Andy and Will are the co-founders of Bottle, a Shopify for membership-driven food brands. (Think Butcher Box or a food truck that makes cupcakes, with a customer base of event planners who predictably buy a lot of cupcakes every week)
Bottle is in that position we all dream of -- they have a great product that their customers love, and now the question is: how do they scale it up? Will is heads down on product, so it's up to Andy to figure out how to grow their top-of-funnel outreach. Andy isn't a developer, so he hired an engineer on Upwork to build them a Google SERP scraper.
The experience was typical of many outsourced projects:
- It was cheap (good!)
- The final deliverable was a bunch of code that Andy had no idea what to do with (bad!)
- The scraper wasn't written very well -- it would constantly run into Google's CAPTCHAs and crash (bad!)
- So... every time Andy needed the script run, he would have to email the developer in Asia and wait for that guy to run it and email the results back (really bad!)
Enter Flank:
- We rewrote the scraper and hosted it for him
- We gave Andy an interface to run the scraper across any variety of search terms that he could dream up
- Now Andy gets the best of both worlds: a tool that 1) he can quickly iterate with that 2) has a nice interface and doesn't crash all the time
In their words:
