Process thread: Subscription website

[Busch_Jager]

Hello,

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'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 >16 hour days where I don'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.

What I have done so far:
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.

What I need to work on:
-Improving the script so it runs on a loop.
-Finding the best place to run this script continuously.
-Continue talks with Upwork freelancer about logo design.
-Work on website and find plugins that turn your website into a membership website.
-Study competitor reviews and websites.

 

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[Busch_Jager]

I haven't updated this thread in a while, but I just got my first subscriber today!

What I have learned so far:

• You have to have thick skin.
  • People don't care about your feelings. At first, this was a tough pill to swallow. Now I appreciate negative feedback. They are just spoonfeeding me things I need to improve on my website.
• It's hard managing a business by myself.
  • I would love to spend all of my time just working on improving the website's technical side. But what's the point if I don't have any customers? Now I spend about 1/3 of the time improving my bots and 2/3 working on marketing tasks. Not to mention I also work a full-time job and have a wife.
• Zapier is amazing.
  • Seriously, it added a ton of value to my site, but it's not cheap when you have many tasks.
• The copy is super important.
  • I am not saying my copy now is great, but it is improving, and this is the area I focus on learning more about every day through reading.
• I can't really use paid advertising.
  • Promoting gambling-related services in the U.S. is a pain. I can't use paid advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram, basically anything. I can't even use a simple service like MailCheat(Chimp) because I am sending gambling-related emails. I think this could be a blessing in disguise if I work on creating a ton of content now to increase my Google keyword rankings. If I can lock down some of the keywords in this space, it will be tough for someone to come in and compete because you can't even do traditional paid advertising.

Things I am going to work on:

• One blog post a week
• Answering questions regularly on Quora.
• Providing value on forums related to my product, not selling to them.
• Robust notifications for my subscribers.
• Automated email marketing drip campaigns
• A/B testing

Goals:

• Short Term Goals
  • 10 subscribers by March
• Long Term Goals
  • 100 subscribers by the end of the year.
    • Yes, it doesn't seem like much, but I am about to change my pricing, and $60 a month * 100 subscribers = $72,000 a year, enough for me to quit my job and do this full-time.

Random Thoughts:

• I have contemplated whether it would be worth it or not to have a partner in the business. It isn't easy to manage this myself, particularly on the marketing side I do not have a large amount of expertise. How would I even find someone to do this? How do I know they are putting in the same amount of effort as me? It seems like the best step to achieve the growth I know is possible, but I am very apprehensive about the idea.

 

[Busch_Jager]

Short Term Goals

• 10 subscribers by March
  

Just reached my tenth subscriber or $300/month recurring income! The business more than pays for itself now. So I reached my goal ahead of schedule with essentially no advertising. Just by writing some blog posts and sharing them on social media and different forums. Thinking about raises my prices up to $60 / month now.

 

[Busch_Jager]

6/4/2020
-Added deletion function into script so it will delete outdated entries from the database
-Added 10-minute sleep loop this may need to be altered in the future
-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.
-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

 

[Busch_Jager]

How many subs have you got so far @Busch_Jager ?

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.

 

[Busch_Jager]

Very, very, very close to being done. Maybe 15 more hours of hard work to have a fully functional website.

I went on two weeks of PTO and couldn't use a laptop so that hurt my progress for sure.

 

[Johnny boy]

If you have no sales you have no evidence this is a good idea since you are unwilling to pre-sell, create a minimum viable product, or run ads to something that isn't ready yet, or even get feedback on the site.

In a business sense, you are trying to walk 10 dogs without leashes, trying to dig sand with a butter knife, trying to type with your nose, or whatever analogy describes inefficient and likely futile actions.

You need to get sales. You need to get people to give a F*ck. You need attention. You need feedback from actual customers. You need subscribers.

Imagine you want to date some girl. Would you plan out your life together, plan out the first 15 dates, plan out every little detail and spend a year doing this all before you even go ask her out to see if she's interested? That's what you're doing right now. Instead, you should ask them out FIRST. Because if there is no interest, you're absolutely wasting your time.

Get some sales. Get some subscribers. Get some attention. Get an audience. Run some ads.

I'm starting a subscription website as well. Its my 2nd business. My primary business pays the bills.

Guess how I'm starting it?

A $50 theme, repurposed to fit my needs.

Buying a directory list of contacts for $79

Sending out an ad campaign to thousands of people.

IF it works, I'll pursue it. If nobody gives a F*ck and I realize it was not an idea that people cared about, I would scrap it.

You are going to be much too deep into this thing to turn back without having some serious emotional trauma since you're investing so much into something with 0 market validation.

 

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[Andy Black]

Good luck @Busch_Jager

This video might interest you.

 

[Busch_Jager]

6/6/2020
-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

 

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[jmin]

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?

It's usually best to get the product out and then worry about improving it - build and release your 'minimum viable product'.

You don't want to put hours into something which might not take off. Plus, real feedback will highlight the work you need to focus on.

Good luck.

 

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[EternalStudent]

It's usually best to get the product out and then worry about improving it - build and release your 'minimum viable product'.

You don't want to put hours into something which might not take off. Plus, real feedback will highlight the work you need to focus on.

Good luck.

The transformation team at my office calls it the MLP - minimum loveable product. Cringrey name I know but a good aspiration for v1.

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's as valuable as you say they will hardly complain about a free money making service!

 

[Busch_Jager]

Good on ya.

Though it might have made more sense not to waste time programming and coding.

Just do the work manually and PROVE there's a demand for the product and service, prove people are willing to pay $50/month to get access to the scraped info.

And just scrape the info/data manually or with scrapebox and post it on your website.

Once you've proven there's a demand for it, then you could hire a programmer or do the programming yourself (If you're a coder).

Other than that, good on ya. Keep at it.

I am very positive people are willing to pay for it because they already do and at a rate a lot more than $50/month. Just not in my country. Up until recently, this method was not possible due to regulations in the U.S. I have a lot of people I know and acquaintances interested in the product. I don't want to give up what I am working on in online forums because I don't want to give anyone the chance to catch up.

I would be very skeptical if there was no historical data of this product but it's already been proven people are willing to pay for it. The data is very time-sensitive and therefore cannot be manually scraped and the websites the data comes from are quite complex and dynamic and I think it would be difficult to get around this without a custom-coded solution. Unfortunately, there really isn't a quick way to push the product out due to the coding involved to get to the minimum viable product. I don't have tens of thousands of dollars to hire programmers so I guess I have to do it myself but I am pretty confident it will pay off. If it doesn't my web scraping skills are improving so much and I already have other website ideas using scraped data that I know I will find success somewhere if I keep at it.

 

[Busch_Jager]

6/20/2020 and 6/21/2020
-Added another spider to scrape a website to add data to the database.
-At this point, I have 10/16 spiders made to scrape the websites I need for my minimum viable product.

Steps once I complete writing the spiders:
1. Finish the data cleaning pipeline which shouldn't take long
2. Design front end of the website
3. Find a proxy service to implement so my spiders never get IP blocked
4. Upload spiders to scraping hub
5. A free trial run with potential customers to fix any bugs before releasing the product to the public
6. Open the website to the public and test different advertising/SEO methods
7.Collect $$$

 

[Busch_Jager]

6/5/2020
-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.
-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.
-Added columns to the database from the script calculating expected profit.
-Really annoying the website I am scraping is blocked by a work firewall during my lunch hours.
-My web hosting doesn'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.
-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
-Started using Asana as a kanban board for me to assign myself more tasks

 

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[Honey_Syed]

What market are you in? Would be interested in the affiliate opportunity once you're live, if good enough we can probably do an exclusive deal too. Good Luck.

 

[Busch_Jager]

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't going to be many competitors popping up unless they put in some serious time/money.

 

[Busch_Jager]

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't exist yet. It'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't dependant on any source of physical products.

 

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[Timmy C]

F*ck coding.

Sell some of your product today?

Pre sell it.

 

[Busch_Jager]

F*ck coding.

Sell some of your product today?

Pre sell it.

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'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.

 

[Busch_Jager]

6/15/2020
-Worked 7AM - 830PM for my job so I didn't have much time.
-I took the answer from stack overflow and fixed my code so now it processes items through the scrapy pipeline.
-Went through the final logo revisions with freelancer

 

[Busch_Jager]

-What appears to be a trivial problem matching up similar data from different websites is actually quite complex. For example, it is hard for a computer to understand that AAPL is referring to Apple if you can't pre-generate lists that tell it that AAPL is Apple. I am working with different libraries but it is a difficult problem to solve. I have been working on it for the past few days.

 

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[Busch_Jager]

Hey, any update? How go things?

I am still alive!

Here is what I have done since:
My code and spiders are workingly flawlessly.

-Completed all code.
-I implemented cloud logging throughout the code to quickly debug any errors as the script runs.
-I uploaded my code on an automated service and now it runs twice a day, I use the logs to debug any errors so now my code gets better and more robust almost every day.

What I am doing now:
-Finish designing the website.
-Let my friends do a trial run for free to get feedback.

Things I likely need to do more research on:
-Marketing. I truly beleive I have a solid product it's just getting the word out there! I actively use MJ's advice in one of his books now where he says something like"The best book is the one that solves the problem right in front of you. " I used to read a bunch of pointless self help books now I just read the ones that solve my immediate problems. It looks like I need a good digital marketing one.

 

[Andy Black]

I am having a difficult time easily explaining what sports betting arbitrage is to potential customers.

Some people will know. Maybe start with them?

 

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[Busch_Jager]

I just got my second subscriber one day after the first subscriber. I think the ball is going to start rolling. The first subscriber basically gave social proof in a subreddit directly targeting my niche. This is free advertising and exactly what I needed.

Up to $60/month in recurring revenue. I increased my cloud servers' speed with the extra $, which increased the speed I scrape profit opportunities by 5X. The more subscribers I get, the faster and better I can make the service.

I also just wrote my own script for my discord notification service instead of using Zapier at 1/23 of the cost of Zapier at even better speeds.

Feeling really motivated, waking up at 5 AM every day during the workweek to work on the technical side until I have to go to work at 8:30 AM, in addition to working on it at least 2 hours in the evening and my lunch break. Spending most of my time on the weekends working on it.

 

[bjd02]

I was subscribed to something similar to this for a while, gained me a few hundred £, (Learn Matched Betting Online Easily | Profit Accumulator) if you haven't heard of them you could take some tips from their website, such as their free trail where they guarantee £45 profit.

 

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[tigerbalm]

DUDE nicely done. I built a scraper like this for the NFL a couple months ago using puppeteer, but ended up giving up on college teams because the naming issue that you mentioned was absurd. Within the same sites it was inconsistent, ie one school would have the mascot in the name, the rest wouldn't. Super frustrating issue to run into. This thread was a blast to read, great work and good luck.

 

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[Andy Black]

How many subs have you got so far @Busch_Jager ?

 

[Busch_Jager]

6/7/2020
-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't be a problem.
-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.
-Created an account on Heroku just need to figure out how to set it up
-Mind mapped different areas of my product using Ayoa which allowed me to break up this project into smaller sub-tasks.
-Inquired with Stack Overflow gods about a coding library decision.

 

[Busch_Jager]

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?

 

[Busch_Jager]

The transformation team at my office calls it the MLP - minimum loveable product. Cringrey name I know but a good aspiration for v1.

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's as valuable as you say they will hardly complain about a free money making service!

Awesome advice! I have an idea of how I want to do this now to just focus on one area and launch the product.