From Freelancer to Startup: Journey in Web Scraping & Automation

When I started freelancing, I got my first gig from two brothers who had a clever idea. They wanted a tool to track product prices on big online stores like Amazon, Gearbest, and Banggood. The twist was they wanted to connect this tool to a Telegram Bot, so people could easily check prices and get sale alerts. I thought it was a cool project, so I joined them.

But it wasn't all easy. Those big online stores didn't like tools like ours that scraped their websites. They had protections in place to stop too many requests. So, I had to learn how to hide what our tool was doing and keep up with their changes. Also, using the Telegram API was tricky. We couldn't send messages to users automatically, which was a big part of our plan. To work around this, I had to find other tools and ways to make our project work.

It took us six tough months to put together the basic version of our tool. It wasn't always smooth. We had lots of late nights fixing problems and dealing with unexpected issues. But in the end, we made it work. We had a database with over 30,000 products, and our army of bots was always checking prices. People liked it, and our Telegram bot grew, giving users a useful service.

This whole journey taught me a lot. It showed me the real challenges of making software. After we finished the basic version, I moved on to other projects, but this one kept going. In the months that followed, it turned into a startup, building on what we started. It reminded me that in software, every project is a step toward bigger things, even when it's tough.