Andy and Will are the co-founders of Bottle, a service that helps coffee shops and bakeries turn repeat customers into subscribers. Think Starbucks app, but for the masses. (If you're a coffee shop or bakery and you're reading this, leave this site and go to theirs!)

Will is an engineer, heads down on product, so Andy has to figure this out on his own. He has a very clear idea of what he needs, but he's not an engineer, and off-the-shelf tools don't do the job. First, he hired an engineer on Upwork to build them a Google SERP scraper, but this was a disaster:

• Cheap (good!)

• The final deliverable was just code that Andy didn't know what to do with (bad!)

• The scraper would crash all the time (bad!)

• 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!)

Even with the terrible Upwork workflow, he still wasted a ton of time whittling those lists down. He would go to individual websites to determine whether they were already using a subscription product, and if so, what it was.

This is difficult to automate with traditional software, but it's a task that chatGPT does incredibly well.

Enter Flank and chatGPT:

• We rewrote the scraper and hosted it for him

• We used chatGPT to extract the unstructured data that Andy needed to properly filter the list down

• 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:

If you're dealing with something like this, shoot me an email! Would love to chat about it. angus@flank.cloud