Episode 783 | Bootstrapping ScrapingBee to $5M ARR and an 8-Figure Exit

Rob Walling:
Welcome to Startups For the Rest Of Us, I’m your host, Rob Walling. In this week’s episode, I talk with Pierre DeWolf, the co-founder of Scraping Bee, about how they mostly bootstrapped to $5 million in a RR and an eight figure all cash exit. It’s an incredible story. We talk about some of their early struggles growing. What changed when they went from growing, I think seven K of MRR in a year and then suddenly grew almost to a million a RR over the next 15 months, and something changed there. We dig into that early in the episode, we find out any trophies that Pierre bought with the proceeds from their exit. We talk about their thought process for deciding when to sell y to sell, as well as some of the inner workings of the exit, and just how hard it can be to sell a company. 

If you know Pierre from X Twitter, you’ve seen his very thoughtful tweets about bootstrapping and indie hacking, and he has what I consider a pretty insightful thought process about what it takes to be successful in this game. Before we dive into the conversation, I am doing a live q and a on Thursday, July 17th. You will only get access to that if you are a member of MicroConf Connect. MicroConf Connect is our amazing online community for bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped founders. Inside Connect, we have founder to founder discussions about what’s working today in SaaS. We have live workshops and AMAs, including the one with me on July 17th, and we have access to our content vault with recordings from every previous MicroConf event. MicroConf Connect is $50 a month and we charge for it to keep the quality up. It’s a gate that keeps the quality of the founders inside very high, and it allows us to afford to pay a moderator to keep the conversation going and to make sure it’s super high signal to noise. MicroConf connect.com if you’re interested in checking it out. And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Pierre Pierre de Wolfe. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Hello, Rob Whaling. Thank you for having me.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s great to have you on, man. I think a lot of folks who listen to this show will know you from X Twitter. You’ve been in the Indie Hacker community pretty prominent for many years now, and you and your co-founder Kevin, started Scraping Bee and you recently sold it for an eight figure all Cash exit. No stock option shenanigans as you put in your tweet, but you’ve even had other folks, I think it was a month or two ago, I went through one of your tweets that was something like, what was it, like 12 or 20 hot takes about indie hacking that you may not agree with or whatever. And I was like, I think I agreed with almost all of ’em. We were in agreement, and your wisdom I think has been helpful for a lot of folks. Last time that you were public about scraping bee’s revenue and Scraping Bee was mostly bootstrapped, effectively bootstrapped. The only money you took was from TinySeed. Last time you were public about it, you were at 5 million a RR, and that’s with two co-founders and a very small team, I dunno, a handful of folks You’re working with  

Pierre de Wulf:
Four. Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
Four. So I mean highly profitable before I get to, how did it feel when the money hit your bank account? And I want to know what you bought the crazy trophies you bought, why sell it all? Why not just run it forever?  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah, that’s actually a good question. Definitely something we talked a lot about with Kevin, and I think there’s two things. First, what this phrase, I don’t remember who said it, I think it was Naval, but most startup doesn’t die because of money or stuff, but most startup dies because funders are tired. We’ve been running scraping before five, six years and doing web scraping for 10, 12 years. And we were not to the point where we were sick of it, but we were getting tired of doing web scraping. We wanted something new and that the second point is the only way to know the top is to reach the top. So 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 slows or to even decrease before selling it. We also had you change between, I mean, you change during all your life, but between 25 and 32, 33, you change your priority change, you start to settle to build a family. And so yeah, all of this combine, we thought it was a good time to sell it and to start the process.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, that makes sense. You might be quoting me, so I have this quote that I’ve said several times where funded companies fail when they run out of money, and a bootstrap companies fail when the founders run out of motivation.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
I think that might be it. I’ve tweeted that and I’ve said it on the show before because that’s usually what happens, especially for bootstrapping. Why would you stop? But if you do plateau or you’ve done it for 10 years, I mean, I started feeling that same thing frankly with Drip and at one point with MicroConf, although I have renewed energy around MicroConf and TinySeed, but yeah, so I think that makes a lot of sense. Now I want to ask you the big question, the end of the hero’s journey, the day the cash hit the bank account, you refreshed the bank balance. I bet you and Kevin were in touch and you’re just waiting for millions of dollars to go in more money than you’ve ever seen or probably ever imagined you would have. What would describe that feeling to me?  

Pierre de Wulf:
So it was very funny. It was a bit anticlimatic in a sense that, so the whole closing day was done remotely. So we had lawyers in the us, investor in the us, so TinySeed, we had the buyer in Litre and us in Sosa, France. So you do all those DocuSign, you have proof of this as a buyer, send the proof of wire transfer, and then you just wait. So it was for three to four hours. And when I actually received the notification refreshing the bank account, I was just relieved I didn’t want to jump. And actually I took a nap. I took I think a two hour, 40 minute nap because I had slept only four hours the night before. And it was very, very stressful those last few hours because you have all those lawyers talking about the last few details of the SPA. 

So the final agreements, it was lot of relief actually. Then you have to start announcing stuff to the team, although they knew we were getting acquired, but you’re making it official. You’re introduced to the acquirer Slack channel. So it was, yeah, a pretty hectic day. A very good one. Yeah, just a lot of relief. I remember afterwards I, after my day was over, I just took a one hour walk. I called my parents and my grandfather to tell them that it’s over, it’s been sold, and this time it worked. Yeah, that was Anticlimatic, but a beautiful day for me.  

Rob Walling:
And did you send Kevin an emoji of you flipping dollar bills or anything? Yeah. Yeah.  

Pierre de Wulf:
So for Kevin actually, so yeah, I can probably share it, but the day we closed, his wife was actually delivering his baby, so it was a very hectic day for him to Wow.  

Rob Walling:
Talk about.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah, so it was a process from afar. Of course, I went to the maternity, I dropped some flowers because it was just a few minutes from home. But yeah, we celebrated  

Rob Walling:
Through Slack. I’m glad. Yeah, exactly. We slack. Okay, so after you sold, we’re going to get into what Scraping Bee is and more of your story, but I know I saw on Twitter at some point that you had bought yourself a bunch of Legos, bunch of Lego sets, but was that after the exit or was that after hitting 5 million  

Pierre de Wulf:
A RR? Yeah, so it was after the 5 million a RR. So Ally just buying big box and just storing them, upping the value goes up. And it was funny because I was able to just buy everything I wanted because Lego are expensive, but it’s not like cars or jewelry or whatever. So at the end of the day, it’s not that big of a deal. So yeah, it was just fun stuff.  

Rob Walling:
People talk about the different levels of wealth where it’s like going to fast food when you’re a teenager or frankly growing up we just didn’t have money, so even fast food, it was like, oh, it was rare we did it right? But at a certain point, maybe you have $50,000 in the bank going to fast food. You don’t look at the menu prices anymore, you just buy which one. And then there’s a point where you go to a restaurant and you don’t look at the menu prices anymore, and then you go to an expensive restaurant and you don’t do, and then your hotel or your Airbnb, you just stop kind of looking at the price very much. And obviously for some people, maybe it’s sports cars or whatever, but getting to the point of Lego being that is, it’s pretty good. Pretty good. Fantastic. This is what Thank you. Thank you.  

Pierre de Wulf:
HTML. Yeah. Is  

Rob Walling:
That what you said?  

Pierre de Wulf:
Exactly? Yeah, this was my thank you. HTML tweet basically.  

Rob Walling:
Yep. Alright, so let’s talk about scraping bee. So your H one, tired of getting blocked while scraping the web, the scraping bee web scraping API handles headless browsers, rotates proxies for you and offers AI powered data extraction. Now you and Kevin started this, what was it, 20 18, 19 20 19, 20 19. But this was not your first idea. You tried B2C, you tried B2B. In fact, you did a really good MicroConf talk on YouTube that will link up in the show notes and you gave it when you guys, you were at about 1.5 million a RR at the time. So if they want to hear about how you found the idea of scraping B, they can go do that. But having done B2C, B2B had failures and then had this outsize success, what are the differences? Why did scraping be work when these previous ideas?  

Pierre de Wulf:
So I think first main reason was I would say funder product fit or funder audience fit in a way that our first reuse SaaS was price monitoring tool for e-commerce owners. It was at the time where drop shipping was very hot. We built a tool allowing to monitor prices and all, but we didn’t know e-commerce and we didn’t know to talk to e-commerce people. We didn’t know where those people end out on the web, what their problem were. So we basically built a product waiting for a solution, waiting for a problem. What changed with Scraping Bee is with Kevin, we were a developer and we did a lot of web scraping, so it was a mix of dark footing because we used a product like Scraping Bee when building pressing bot and product audience fit. Kevin had a book and a blog about web scraping in Java, which was quite popular in that niche afterwards. It sounds very obvious, why haven’t we started with that? But I think what changed the most, the audience and knowing the people you want to sell it to,  

Rob Walling:
Do I remember correctly that you or you and Kevin had authored a book about web scraping?  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah, he did. About web scraping Java. Yeah. He had a blog and a book. Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
He did. I remember when we interviewed you for Tiny C, because you were early, you were like one KMRR maybe, which is right on the edge for us, but we really liked you and Kevin and B, this book, it’s like, oh, you wrote a book a bunch about this, and I think you guys had kind of a small audience in the web scraping space because of that. And we’re like, you know what? We’re going to take a bet on these guys. And it was part of it. And it’s again, if you listen to this show at all, people know I don’t put a lot behind having an audience per se to build SaaS. You can only sell to a very small portion of that, and it doesn’t actually get you very far. But we were betting on the audience, we were betting on the two of you being these smart people who had had built this, had launched it, had some kind of wounds under your belt in terms of having some failures and had written a book and had gotten it out there. And then my memory was even after, I have some notes here from Producer Ron that after a year after the TinySeed year, you were only at about eight KMRR, but then 15 months after that you were at a million a RR. So do you remember what changed in that? Yeah, yeah, because a striking difference  

Pierre de Wulf:
Definitely. So what I remember is that for the first few months of scraping B, so we tried to leverage Kevin audience, but as you said, it was not such big audience and here knowledge of the space was more valuable than having an audience, but it was very think that on scale we were hanging out on forums, Reddit and stuff like that. And then what really changed during the year we grew very fast is that we started writing a lot more content. So first eight months, we spent a lot of time writing some very good content, but the output was quite small because it was only Kevin an eye. And then, so thanks to TinySeed money of course, and also to a few advice that made us focus on what works, we just decided to go all in on SEO and that’s what we did and what really fueled that grows. 

Then of course we’re doing tons of product optimization, onboarding and stuff, but at the end of the day, what really mattered the most was the S thanks to Kevin because basically we split roles. So we’re both developers, but at some point we’re like, okay, Kevin, you’re going to do marketing. I’m going to do product and tech. And Kevin wanted to do that. And so I remember it was during COVID, and so he watched the A Hre course blogging for businesses, which they have just made free during COVID. And yeah, from there it was just nonstop finding content writer, publishing good content, listening to Ruben Gamma advices a lot. He helped us a lot. I know he helped Kevin a lot. And yeah, that was the main point.  

Rob Walling:
I remember that now, and I do remember folks who listen to the podcast will know Ruben is my go-to for freemium, for SEO, for content, for Hot Takes on AI and such. And that was a good part of, I think for you guys being part of a TinySeed is that Ruben is in batch two from 2020 I think, and is very generous, especially with TinySeed founders about his detailed knowledge. He knows that you’re not going to go on Twitter and write out everything that he does or share with a random person, but he is willing to kind of give up the real details of how it’s really done.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah, no, it was awesome.  

Rob Walling:
As are you guys now, it’s great. When I have someone who I see a tiny C founder who content SEO is working for, I’m like, all right, talk to Kevin and Pierre, talk to Ruben. There’s a few others. There’s content obviously is a very powerful force for Bootstrappers. It scales so well, and that’s something that you guys did I want to call out is when you and Kevin were writing everything, it was a little slow going. You can only produce so much, but you figured out how to do something that a lot of folks don’t, which is how do I hire writers and or editors who you produce a content machine rather than just the founders doing it. And it’s easy to do that poorly. It’s easy to hire people that turn out articles. I’ve done that myself in the past. So what was that process like to build that engine, that content engine? Because we as founders, especially folks who are like yourself, who are really good on social media, who are really clever and who have a lot of hot takes that are interesting and get people thinking and talking, our standard for this type of stuff is really high. You’re not going to publish an article about web scraping using Node or JavaScript or whatever that doesn’t meet your standard, and that standard is a nine and a half out of 10. So how did you possibly build that engine?  

Pierre de Wulf:
So first thing is that, so our audience, were a developer and we wanted to build skyscraper techniques. So the big possible stuff, you can write educational content. And so first we started looking for developers who wanted to write and not for writers who knew a bit how to code. With that in mind we’re able to have writers who were really, in terms of technology, like technologically very top-notch. They knew everything there is to know about their language framework or whatever. Then, and I think I’m pretty sure it was Kevin’s id, we hired an editor. So basically this one was a writer who knew a bit about Watch Scraping, but doesn’t matter. And his role and I think is still working with us to this day, was to review every single piece of content and making them more enjoyable. Sometimes a writer will not be English speaking, English will not be first language and all. So really focusing on developers who want to write, then have an editor review everything, then have a bit of SEO knowledge to optimize it and you just keep going, keep going, keep going. And so we’re not publishing a lot of content, 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 sweeping blog on the internet. So that worked.  

Rob Walling:
The articles were long was my memory, is that right? Like 4,000 words? 3000,  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah. So I think 20 minutes reading time. So that’s about that. And we did one for once you have something that works for Python, you can do all the language. Once you’ve done the language, you can do the framework and some library. So it’s really easy to duplicate Content ID issues started when everyone started doing the same. So because SEO O is a zero sum game, there is only one Google Page rank zero, so we had to diversify. But for the first two years, that worked very, very well.  

Rob Walling:
What’s interesting is that there’s a good chunk of TinySeed companies that take the money and they say, the money’s great, but I didn’t actually need it. What I really wanted was the community, the mentorship, the advice. But it sounds like the money actually did make a difference for you guys.  

Pierre de Wulf:
It made a mental difference because it was during COVID, we had only, I don’t know, 15 K in the bank. When we received it, we were lucky enough because growth meant we haven’t actually touched it, but if we hadn’t received the money, we wouldn’t have spent it. I dunno if I’m clear, but it’s like it gave us mental safety and reassurance that we can spend a bit more, that we can pay ourselves finally a decent amount of money. So yeah, money helped a bit to give mental clarity and support and mentoring helped the most. Basically we had access. So again, it was COVID lockdown, we were in a countryside, France with Kevin, so not the perfect place and time to talk with people who build SaaS. And in the Slack we had access to expert in everything, SEO, pricing, copywriting. I remember Jan Patch helped a lot there an hour for pricing and many other people who just gave us free 30 minutes, one hour consulting call and it was very, very helpful.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask was like obviously you have this great tweet from yesterday and you said getting funded through TinySeed was a game changer for Scraping Bee. We kept the best benefit a bootstrapper can have optionality, we were never forced to raise more, but we always knew we could if we wanted to, and it gave us enough funding to meaningfully accelerate our growth. But the best part, the advisors, the mentors, the experts that make up the TinySeed community we’re here for us when we needed it most. So today, I guess we’re coming full circle as I’m very happy to become an investor in fund three, which makes me, and I love it. It’s such so great to build your own investors, but it sounds like it all made a difference. The money made perhaps less of a difference, I guess, but the advisors, the mentors, the experts, and the advice got you there faster, right? See, I believe you would’ve gotten there eventually, but maybe it would’ve taken you extra years or maybe it would’ve been slow enough that there would’ve been other competitors. You don’t know, right? You don’t know the sliding doors.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah, you don’t know. We talked about it with Kevin and I think last year we said, I think TinySeed made us save two years and at that time the company was four years old, so it made us grow twice as fast, which is huge, especially when time is your most valuable asset.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s really good to hear. That’s really good to hear. You put a number to it and I dunno, it just makes me happy why we do it. I tell people, get there faster. Now, was this pretty steady growth once you started that trajectory with the content seo? Did you have any  

Pierre de Wulf:
Very steady,  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, you didn’t have any plateaus, right?  

Pierre de Wulf:
Have early sign of plateau. So because in SaaS, if you analyze churn and basically when your growth is not growing, we’re going to get a plateau because of churn. So we had a plateau coming in and at that time we made some meaningful update to the product and to pricing because we were commodity product and we bought the idea that you shouldn’t care about your competitors’ prices and all. But I think it’s just mean for us it was completely wrong. I mean, you cannot just ignore it, especially in our market, we’re commodity products, so you need to have a sexy pricing table if you want people to at least give you a chance.  

Rob Walling:
So let’s talk about the sale process, the exit. You and Kevin got together and decided it was time to sell. I want to ask you how did you decide it was time to sell, I guess is the first thing, and then talk a little bit about how it actually went down.  

Pierre de Wulf:
So actually if we’re talking about the early start of the process, it was 18 months ago when we sat down with Kevin. We saw revenue, growth, churn, margin, business was in good state. We were a bit exhausted. So we started a full process with discretion, capital, our m and a advisor. We went through the process of building a pitch, selling a story to potential acquirer and doing some interviews and then getting some offer. And then we received a big frightening cease disease from one of the five biggest tech companies in the world. Of course, everyone got frightened about it. We had to aboard the sales process. We were like, okay, it’s not going to happen this year. We want to try again in a year. What can we do to make the process smoother next year? So actually it was a year long process. So two big things we did was to hire more to standardize operation, document a bit, everything, and to have all the accounting stuff ready in gap format. 

We’re a French company, so it was a bit of work for us, but very helpful. And so fast forward a year, we’re in August with Kevin and he is like, okay, I want to start again to sell the business number. We’re still good. We talked with a R, was like, okay, let’s do it again. And so obviously that time it was a bit faster because the whole pitch was ready. The accounting staff were all there. So the way it works is like you prepare a pitch, you prepare some name you want your advisor to reach out to, then the advisor. So here, discretion, capital, they were our salesmen. So basically talking to all those people being like, okay, scripting B one, two sell. Are you interested in it? You can sign this NDA, here are all those numbers. They filter out serious buyers. Then you start to book some interviews with them. 

So people want to know the team, ask questions such as Why are you selling? Where do you see what scraping industry coming forward in the next few years? How much do you want for? How much do you thousand the business from? And where NR or Scott who answer every time, we’re not in the valuation business. So we give valuation advice. And so we just let the buyer give the first offer and then you get LOI, you ship around a bit, try to negotiate, and then you sign the first LOI. So between first pitch and signing of LO, I think it took three to four months and then start the due diligence.  

Rob Walling:
Now did you get multiple offers?  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah, we got three multiples offer, so two that you could consider strategic ones and one from a private equity fund. What was interesting is that the private equity fund offer was very seducing for a private equity fund. Usually there are multiple RMH flower, but we ended up working with XI Labs group because we really wanted to sell to someone who knew the industry because web scraping is very particular. There’s some legal risk when you’re doing web scraping, lots of company are not happy that you’re doing it. And so we didn’t want to relieve what happened to us one year prior. And so selling to the biggest actor in this industry obviously smoothen out the risk because he knows about everything. He had the same struggles as we used to add, and he wanted to really acquire as a company to make it grow bigger and better. So this was very what seduced us, and it was also a full cash offer, which was the best for us,  

Rob Walling:
Which makes total sense. It’s a r volt. Many folks who listen to this podcast know he comes on for Hot Take Tuesdays and my co-founder with TinySeed discretion capital.com. If folks are between, if you’re between about two and 20 million a RR, they only do the sell side m and a. So they’re always on the founder side and I know you had a great experience with them.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah, definitely.  

Rob Walling:
I don’t want to gloss over the cease and desist that you received because the first time you receive a cease and desist, it feels like it’s going to be the end of the world. And what I tell TinySeed founders, I believe we talked about it, but it’s like across 200 and how many do we have now? 212 investments, 204 investments. I think just through TinySeed, we see a cease and desist at least once a quarter, sometimes every two months, just because it’s a lot of large numbers. Now. We also see co-founders implode about once a quarter and we see a nap get hacked once a year maybe. And again, it’s just large numbers. So for us, while we know it’s scary, it is usually not business ending. Now, that’s not to say it can’t be, but it usually isn’t. Usually there’s something, there’s a way around it, whether you change what you’re doing or whether they just leave you alone or whatever. So I know you can’t go into extreme detail about exactly what happened, but did that just kind of go away? Did you respond to it at all?  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah, so we received, it was a big season, like really a business trading one. They were asking for full cut base, full customer base, full revenue may scraping their website. They wanted us to stop scraping their property and it can go very far. The worst case scenario was really us in jail and the company closed. So that was a bit frightening. But what happened is that first we were advised by very good lawyers who drafted very good answer, but the most critical part that they send those kind of ceases and disease to all the web scraping companies in the world. And one of them, one the biggest web scrapping companies won against them and it was very public. So they no longer had a case with us because we would just say, look what you are reporting us  

Rob Walling:
Case law.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah, this is what saved us, not saved us, but what closed the issue we had plan B, we could have always stopped scraping this website. We would’ve lost, I don’t know, 10, 15% revenue. But that was what happened. So it took six months for it to settle completely, but it settled by then no longer answering to us. So it died. It died  

Rob Walling:
As they usually do. They either kind of settle, as you said, you need your plan A, B, C, D, and E plan A is we just tell ’em to go F themselves and then they back off, right? Plan B is we send ’em some documentation and we maybe adjust our approach. And plan C is we just stop scraping the site and we lose 10 to 15%. That’s like the worst case, almost not the worst case. As you said, the worst case you wound up in jail. But that’s just so they don’t actually want that. They don’t actually want  

Pierre de Wulf:
That. No. But it was the worst case, just trusting anti act in the US and California low and  

Rob Walling:
It’s scare tactics. Yeah, it’s scare tactics. Yeah. So then let’s walk through this part because this is the part where you talk due diligence and you had a more painful time of your life. How was due diligence for you? Were you stressed? Was it as awful as I often make it out on the  

Pierre de Wulf:
Show? Yeah, so it was funny because I remember is the day we signed the LOI. So the days the due diligence started, you sent me a PDF or your of your exit book, which I’ve read during my flight back from Phoenix.  

Rob Walling:
This was before it was published. This was several months before.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah. Yeah, it was very helpful. And yeah, I’ve read about this due diligence part, how awful it is. So it was bad, but two things made it easier for us. I think three things. So first I had a co-founder, and so honestly, without Kevin, it would’ve been much harder, especially because Kevin is much calmer than I am. We had lots of accounting issue during due diligence, no big deal, but it was French accounting and also lots of question regarding this. And so Kevin worked on it very well. It really made due diligence lighter. Secondly, we were prepared because we’ve read a lot about it, your book block, past Discretion, capital, we had some documents ready. And third, the acquirer was really not friendly, but cooperative. Not trying to find the slightest default to try to retrade or not trying to nit pick the smallest detail, trying to give a lot of pressure. I mean, it was serious business, it was important stuff, it needed to be done, but we never felt we were working with someone who didn’t want to welcome us very soon. So those three things made it very stressful, but probably not as bad as some funder at it.  

Rob Walling:
And how long was Didi?  

Pierre de Wulf:
It was quite long because of those accounting staff. So the way it worked, basically we had added cabinet just redoing our four years of accounting from the grand up. So it lasted I think three months.  

Rob Walling:
Three. Oh, that’s long.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
It’s long and stressful because you just, every day you wake up and A, you don’t sleep well, and B, you then wake up tired and every day I remember I’m thinking, is this the day it all just goes sideways? Is this the day they back out? Is this the day they find something? Is this the day we screw something up? Is this the day that even is this the day that the stock market drops by 30, 40%? Any black swan event can happen, a terrorist attack, God forbid, just anything can happen and suddenly these deals don’t go through and so you’re like, I want this to go as fast as possible. Did you feel that as well? I felt that the entire time. Yeah.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah. I was very afraid of that. So very afraid of receiving another season disease. So although XI Labs was we scrapping company, I remember every letter we received during those three months, I was scared to open it. Is it the IRS asking for an audit? Is it, I don’t know, big tech company sending season disease? So this was very frightening, especially because we had it happen. So we almost sold the business two times. So one time season disease, 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 raise a business. So yeah, black Swan event was what frightened me the most. I wasn’t scared about everything else because we had no, we were not hiding anything. It was a small team, clean cut base, no big trouble with customers and all and growing stuff. But yeah, black swan, scary.  

Rob Walling:
So then you closed, and we can smash, cut back to the beginning of this episode when I said, how did it feel when money hit the bank account? And so you’d already bought the Lego sets when you hit 5 million, did you buy any crazy or cool things after the exit?  

Pierre de Wulf:
So what we did, we went to Paris with my girlfriend of 10 years and we went to a very nice hotel. So this was, I think our celebration gift to ourselves because it was also stressful for her and she was very helpful during this period. So I think this was the biggest treat we gave to ourselves. I was able to invite my father to MicroConf in New Orleans, so he was with me, so I took, yeah, it was a nice holiday with him and yeah, small gift to family, but no big massive spending  

Rob Walling:
Aside from the three Lamborghinis that now sit out inside outside of  

Pierre de Wulf:
Your cell. Yeah, aside from that,  

Rob Walling:
Obviously, yeah, obviously. Well man, huge congrats to you and Kevin. It’s really well deserved. You guys executed very well. You worked hard and you worked on things that mattered and you shipped a lot quickly, and you were generally right about most of the stuff you were doing. And so I think you’re kind of a shining example of someone who can bootstrap or mostly bootstrap to millions in a RR and I would have every confidence. I guess this leads to my next question is have you ever thought to yourself, and you can say, Rob, too soon, too soon, don’t ask me this, but have you thought to yourself whether you want to do it again at some point? Because I believe you’re still working for the acquirer right now, right?  

Pierre de Wulf:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
And so that’ll happen for however long it happens, but when you move on, you have your freedom, you have enough money in the bank that you never have to work again. Have you given any thought to what might be next for you?  

Pierre de Wulf:
A lot. So yeah, for now, I’m still working as scrap PB until at least early 2026. And for what comes after, I think about it a lot. We talked about it a lot with Kevin. We don’t know if it’s going to be together or not, but we have lots of ideas. I dunno if I want to do it again from scratch because those first few years are very, very slow and I’m not in a position where I want to relieve that because grinding for a year and then after a year only reaching six KMRR, it’s rough. Pretty bad. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
And it’s hard the second time because you want it to be faster and you’re like, you don’t want to put in the pain, the motivation, because the first time it’s like, well, I’m doing it to create an impact and to learn and to get rich so that I never have to work again. The second time, it’s like, how much am I learning this time? I don’t need to get rich. I already, it’s like real calls into question a lot of things.  

Pierre de Wulf:
But what I think I would like to do is to start early on with a small team. It doesn’t have to be big, maybe three, four people to really put up something live real quick to try to fail faster maybe. But so I definitely want to search something again at some point, but it’s probably not going to be the way we did scraping B because we want to save time  

Rob Walling:
And you don’t have to this time. You have resources. You could acquire something. You could.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Exactly.  

Rob Walling:
This  

Pierre de Wulf:
Is something we talk a lot about  

Rob Walling:
Also. Yep. So P de Wolff, there’s so much more to your story, but I’m going to bid you ADU today. Folks want to follow you on X, Twitter U are Pierre de Wolff, it’s D-E-W-U-L-F, where you are a prolific and thought-provoking twitterer. So thanks so much for joining me. Is there anything else you’d like folks to check out? Do you have a personal blog or a YouTube channel? I don’t know about  

Pierre de Wulf:
No personal blog. I’ve started posting on LinkedIn a bit more, which was definitely different audience, but you meet a lot of interesting folks there too. So yeah, for note, that’s it.  

Rob Walling:
LinkedIn and next Twitter. Well, thanks again man. It was great having you on to tell your story.  

Pierre de Wulf:
Thank you, Rob.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Pierre for coming on the show, and thanks to you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 783.