How a $180 MVP From Jaipur Grew Into a $22K/Month Web Scraping API
Manthan Koolwal taught himself to code, launched a two-feature scraping API for $180, and grew Scrapingdog to $22K per month almost through SEO-driven content.
Part of Indian SaaS builders
Business snapshot
Monthly revenue
$22K/mo
reported Mar 2022
- Business model
- API
- Started
- Apr 2020
- Team
- Solo founder + 6 staff
- Based in
- Jaipur
- Monthly revenue
- $22,000
- Initial investment
- $180
- Monthly running cost
- $7k to $8k
- Gross margin
- 68%
- Paid customer growth
- 15% to 18% per month
Channels
Tools
- Node.js
- Express
- MongoDB
- Nginx
- Reactjs
- Nextjs
- DigitalOcean
- GitHub
- Drift
- HubSpot
- Ahrefs
- snov
Founder-reported figures, not independently verified.
Who built it, and what they built
Manthan Koolwal is the founder of Scrapingdog, a web scraping API based just outside Jaipur, India. The product lets developers pull data from any website with a single GET request, and the data powers use cases like price comparison, sentiment analysis, training data sets, and lead generation.
Alongside Scrapingdog, the company runs two sibling products: MakCorps, a hotel rate shopping tool comparing more than 200 hotel OTAs for independent travel agencies, and FlightAPI, which returns flight pricing from multiple vendors.
Where the idea came from
Koolwal began the product in 2016 during the second year of his B.tech degree at Ganpat University in Gujarat. Surrounded by classmates from business-minded families in a state known for producing major investors, he decided to learn coding through online courses.
Through that learning he met Manish, who was building a Railway API later sold to confirmtkt in 2017 for $50k. Manish handed him a small web scraping task, which he researched and delivered within a week. Enjoying the process, he noticed that every business needing data relied on scraping, and decided to build a scraping tool of his own.
How they built the first version
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