welanes

I released Humm[1] last week. Realtime speech-to-text with a focus on privacy. No backend, no telemetry - just a fast, nicely designed app wrapping local stt models.

[1] https://humm.so/

Data extraction: https://simplescraper.io

A project that I launched on HN that became a business. Simplescraper rode the no-code wave of a few years back ('instant structured data without parsing html').

Now working on increasing the surface area for AI agents: MCP support, screenshots API, and (experimentally) x402[1]

[1] https://simplescraper.io/blog/x402-payment-protocol/

Whoops, developer mode needs to be toggled on. Just updated the instructions

Made a quick tool so you can check if your extensions are on the list: https://extensioncheck.val.run

1. Go to chrome://extensions and toggle Developer mode on (so IDs are visible)

2. Select all text on the page with your mouse and copy

3. Paste it into the tool

It parses the IDs and warns you if any are among the 287 spyware extensions.

This guide may be useful for anyone interested in building their own spec-compliant MCP server: https://simplescraper.io/blog/how-to-mcp.

Albeit, it's a few weeks old so already in need of an update!

I'm always a bit wary of approaching these ideas though because I feel like nobody would ever pay for small web stuff?

Build them and find out! There's almost always room for something better, and if what you build is that, then some people will pay.

Unless the tools have large running costs, consider offering them for free (at least at first).

A few things are likely to happen:

Nobody cares enough to sign up – fine, zero users, zero costs.

People use it but don’t stick around – ask them what would make the tool more valuable.

People use it a lot – great, now you can charge for the value.

Two examples come to mind: spaced repetition app Mochi and markdown editor Typora. Mochi is $5 a month, I think. Typora was free and is now a $15 one-time purchase.

Both compete with free alternatives and still have many paying users.

1. Clicking the box programmatically – possible but inconsistent

2. Outsourcing the task to one of the many CAPTCHA-solving services (2Captcha etc) – better

3. Using a pool of reliable IP addresses so you don't encounter checkboxes or turnstiles – best

I run a web scraping startup (https://simplescraper.io) and this is usually the approach[0]. It has become more difficult, and I think a lot of the AI crawlers are peeing in the pool with aggressive scraping, which is making the web a little bit worse for everyone.

[0] Worth mentioning that once you're "in" past the captcha, a smart scraper will try to use fetch to access more pages on the same domain so you only need to solve a fraction of possible captchas.

Making my data extraction Saas (https://simplescraper.io) more LLM friendly.

Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately.

Things are much easier for one-person startups these days—it's a gift.

I remember building a todo app as my first SaaS project, and choosing something called Stormpath for authentication. It subsequently shut down, forcing me to do a last-minute migration from a hostel in Japan using Nitrous Cloud IDE (which also shut down). Just pain upon pain.[1]

Now, you can just pick a full-stack cloud service and run with it. My latest SaaS[2] is built on Google Cloud, so Authentication, Cloud Functions, Docker containers, logging, etc straight out of the box.

Not to mention, modern JavaScript and CSS are finally good. With so many fewer headaches, it’s a great time to build.

[1] Admittedly, I was new to software dev and made some rather poor tech choices

[2] https://simplescraper.io

Sounds like you've learned a lot of what not to do, which will be invaluable when you try again.

It feels like the only areas where a solo builder can gain traction are in B2B products, or B2C if you're riding the latest trend (crypto yesterday, AI today).

Everything else requires an audience or a ton of capital if you hope to capture even a sliver of attention. Patience and persistence may get you there too, but it's going to take more than a year.

perhaps you can simply ask the API to create Python or JS code that is deterministic, instead.

Had a conversation last week with a customer that did exactly that - spent 15 minutes in ChatGPT generating working Scrapy code. Neat to see people solve their own problem so easily but it doesn't yet erode our value.

I run https://simplescraper.io and a lot of value is integrations, scale, proxies, scheduling, UI, not-having-to-maintain-code etc.

More important than that though is time-saved. For many people, 15 minutes wrangling with ChatGPT will always remain less preferable than paying a few dollars and having everything Just Work.

AI is still a little too unreliable at extracting structured data from HTML, but excellent at auxiliary tasks like identifying randomized CSS selectors etc

This will change of course so the opportunity right now is one of arbitrage - use AI to improve your offering before it has a chance to subsume it.

I'm making https://simplescraper.io - a no-code web scraping tool.

Saved up, quit my job and went all in...on a todo app. Needless to say that idea didn't go far, but it taught me how to code.

When I was close to broke I pivoted to this product and finally gained traction and now it's doing well enough to be my main source of income.

I'm kind of following the "1000 true fans" ethos that pops up here occasionally. There's a dedicated group of customers who benefit from the ease and speed of the tool and they're like my product team.

I check in with them often, make sure they're happy and build features for them. Turns out, what they value other people value too, and so the product slowly but surely grows.

Learning to code was definitely one of the best decisions I've made. Felt like gaining wings.

Nice job. No RSS though as far as I can tell.

For something slightly less minimal but very nice to use, I stumbled across this the other day: https://blogstatic.io/

Feels likes - after being crowded out by FB and Twitter (and the death of Google Reader) - blogs are making a comeback.

Congrats on the persistence! The lesson: things take time.

Took me about a decade. I also tried a note-taking app (every new developer's rite of passage it seems), an event guide, digital magazine, and an assortment of other projects whose domain names no longer resolve.

Suck as it may, each failure is a lesson in what not to do. If you find yourself back at square one and still have the drive to keep trying then it's only a matter of time before you create enough value to open wallets.

Another great resource is incolumitas.com. A list of detection methods are here: https://bot.incolumitas.com/

I run a no-code web scraper (https://simplescraper.io) and we test against these.

Having scraped million of webpages, I find dynamic CSS selectors a bigger time sink than most anti-scraping tech encountered so far (if your goal is to extract structured data).

I'm building https://simplescraper.io - data extraction in the spirit of the late Kimono Labs.

Front: Vue.js, Tailwind

Back: Node.js, Firebase (Database, Hosting, Functions, Scheduler)

Management: Airtable, Github, a 30,000 word README file

I'm making a living with just over 100 true fans building Simplescraper: https://simplescraper.io/.

An extra zero would be nice but I'm very grateful for 100. In addition to the article above, these writings provided a lot of inspiration:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20090321145348/https://plentyoff...

- https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/reconsider-41adf356857f

- https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/building-a-one-man-saas-app-...

The beautiful thing about web scraping is that it automates so much tedious work that the benefits in saved time offsets the brittleness inherent in scraping data.

And with Puppeteer (also Playwright) it's never been easier. Recaptcha solving, Ad blocking etc. in just a few lines of code[1].

I've built a business on the back of Puppeteer - https://simplescraper.io. Ten months in and we've just passed 100 customers so there's mucho opportunities in solving these kind of problems.

[1] https://github.com/berstend/puppeteer-extra/tree/master/pack...

Case in point! Thanks, I'll dust off the project folder and get on this soon.

I started building Lanes (https://lanes.io) in 2016 as a way to learn how to code. Don't talk about it because it's way overdue for an update.

But it plods along, earning enough to cover the bills for my second project, Simplescraper (https://simplescraper.io).

With Wunderlist shut down this year it was the perfect time to relaunch Lanes 2.0 to try capture some of those task-manager migrants. But if there's a single thing building side-projects has taught me it's that if you try and chase two rabbits, you'll catch neither.

Neat write-up, and thanks for putting me on to jsonld.js - looks useful.

I'm building https://simplescraper.io and we're trying to create heuristics to update CSS selectors whenever a website changes. People become unhappy when a scrape task that ran smoothly on Monday suddenly returns nothing on Tuesday so while it's a tough nut to crack it's super important.

We use a combination of XPath, historical data and data type (the value may change but the type and length often remain the same or similar) to narrow down the options.

Of course there's more sophisticated methods using Machine learning etc. but it's fun to try different approaches to solve this problem.

Hey, the best place to keep updated is https://twitter.com/simplescraper

If you're not on Twitter, we hope to submit the integration by the end of this month so check us out then.

It depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

For building websites, Webflow is powerful (and allows for fine-tuning).

Among utilities, Parabola (a kind of no-code extract, transform, load tool) is very neat.

For getting data/creating APIs without having to code I've built Simplescraper - https://simplescraper.io.

Currently working on an integration for Airtable that allows you to create a dynamic CMS using any data source, without code. Hopefully useful to non-dev and lazy-dev alike.

I'm in the middle of pushing out v1.0 of Simple scraper[0] this week which will recreate some of the functionality.

Having a lot of fun building the product but with so many of these types of companies shutting down it has me wondering what it forebodes :/

[0] https://simplescraper.io

Cheers Joel. I have most of your blog posts on Puppeteer bookmarked - super helpful and well written.

For sure, once the app is a notch more tried and tested I'll get in touch. Appreciate it.

Hey, right now you can select a Pagination element that the app will use to load the next page / new data.

If the site's publicly accessible and you're able to share, send the details to mike @ simplescraper.io and I'll get this working for you.

Right now it's free and will be until it's stable. Starting price will be about $25 for 4000 scraping credits, 200k API calls and data storage.

This will likely change as I have more stats and feedback on usage and expenses. But the goal is to offer a price point that's fair and low relative to other options.

Came here to post exactly this.

Music For Nine Post Cards is also a real gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyY7NU4cbtY.

Much respect to the uploaders giving these albums a digital rebirth.

Yes, working on it now.

Yes - you're able to save data behind a login using the point and click functionality as it extracts whatever data is loaded in your browser ("local scraping").

And no - if you choose to also create a cloud recipe that runs on the server, the remote browser instance won't be able to access data behind a login.

It's possible but I'd rather not store third-party credentials for the time being.