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Two Failures → $5M ARR → an 8-Figure All-Cash Exit: ScrapingBee's Textbook Run

French duo Pierre de Wulf and Kevin Sahin failed twice, then built web-scraping API ScrapingBee: $1K MRR in month one, $100K ARR in 14 months, $5M ARR — and an 8-figure all-cash sale to Oxylabs in 2025. The full arc, published.

This is a translation of the Japanese original. The Japanese version and cited primary sources are authoritative for all figures.

The full numbers

StageFigure
Before2 failed startups
Month 1$1K MRR
Year 1$8K MRR
14 months$100K ARR
At $10K MRR“Same salary as our old jobs, and profitable”
Under 2 years$500K ARR
Team of 4$1.5M ARR
Final$5M ARR → sold to Oxylabs in 2025, 8 figures, all cash

The business

ScrapingBee is a web-scraping API that handles proxies and browser rendering for developers. The founders wrote a large volume of technical how-to content about scraping, ranked on search, and converted those developer readers into API customers — the classic content → developer → API-billing pipeline. Over 2,500 customers worldwide.

What to take from it

Setting “$10K MRR = our old salaries + profitable” as the first goal was the masterstroke. Instead of aiming at $1M from day one, they defined the line where the business becomes indefinitely sustainable. Everything after that was upside. It is the best practice for goal-setting in bootstrapped businesses.

An all-cash 8-figure exit is the opposite of earnout hell (see Tweet Hunter). Because the company was profitable and under no pressure to sell, they could refuse bad terms. The strongest negotiating position is simply not needing the deal.

Two failures before one win re-enacts the recurring pattern. Bannerbear failed 7 times, MENTA’s founder shipped 29 products before the hit. The story is always the same; only the number of failures differs.

Sources

This article summarizes and analyzes the public sources above. Please refer to the primary sources for details.