Scrapingdog, a public data extraction API that helps businesses scale web data collection, has crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). What makes the milestone stand out is that the company achieved it entirely through organic marketing and without any external funding.
Founded in 2020 by Manthan Koolwal, this started as a one-man project. Manthan had been building APIs since his college days, including one for a leading Indian brand that extracted railway data online. That early experience in this domain helped him lay down the foundation for Scrapingdog’s launch.
The Early Traction
The company’s first paying user came one month after launch, which validated the idea. To acquire customers, Manthan was clear that he needed to grow from organic marketing, again, because it was bootstrapped, and other competitors were growing from it.
Since he was a single person handling the whole process, he conducted research on search marketing, wrote relevant blogs, and gradually began attracting traffic from Google.
These were relevant auditors who tried the API, and some converted to paying users.
Expanding The Team
By August 2022, the company had grown to $3,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR). At this stage, Manthan brought in an in-house SEO specialist to push the next phase of growth.
This way, he dedicated most of his time to product improvement & development, while the marketing guy helped him with organic optimization.
With more consistent content, Scrapingdog crossed 100 recurring paying customers by August 2023, straight one year after the first hire.
Product development went hand in hand with marketing. The team introduced dedicated endpoints such as the LinkedIn Scraper API and Google Search API, which delivered clean JSON output and removed the need for customers to use separate parsers. Today, the product has expanded to 73 dedicated endpoints, covering different platforms and use cases.
Product-Led SEO To Cover Use Cases with Dedicated APIs
If you know about SEO or have heard a little about it, in SaaS, this concept has been gaining some eyeballs in recent years.
The company adopted product-led SEO, creating tutorials and workflows showing how their APIs could power end-to-end tools like a Google keyword rank tracker.
This not only separated them from competitors in terms of content but also helped gain LLM visibility. For example, if someone wanted to create a rank tracker using an API, the LLMs would link out to the blog written. Since users in LLMs interact differently, they tend to interact with Google; this was an early move in their domain that significantly helped them with their content marketing.
Community Interaction & More Content Ideas
Since the early days, Manthan has had the idea of how community engagement can bring in some early adopters. Even some of the early paying users came from commenting on social posts on this platform.
After the team had a dedicated resource for SEO, the team dedicated some time to interacting on Reddit. Since manually tracking all the subreddits was difficult, the team used a free tool, F5Bot, to track related keywords.
This not only helped the team to know potential issues, but also gave new content ideas that they could write. The team built a dedicated folder on the website that answered these Reddit questions. Since it wasn’t a regular blog section, the answers were to the point, and a different folder for them helped in SEO & users can see all of them in one place.
Challenges of Scaling From a Tier-2 City in India
Scaling a business comes with its own set of challenges. The resources are limited, since people who have the required set of skills either move to a Tier-1 city or are working with the competitors.
The founder had confidence in the product. It was really appreciated, and the pricing was also competitive compared to what others were offering.
With that, there were challenges in the scraping domain that existed. Target websites changed layouts frequently, breaking scrapers and pipelines.
The team focused on rapid improvements and reliability, which helped retain and grow the user base.
What future holds for the company
In April 2025, Scrapingdog reached $50,000 in MRR and, within four months, scaled to $1 Million ARR. This all came through our efforts in organic marketing.
The achievement came from a small team of three people working out of Jaipur, Rajasthan. The company now aims to touch $4 million ARR by the end of next year (2026).
The company is now looking to acquire customers through other channels as well. Google ads, influencer collaboration are some of the paid channels we are now looking to invest in, the founder said.
Scrapingdog continues to grow its product portfolio. The latest addition is a Universal Search API, which fetches results from major search engines in a single call, cutting down on cost and duplication. The product is rated 4.8/5 stars on Trustpilot, with users praising both the APIs and customer support.
