I have a pretty successful microservice for b2b leads, and that's the primary demand.
- Emails are the biggest request.
- Ecommerce requests are rare.
- B2C requests are frequent, but have to be turned-away.
- There's a decent demand for spreadsheets of data with multiple business details, like email, address, and phone.
That makes directories of particular interest, but Scrapebox can't do Javascript, so I can't do Google Maps, for example.
- Sometimes I get requests for phone numbers or addresses, as well.
- Rarely, I'll get requests for custom fields.
Honestly, I think if you have to ask, then you probably aren't involved in it enough to take-on the project.
There are MANY moving parts.
I use Scrapebox, and so if you were to look at Scrapebox, you can very much think of every clickable button and addon as a separate script that you would need to make.
My process has about 30-steps, and there's probably 50 different chunks of code you would have to write, just to do what I do in Scrapebox, and there's a lot more features in Scrapebox than that.
The problem with competing tools is they are much more expensive, and sometimes more complicated.
They also tend to require subscription or use of their proxy systems.
Some of the more notable competitors would be Octoparse and Apify, but again, the downsides are pretty huge compared to the upsides.
Many other service providers use the Scrapy python project, to my understanding.
Anytime you search for anything on scraping, there is a ton of talk about Python.
The fact of the matter is that you can't use Python to handle resource intensive processes like scraping millions of URLs, or even something as simple as removing duplicates from large files.
Meaning that most of these guys, out-here, are running services for very low-scale jobs, comparatively.
Scrapebox uses Delphi, just for reference.
For me, something better than Scrapebox means you have to have all the features and addons they already have, and then you have to be able to scrape javascript, and operate more quickly.
You also can't restrict me to the cloud, with an expensive subscription fee, for any reason.
So, you're looking at a desktop program that basically beats Scrapebox in both functionality and performance.
That's a hard thing to compete against.
If you actually pulled that off, I'd welcome it, and switch to your platform, but you really need to spend some time in there, in order to understand what you are up against.
The only other solution I can think of is focusing on a niche requirement.
For example, you could make a cheap desktop program, with javascript scraping capability, for targeting a collection of pre-defined and maintained directory footprints.
Support Google Maps, Houzz, Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, and a bunch of others.
Allow your buyers to use their own proxies, and give them a lifetime license like Scrapebox does.
You'd be the sort-of Web 2.0 version of Scrapebox.
Now, that's something I would be interested in...
Best to you!
