Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

DeWulf: A Big Tech cease-and-desist halted our first acquisition process

Pierre DeWulf · Episode 783 | Bootstrapping ScrapingBee to $5M ARR and an 8-Figur... · Jul 15, 2025 · at 24:40

Pierre DeWulf, co-founder of web scraping SaaS ScrapingBee, recounts having to halt their initial sales process eighteen months prior due to a legal threat from Big Tech.

0:00 / 0:15exact quote · 15.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And then we just received, we received a big, frightening cease and desist from one of the five biggest tech companies in the world. Of course, everyone got frightened about it. We had to abort the sales process.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Pierre DeWulf

Insight
DeWulf: Hire developers who write, not writers who code
“So first we started looking for developers who wanted to write and not for writers who knew a bit how to code. So with that in mind, we're able to have writers who were really in terms of Technology, like technologically very top notch, you know, they knew eve…”
Pierre DeWulf Jul 15, 2025 ▶ 17:26 Episode 783 | Bootstrapping ScrapingBee to $5M ARR and an 8-Figur...
Insight
DeWulf: Commodity SaaS products cannot ignore competitor pricing to win customers
“I think it's just, I mean, for us, it was completely wrong. I mean, you cannot just ignore it, especially in our market, we're, yeah, commodity products. So you need to be, you need to have a sexy pricing table if you want people to at least give you a chance.”
Pierre DeWulf Jul 15, 2025 ▶ 23:32 Episode 783 | Bootstrapping ScrapingBee to $5M ARR and an 8-Figur...
Disclosure
DeWulf: Oxylabs acquired ScrapingBee in an all-cash deal
“So this was very what seduced us, and it was also a full cash offer, which was the best for us.”
Pierre DeWulf Jul 15, 2025 ▶ 28:15 Episode 783 | Bootstrapping ScrapingBee to $5M ARR and an 8-Figur...
Assertion Not checkable as stated
DeWulf: Two previous ScrapingBee acquisitions fell through before the final exit
“We almost sold the business two times. So, one time season desist, but the time before, we were two weeks before closing the business, and we actually received an email from the acquirer telling us, hey, we need to talk, and boom, they no longer wanted to rais…”
Pierre DeWulf Jul 15, 2025 ▶ 35:15 Episode 783 | Bootstrapping ScrapingBee to $5M ARR and an 8-Figur...
Disclosure
DeWulf: ScrapingBee sold at peak growth to avoid an eventual slowdown
“Scraping really was in very good position to be sold in terms of revenue, growth, and all, and we didn't want to wait for the growth to slow or to even decrease before selling it.”
Pierre DeWulf Jul 15, 2025 ▶ 4:30 Episode 783 | Bootstrapping ScrapingBee to $5M ARR and an 8-Figur...
Assertion Not checkable as stated
DeWulf: ScrapingBee became the web's second-biggest scraping blog with 3-4 posts/month
“And so we're not Publishing a lot of content, you know, only three to four blog posts per month, I think, which is way less than what some companies are able to do, but it was sufficient to be, yeah, at some point, I think we were the second biggest web sweepi…”
Pierre DeWulf Jul 15, 2025 ▶ 18:45 Episode 783 | Bootstrapping ScrapingBee to $5M ARR and an 8-Figur...
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.