal to noise. Microconfconnect.com if you're interested in checking it out. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Pierre. Pierre de Wolfe. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Hello, Rob Whaling. Thank you for having me. Yeah. It's great to have you on, man. I think a lot of folks who listen to this show will know you from x Twitter. You've been, you know, in the indie hacker community, pretty prominent for many years now. And you and your cofounder, Kevin, started scraping bee. And you recently sold it for an 8 figure all cash exit, no stock option shenanigans as you put in your tweet. But you've even had I mean, other folks, you know, I think it was a month or two ago, I went through one of your tweets that was something like what was it? Like, 12 or 20 hot takes about indie hacking that that you may not agree with or whatever. And I was like, I think I agree with almost …