Chrome extension started as an Indie Hacking project while working at GoJek | Grew it to $8k MRR | Shut down
Profilebud is a chrome extension that extracts leads from Instagram using logged in IG account.
Facts & Stats 🧮
1 in 10 Accounts on IG have put PII - email / phone
6 target search options in extension: Extract by Follower, Following , Hashtag, Location, Liker / Commenter of post. Eg: Get me emails from all those accounts that are posting with "#homecooking"
PLG Growth - Chrome store SEO + Influencer marketing worked wonders for us
Reviews: 100+ 5 star reviews with 4.9 star rating. All this added to PLG.
Idea germination 💡
Idea started when I was working at GoJek and wanted FIRE. Saw an extension called "Helper Tools for Instagram" on chrome store with 30k+ active installs & minimum $50 plan / month. Rating was shit ~2.7 star. Did the math & even with 2% paid users, gives me $30,000 every month which was 15 times more than my salary!
Build Phase 👷🏻
I wanted a better product than all existing players in the niche and honestly I was loving the build part of my journey. All I was doing was having fun building features. Working 40 hours / week for GoJek & another 40 hours working on this.
For 6 months, I built the product with so many features & DIDN'T LAUNCH IT.
After launch, I had to make 2 products - Profilebud (this one) & Growpad as the market for both of them are very different
Lesson learnt: Ship the product fast & get it in the hands of users
Initial Validation Phase ✅
Used chrome store SEO with similar keywords as my competitors in description.
Slowly and steadily, people started using the product & were super confused on what to do, where to go & how it works? Luckily I had live chat (by drift) in my product & they could speak to me.
I was super reactive in my chats & this lead me to understand the user & their pain. Patterns started to emerge.
Fun story: through this reactiveness in me, I spoke with an influencer - Rob Level - with 300k+ Youtube subscribers who became my affiliate and drove majority of growth for Growpad.
It was in this phase too when Abhishek joined me as the Co-Founder. I have a shadow kink where I love to show off what I did. Showing off what all I did to Abhishek & moving the levers was how my shadow part was satisfied. Also when you have a partner with whom you can be yourself & brainstorm, that's the whole point.
Growth Phase 🚀
This was a clear pain and within 2 months of experimenting with pricing, we grew to $1.5k+ MRR
In this period, we made a whole design change & hired our first designer - Darin (11th class kid - who's a prodigy in design). We are still in touch & have worked on so many other products after this
With this design change, we were growing 30% every month. By October 2020, we were doing $2.5k MRR.
Fear it might shut down 😨
During Oct 2020, we saw our biggest competitor - Helper Tools for Instagram shut down. Instagram went through it's Cambridge Analytica scandal & they were using law firms to cease & desist anyone scraping.
Another indicator was the cat & mouse game. A lot of APIs were getting rate limited & we had to use proxies now to bypass. Another 1-2 months, even datacenter proxies started to fail and we had to use residential proxies to get it to work (super expensive). There were quite a few bottlenecks which if changed can make our whole design to scrape flawed!
Yes, it was working! We had made it work! But we are against the ticking time bomb which can shut off anytime! 1 day, 1 month, 1 year or even more! We have to make the most money as quick as we came. The race is on!
Whitelabel it! 🛠️
A friend of mine introduced me to Luke Maguire - Australian marketer who's the founder of SocialMediaMansion. He's one of the top product makers at JVZoo. JVZoo is an affiliate platform where tech products are sold & affiliate gets ~50% of the price.
He gets people to make money online & get rich quick! This software was the ace. You can use Profilebud & get leads & sell these leads!
In the fear, I made a shitty deal w.r.t revenue split. Deal was that we'll make a new product - Profilemate (clone of Profilebud) and he will sell it. We will get 15% of the profits. We were relying on his image as the biggest marketer on JVZoo.
Well, eventually he did sold more than $1.5M+ and we got ~$120k of the total. We were three partners of which I had the major share. This is the money I used to power my next startup for 2 years.
I'm happy with what we did & whatever we made.
Automated scraping 🤖
Problem with Profilebud as chrome extension was you can use 1 logged in instagram account at a time on your laptop. In 1 day, you can scrape 24000 accounts & get about 1000 leads. This is TOO less for cold emailing & what any business who is serious about cold emailing needs.
Quite some people approached us to do scraping on our end and just give them the clean leads in a google sheet. They don't want any scraping tools but the end goal which is clean data. They don't want a tool for $49 but rather they are happy paying $1000 and get clean verified leads. Ding Ding Ding!!! 🔔
One Market Sales founders reached out to us and asked us for this custom requirement. They were happy to pay $2000 / month for this tool where they can scrape this data by just entering plain queries and we do all this scraping ourselves. With already an offer, I started building out this tool.
I needed IG accounts in bulk, proxies for the same and a system which takes & processes the scraping. If accounts go bad (which they generally do in few days), a system to remove them from system. 30 days in & this system was developed. Took another 30 days to make the system robust but the team at One market sales was so happy with the result!
With similar backend, we made another service - ProfileZoo. Where you enter simple queries & your data is processed at the backend by us. All you pay for is the clean leads (coin system rather than a subscription model)
This went to $4k MRR in under a month of release.
Doomsday - 29th July, 2021 🔥
We got a cease & desist from Instagram to shut down Profilebud & Growpad. Profilebud was doing ~$7000/month when this happened.
Unfortunately, we've gone so big (10k+ active users with 4.5 star rating with 100+ reviews) that we came into the eyes of Meta.
Meta took down my personal FB & Instagram and banned me from their service. I lost quite some of my college connections but it's okay. I took some good 1 year detox before joining again.
It made sense to stop the business operation as we cannot fight meta & I hate lawyers & all the legal things! We took down the website & stopped taking any new customers. The older customers were serviced through a backdoor as most of them were on Lifetime plan.
Automated service worked for another few months till they implemented a change making scraping super hard. It was time then to call it quits too.
How do I feel? 😌
Profilebud was my first taste of success. I loved what I did. No regrets! Those were the times when I was flowing with life. I had so much energy. Building the tool, hustling my way out, growing a small team & diving deep into the startup - my baby. It made me realise how much I love to build & connect different things.
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