Day 017

Today, costs on Google Ads rose to 103 USD. People are clicking a lot more somehow by the way. It feels nice to have conversions, but nobody is filling the form.

This reminds me a little bit of when I was doing dropshipping.

We have other projects coming (potentially) but I think that I need to increase my workload anyway.

Working on this project on the side should be one of my priorities even though it's not super comfortable for me to work on many things at the same time.

The game plan

I would like to detail the game plan here for the next weeks.

Building vertical instead of horizontal

The goal will be to create vertical offerings for each target website, so we can tailor the messaging and go a bit crazy.

Problem with generalist scraping API marketplaces is that in my opinion they are hard to market. That's why I want to build something vertical first.

But, which data sources should we target?

Market research

The first step will be to do market research: which websites are the most in-demand, and with the lowest competition?

We'll use that as a proxy metric for the potential cost on Google Ads

Building the scraping API

Well, that's where I'm good at.

I'll just build an API. This one will be internal, at first hosted on a server in a very simple way.

Building the API gateway

This will be the API that handles the credits.

It should allow for buying credits through Stripe, and spending them by making API requests.

It'll use Go and PostgreSQL, and that's it.

Building the landing page

I'll make a landing page tailored to my target, with a lot of content.

I think I'll just take Modafinil to write all the content, because otherwise I'm a pretty crappy writer in my opinion.

Maybe I should try cocaine due to the lower half-life /j

Acquiring customers

Once that's done, we can set up Google Ads to acquire our first customers!

We can also write a few blogposts, taking inspiration from the competition we find using Ahrefs. Better focus on the long tail keywords.

The key: collecting the scraps rather than aiming for the whole pie. The goal is just to have something running to get our feet wet rather than building the next million-dollar business.

Another idea is to contact people on Reddit, GitHub, etc.

We could open-source some parts of the code or create a free version in order to bait people in.

Generalizing

Once we have something working for our first target, we can try and make it so that the website template can easily be changed to fit any target.

We can build a scraper for another website, and try marketing it the same way.

Additionally, one of the goals could be to build a long-term API marketplace on the side or sell APIs on existing API marketplaces, with a markup, potentially to acquire customers.