Process thread: Subscription website

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">Hello, <br /> <br /> I feel like I have been a wantrepreneur many times before in my life and this thread is dedicated to it stopping. I have already done a fair amount of work toward the project I am working on and will continue to chronicle it here. I won&#039;t explain the full details of the site I am working on but basically there is information on the internet that can be scraped and shown to users for profits. The particular information that I plan on showing my users has never been scraped before. There are competitor websites focusing on different information in the same category that charge more than $100 a month to their subscribers. I figure if I even charge $50 a month if I can get 100 subscribers minimum that is technically enough money for me to quit my job. I could just use this information for my own profit but the real money is in selling shovels not mining for gold. I am going to post on here every day barring days that I have to go on work trips in which case I work &gt;16 hour days where I don&#039;t have time to work on this project. Currently, I spend 3 hours at least every day towards the project. I have a fiance, full-time job, and workout so that takes some of my time as well.<br /> <br /> What I have done so far:<br /> I already wrote a python script that scrapes this profitable information and stores it in a MySQL database. I have created a blank website that is already connected to this database and displays all of this data on the webpage for users to profit off of.<br /> <br /> What I need to work on:<br /> -Improving the script so it runs on a loop.<br /> -Finding the best place to run this script continuously.<br /> -Continue talks with Upwork freelancer about logo design.<br /> -Work on website and find plugins that turn your website into a membership website.<br /> -Study competitor reviews and websites.</div>

 

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[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/4/2020<br /> -Added deletion function into script so it will delete outdated entries from the database<br /> -Added 10-minute sleep loop this may need to be altered in the future<br /> -Added paidmembershipspro add-on to Wordpress and did a quick setup but needs a lot of work for the full membership experience to work seamlessly.<br /> -MySQL connection times out prematurely showing I need to change some settings on the my.cnf file which is turning out to be a massive pain with my host</div>

 

[Andy Black]

<div class="bbWrapper">Good luck <a href="https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/members/63619/" class="username" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" data-user-id="63619" data-username="@Busch_Jager">@Busch_Jager</a> <br /> <br /> <a href="https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/progress-paid-email-newsletters.83312/page-5#post-777119" class="link link--internal"><u>This video might interest you.</u></a></div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/5/2020<br /> -I decided to use a raspberry pi 4 to run my script full-time for now since it is a cheap option and my script is lightweight. Ordered it and it should come tomorrow.<br /> -Later today going to contact my host on editing the MySQL configuration file which I need to do or else the connection will continue to timeout since it takes my script more than 60 seconds.<br /> -Added columns to the database from the script calculating expected profit.<br /> -Really annoying the website I am scraping is blocked by a work firewall during my lunch hours.<br /> -My web hosting doesn&#039;t allow changing of the configuration file which turned out to be a big pain since I had to change how my script was coded to work around it.<br /> -Added another column to the table showing the time difference between when the data was first found and when it was last found which is an important metric for my users<br /> -Started using Asana as a kanban board for me to assign myself more tasks</div>

 

[Andy Black]

<div class="bbWrapper">How many subs have you got so far <a href="https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/members/63619/" class="username" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" data-user-id="63619" data-username="@Busch_Jager">@Busch_Jager</a> ?</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper"><blockquote data-attributes="member: 23590" data-quote="Andy Black" data-source="post: 880912" class="bbCodeBlock bbCodeBlock--expandable bbCodeBlock--quote js-expandWatch"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-title"> <a href="/community/goto/post?id=880912" class="bbCodeBlock-sourceJump" rel="nofollow" data-xf-click="attribution" data-content-selector="#post-880912">Andy Black said:</a> </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-content"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandContent js-expandContent "> How many subs have you got so far <a href="https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/members/63619/" class="username" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" data-user-id="63619" data-username="@Busch_Jager">@Busch_Jager</a> ? </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandLink js-expandLink"><a role="button" tabindex="0">Click to expand...</a></div> </div> </blockquote>No subs yet I want to make the website and database/script work reliably and be a good looking finished product before it goes live. I already have a coworker that is really excited and have some friends excited about it. The website still needs to be completely designed. I plan to offer a lucrative affiliate marketing plan once it goes live. There still is a lot of work that needs to be done on the marketing side I just want to make a great product first. A lot of coding that needs done as well.</div>

 

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[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/6/2020<br /> -Had a lot of trouble getting my python script to work on the raspberry pi but finally got it working so now it runs all the time constantly updating the database</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/7/2020<br /> -Spent a ton of time today trying to get the script to run on Raspberry pi boot with no avail. I think I am going to manually run it on the Raspberry Pi and a cloud solution like Heroku so I have a backup if one fails. The script auto deletes duplicates so this shouldn&#039;t be a problem.<br /> -I think I need to look into some type of mind mapping software to break down big ideas. I have so many different things that need to be done that it can seem overwhelming. I am currently using Asana as a kanban board for the tasks.<br /> -Created an account on Heroku just need to figure out how to set it up<br /> -Mind mapped different areas of my product using Ayoa which allowed me to break up this project into smaller sub-tasks.<br /> -Inquired with Stack Overflow gods about a coding library decision.</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">I could probably spend a year working on this perfecting it. Is it better to get out a decent product quickly and start to make money while improving along the way? Or release a perfect product at a later date?</div>

 

[jmin]

<div class="bbWrapper"><blockquote data-attributes="member: 63619" data-quote="Busch_Jager" data-source="post: 881455" class="bbCodeBlock bbCodeBlock--expandable bbCodeBlock--quote js-expandWatch"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-title"> <a href="/community/goto/post?id=881455" class="bbCodeBlock-sourceJump" rel="nofollow" data-xf-click="attribution" data-content-selector="#post-881455">Busch_Jager said:</a> </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-content"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandContent js-expandContent "> I could probably spend a year working on this perfecting it. Is it better to get out a decent product quickly and start to make money while improving along the way? Or release a perfect product at a later date? </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandLink js-expandLink"><a role="button" tabindex="0">Click to expand...</a></div> </div> </blockquote><br /> It&#039;s usually best to get the product out and then worry about improving it - build and release your &#039;minimum viable product&#039;.<br /> <br /> You don&#039;t want to put hours into something which might not take off. Plus, real feedback will highlight the work you need to focus on.<br /> <br /> Good luck.</div>

 

[EternalStudent]

<div class="bbWrapper"><blockquote data-attributes="member: 81349" data-quote="jmin" data-source="post: 881472" class="bbCodeBlock bbCodeBlock--expandable bbCodeBlock--quote js-expandWatch"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-title"> <a href="/community/goto/post?id=881472" class="bbCodeBlock-sourceJump" rel="nofollow" data-xf-click="attribution" data-content-selector="#post-881472">jmin said:</a> </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-content"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandContent js-expandContent "> It&#039;s usually best to get the product out and then worry about improving it - build and release your &#039;minimum viable product&#039;.<br /> <br /> You don&#039;t want to put hours into something which might not take off. Plus, real feedback will highlight the work you need to focus on.<br /> <br /> Good luck. </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandLink js-expandLink"><a role="button" tabindex="0">Click to expand...</a></div> </div> </blockquote>The transformation team at my office calls it the MLP - minimum loveable product. Cringrey name I know but a good aspiration for v1. <br /> <br /> OP, have you considered giving out 10 or so free memberships to people in your niche? The free feedback they give you will be valuable while you perfect your service and if it&#039;s as valuable as you say they will hardly complain about a free money making service!</div>

 

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[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper"><blockquote data-attributes="member: 79090" data-quote="Kickflips" data-source="post: 881584" class="bbCodeBlock bbCodeBlock--expandable bbCodeBlock--quote js-expandWatch"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-title"> <a href="/community/goto/post?id=881584" class="bbCodeBlock-sourceJump" rel="nofollow" data-xf-click="attribution" data-content-selector="#post-881584">Kickflips said:</a> </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-content"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandContent js-expandContent "> The transformation team at my office calls it the MLP - minimum loveable product. Cringrey name I know but a good aspiration for v1.<br /> <br /> OP, have you considered giving out 10 or so free memberships to people in your niche? The free feedback they give you will be valuable while you perfect your service and if it&#039;s as valuable as you say they will hardly complain about a free money making service! </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandLink js-expandLink"><a role="button" tabindex="0">Click to expand...</a></div> </div> </blockquote>Awesome advice! I have an idea of how I want to do this now to just focus on one area and launch the product.</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/8/2020<br /> -As I suspected it will be more useful for me to use the Scrapy framework instead of Beautiful Soup. This is going to require some time upfront to learn how to rewrite the code but from what I understand it will tremendously improve the reliability and scalability of the script.<br /> -Nah I changed my mind with the more research that I did If it seriously slows me down I am willing to change everything over to Scrapy in the future<br /> -I am probably going to need to look into proxy services at some point to make sure my IP doesn&#039;t get blocked<br /> -Got a seriously awesome logo made from Upwork I wish I could show you guys but I don&#039;t want to give up the website name yet if your thinking about logos I would skip Fiverr and go right to Upwork way higher quality<br /> -Started writing the script to scrape another website which is needed to get the minimal viable product<br /> -Since the other website has dynamically loading pages I have to wait for the page to load before I can grab the HTML so I have to use selenium which is kind of a pain</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/9/2020<br /> -Since I am going to have to use selenium on a delay I think I am going to have to convert the script to scrapy so I can crawl with multiple spiders at the same time. If I don&#039;t I will likely have outdated information and long script run times before looping.<br /> -Swapping over all my scripts to scrapy today not finished but easier than I thought and scrapinghub.com has an amazing platform for deploying the spiders at any scale when using scrapy.</div>

 

[Honey_Syed]

<div class="bbWrapper">What market are you in? Would be interested in the affiliate opportunity once you&#039;re live, if good enough we can probably do an exclusive deal too. Good Luck.</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper"><blockquote data-attributes="member: 39876" data-quote="Honey_Syed" data-source="post: 882035" class="bbCodeBlock bbCodeBlock--expandable bbCodeBlock--quote js-expandWatch"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-title"> <a href="/community/goto/post?id=882035" class="bbCodeBlock-sourceJump" rel="nofollow" data-xf-click="attribution" data-content-selector="#post-882035">Honey_Syed said:</a> </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-content"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandContent js-expandContent "> What market are you in? Would be interested in the affiliate opportunity once you&#039;re live, if good enough we can probably do an exclusive deal too. Good Luck. </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandLink js-expandLink"><a role="button" tabindex="0">Click to expand...</a></div> </div> </blockquote>Awesome man this will be exclusive to certain states in the U.S. <br /> . . . . . . .for now.</div>

 

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[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper"><blockquote data-attributes="member: 39876" data-quote="Honey_Syed" data-source="post: 882035" class="bbCodeBlock bbCodeBlock--expandable bbCodeBlock--quote js-expandWatch"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-title"> <a href="/community/goto/post?id=882035" class="bbCodeBlock-sourceJump" rel="nofollow" data-xf-click="attribution" data-content-selector="#post-882035">Honey_Syed said:</a> </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-content"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandContent js-expandContent "> What market are you in? Would be interested in the affiliate opportunity once you&#039;re live, if good enough we can probably do an exclusive deal too. Good Luck. </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandLink js-expandLink"><a role="button" tabindex="0">Click to expand...</a></div> </div> </blockquote>For sure I will keep you updated.</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">I really have a lot of confidence that this is going to work out if I put the work in. Thinking about Unscripted there is so much time coding or money if you hired someone to do it that I know there aren&#039;t going to be many competitors popping up unless they put in some serious time/money.</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/10/2020<br /> -Forgot to post my progress in here yesterday but still working to transition my code to the scrapy framework, it&#039;s a pain now but it&#039;s going to pay off in dividends in the long run. It will make adding new data sources to the pipeline way easier, increasing scalability.</div>

 

[Timmy C]

<div class="bbWrapper">Nice nice.<br /> <br /> Have you engaged the market first and are now onto creating the product?<br /> <br /> By that i mean...spoken to them on zoom, skype, got them to fill out a survey and have enough data to determine it is something they actually want?<br /> <br /> Might help drawing up a customer profile if you haven&#039;t done that yet it&#039;s helped me alot.</div>

 

[Boychamp]

<div class="bbWrapper"><blockquote data-attributes="member: 57545" data-quote="Timmy C" data-source="post: 882380" class="bbCodeBlock bbCodeBlock--expandable bbCodeBlock--quote js-expandWatch"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-title"> <a href="/community/goto/post?id=882380" class="bbCodeBlock-sourceJump" rel="nofollow" data-xf-click="attribution" data-content-selector="#post-882380">Timmy C said:</a> </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-content"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandContent js-expandContent "> Might help drawing up a customer profile if you haven&#039;t done that yet it&#039;s helped me alot. </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandLink js-expandLink"><a role="button" tabindex="0">Click to expand...</a></div> </div> </blockquote><br /> This. Do this if you haven&#039;t already. I just read a little bit about how you&#039;re overwhelmed with the amount of ideas (which I understand). If you know exactly who you&#039;re creating this product for (in the beginning) it can also help give you clarity around what to focus your time on. As an example, let&#039;s say there&#039;s some tertiary feature you&#039;re working on that&#039;s taking a good chunk of your time, well it may not be so important to the customers you actually want to start out with so, for now, you can put a pin in it and work on a more pressing issue to get your MVP (minimal viable product) out.</div>

 

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[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">Great suggestions guys! I should certainly come up with a customer profile. I am very confident people will want this product but in my geographical area, it doesn&#039;t exist yet. It&#039;s essentially an easy way to make money and is 100% not a scam or some bs course. I am spoonfeeding the subscribers the information to make money. Kind of like if I had some service that scraped Craigslist listings compared them to Ebay and sold subscribers in my area the database of all profitable items in their area to flip. But the information I am selling isn&#039;t dependant on any source of physical products.</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/11/2020<br /> -The website I was scraping just updated to a dynamic Javascript website so new scraping methods had to be implemented. <br /> -I rewrote the code to use Splash a headless browser like Selenium that can wait for Java script to load before grabbing the html.<br /> -Gave suggestions to Upwork freelancer or logo revisions.<br /> -Came to a roadblock on my code and posted on stack overflow.</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">Even if for some reason this didn&#039;t work out I am improving my web scraping skills so much where I just know I could use it to come up with another idea. I already have a couple but I am going to keep pushing on this 100%. Sometimes I wonder if my fiance is slightly bottlenecking me on progress since if I was single I would just stay at my work office till at least 8 or 9 working on my code every night.</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/12/2020<br /> -Eagerly awaiting for someone to help me on stack overflow there are some other things I can do in the meantime but this is really holding me back from continuing to code.</div>

 

[Timmy C]

<div class="bbWrapper">F*ck coding.<br /> <br /> Sell some of your product today?<br /> <br /> Pre sell it.</div>

 

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[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper"><blockquote data-attributes="member: 57545" data-quote="Timmy C" data-source="post: 882653" class="bbCodeBlock bbCodeBlock--expandable bbCodeBlock--quote js-expandWatch"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-title"> <a href="/community/goto/post?id=882653" class="bbCodeBlock-sourceJump" rel="nofollow" data-xf-click="attribution" data-content-selector="#post-882653">Timmy C said:</a> </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-content"> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandContent js-expandContent "> F*ck coding.<br /> <br /> Sell some of your product today?<br /> <br /> Pre sell it. </div> <div class="bbCodeBlock-expandLink js-expandLink"><a role="button" tabindex="0">Click to expand...</a></div> </div> </blockquote>It seems weird to presell a subscription service unless I offered some type of lifetime subscription or something. This is a possibility but I am really not sure on the timeline for when this will be finished. I like coding because the barrier to entry for my competitors is either a ton of money for someone to code everything or a ton of time with the ability to code. I don&#039;t have a ton of money so I guess I have to spend a ton of time and luckily I know how to code. I like software because I can make money sleeping and there is never any worries that come with a physical product.</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/13/2020<br /> -Was able to get my code scraping great with no issues.</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/14/2020<br /> -traveling to North Dakota for work<br /> -Asked a question on stack overflow for my code</div>

 

[Busch_Jager]

<div class="bbWrapper">6/15/2020<br /> -Worked 7AM - 830PM for my job so I didn&#039;t have much time.<br /> -I took the answer from stack overflow and fixed my code so now it processes items through the scrapy pipeline.<br /> -Went through the final logo revisions with freelancer</div>