Should I build another email scraping web tool?

[Nana Dada]

Hi guys,

I would like to receive some feedback regarding the following:

A couple of months ago I wrote a small but very fast email harvesting script which is capable of scraping emails from almost any website, as long as they are posted as plain text or contained in HTML code. I first wrote it for some of my projects because I did not want to pay for presently available commercial web services, but now I am considering building a full sized paid web tool around it.

The script is really fast, multithreaded (i.e. capable of harvesting emails from several tens of websites at the same time), and efficient. However, I cannot decide whether I should pull the trigger on it, because there are so many email scraping tools available (hunter.io, skrapp.io, grabby.io, various browser addons, etc) that I just do not know whether the world needs another one. It would be very nice to have even $500 as an additional monthly income out of it, but at the same time I am really afraid to invest like 1-2 months of my time into it only to find that the competition is too high.

What do you guys think? Should I go for it? Or are there any better ways to spend my time and efforts?

 

[tord]

Is sending email spam a good method to get leads for you?

 

[Nana Dada]

Is sending email spam a good method to get leads for you?

I do not quite get how your question is related to my situation. Please clarify.

 

[Sheepp]

You have to build your USP (Unique selling proposition). If there's competitors, that means there is a need.

Now you have to stand out, and be unique.

There are many ways to do that, here are a few ideas :

• do the thing better than others (example : faster, easier to user, better customer service, whatever lacks in your competitor product)
• build a brand (for your case i don't think it is very appropriate but I mention it to apply as a more general answer)
• add an innovative feature

Your USP should NOT be only cutting prices, if that's the only thing you found, don't go in.

 

[bfftalk]

It would be good if you can book pre order for tool in lower price. So it will give you bootstraping time to run your project.

 

[Nana Dada]

You have to build your USP (Unique selling proposition). If there's competitors, that means there is a need.

Now you have to stand out, and be unique.

There are many ways to do that, here are a few ideas :

• do the thing better than others (example : faster, easier to user, better customer service, whatever lacks in your competitor product)
• build a brand (for your case i don't think it is very appropriate but I mention it to apply as a more general answer)
• add an innovative feature

Your USP should NOT be only cutting prices, if that's the only thing you found, don't go in.

It would be good if you can book pre order for tool in lower price. So it will give you bootstraping time to run your project.

Well noted, thanks for feedback.