📂 The First $1k MRR (& Beyond): Scrapybird

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When you're in scale-up mode and you have KPIs to hit... the pressure is on to deliver demos and signups. And it's a lot to handle: multi-channel strategy, remarketing, landing pages, email sequences, revenue ops, conversion rate optimization.

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This is The First $1k MRR (& Beyond), a series about how founders got traction for their startups, told by the founders themselves.

Product: Scrapybird

Website: https://www.scrapybird.com

Founder(s): Valentin Wallyn

Launched: Feb of 2022

Current MRR range: $1k – $10k

What does Scrapybird do?

Scrapybird is a lead generation tool based on Twitter. It helps you quickly get relevant email leads to use in your cold email campaigns. You can leverage Twitter intent-data to get emails from people you *know* are interested in your niche. For example, get the emails of the followers of your competitors or those that have engaged with a specific tweet. It is mainly used by B2B lead generation agencies and founders growing their own business.

How did you get the first $1k MRR for Scrapybird?

The first thing I did was set up Google ads on some keywords like “twitter email scraper” etc.

This generated some clicks but 0 conversions. At that point the goal was more to validate there was at least *some* people looking for it more than getting customers but I thought it was worth mentioning that step.

Scrapybird mainly grew by using itself. That was the logical thing to do and would also prove to me and others that the product is worthy. I’m also running 4 other SaaS in parallel so I needed something that would not take me a lot of time to set up.

So what I did was look for tweets in the cold email space, scrape the emails of people that engaged with that tweet (-> they are interested in cold email) then launched a cold email sequence to them.

I would take tweets such as this one :

And scrape the emails of the retweeters.

I’d then send them a simple cold email like

Hey , saw your interest in cold emailing and we actually built a software to scrape relevant emails from twitter (eg. retarget your competitors' followers).

worth a chat ?

Some people were interested, some were not. I set up meetings with those interested and closed them from there.

For me that’s the easiest thing to do to go from 0 -> $1k MRR because you’ll need to have 1:1 calls with your ideal customer anyway if you want to understand them better. This helped me tune my messaging and iterate on the product, both steps being critical to an early stage product. And even though my ticket size is not that big, it doesn’t take that long to set up a campaign. It’ll also help you clarify who exactly you are trying to reach and are they easy to reach. If you’re not even able to get into conversations with them then maybe your offer is poor or you’re entering a difficult market.

Another thing I did was to export the twitter profiles from the above lists for which we did *not* find an email address and plug them into Phantombuster for some Twitter DM automation. I’d basically do the same thing as my cold email campaign but on Twitter DM. This did not perform nearly as well.

How have you scaled Scrapybird beyond $1k MRR?

Once I reached $1k MRR, I started to need to look for a more diverse range of lead sources. Cold email twitter is quite narrow so 1. There’s not hundreds of tweets to scrape each week 2. The same people engage on those different tweets so there’s overlap and less and less brand new leads.

So I expanded our lead sources but also tried experimenting with other marketing channels. For example some happy customers requested an affiliate program so I set up that (using Rewardful) and made them register to the program. They would then refer to me new customers and promote it themselves on social media etc.

Speaking of social media I’d also try to share some of the stuff I did on Scrapybird in public to get some visibility for the project on my own (little) audience. It’s harder to quantify who came from that but I did get inbound leads so surely they heard about it from somewhere !

I’m also working a little on the SEO side to generate inbound traffic but this is still very much a work in progress as it takes quite some time to really fire.

All of those are quite recent but it’s growing quite fast so whenever something clicks I’ll just double down on that. You can follow me on Twitter at @valentin_wln for the next parts of the adventure !

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