Unwrangle

It's been over 3 years that I've been running this service by myself and the journey has been a roller coaster ride but a very fulfilling one at that. Unwrangle now has 800 signed up users dozens of paying customers and gets 3-10 new sign ups every week. All while being a super niche service that's priced well above alternatives and has never been marketed really.

My top takeaways from the journey have been:

• Keep it simple, focus more attention on doing a simple thing really well rather than building a ton of features
• Be consistent with simple organic efforts like SEO, emailing customers, product improvements despite your belief in the project going up and down.
• Be resilient and treat customers kindly, some users will test your patience but while drawing boundaries it's important to be nice to all and it really does pay off in terms of loyalty

I have plans to keep improving the service and turn it into a general purpose no-code web scraping tool a little like Octoparse but with my own twist to it. I think AI is useful in parsing HTML/JSON and distributing expert level anti-bot services purchased at bulk pricing packaged into a value added parsing tool designed for medium scale use really does pass on benefits worth paying for to a developer or researcher looking to write their own scraper or parser for a personal or business research project.

Meanwhile, I have been cooking up another tool as well—yeah I know it's silly to spread my focus thin and I really do think it is silly but you know us lot have a bug, I still have around 50 domains for which I would love to ship products one day. Anyhow, this is the year that I hit some revenue targets and start building a small team for my little business as well. I gave this a shot late last year and while I had to fire the team mate I really did learn something about managing so I look forward to giving it another shot.