In 2024, Cahyo Subroto wasn’t looking to build a startup from scratch—he was looking for something he could acquire and grow. With cash in hand from his profitable technical writing agency, Penateam, and a growing interest in business flipping, he browsed listings on Acquire.com. One opportunity stood out: a small but promising data scraping tool called MrScraper.
Less than a year later, Cahyo had rebuilt the product, grown the team to eight people, and scaled revenue to over $140,000 per month.
Running Penateam had shown Cahyo the value of service-based businesses, but also the limitations: scaling was labor-intensive, and margins depended on time. SaaS, by contrast, offered scalability—but with more risk.
When he came across MrScraper, the project was modest. It was run by another Indie Hacker, Kai, and listed for five figures. It had solid SEO traffic, a functioning product, and people were signing up—but few were converting. To Cahyo, that meant one thing: unmet demand.
“It was clear people wanted this,” he recalls, “they just couldn’t figure out how to use it.”
As a startup, I realize that my back is always against the wall with limited resources, so I need to super focus on what I want to target and who I want to be with.
Cahyo Subroto
The First Rebuild
With revenue from Penateam, Cahyo hired a small engineering team from Asia and got to work. In just three weeks, the team rebuilt the backend, cleaned up the interface, and started testing improvements. It was faster than expected—but not without pain.
“Building a SaaS is way harder than an agency,” Cahyo says. “In an agency, you get paid when you deliver. With SaaS, you can spend 100 hours and nobody cares.”
Still, the work paid off. After improving onboarding and making the value proposition more immediate, Cahyo relaunched MrScraper across X (Twitter), Product Hunt, and Starter Story’s Slack group. This time, real customers started paying.
Zero to Revenue (and Almost Back Again)
Traction didn’t come easily. The first public launches brought in no revenue, and churn remained high. Cahyo experimented with every channel—Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, SEO, outbound—and even made a now-infamous Reddit post out of sheer frustration. It went viral.
That post alone added $500/month in recurring revenue.
But the breakthrough came from two places: search and outbound.
Cahyo began segmenting his outreach to ideal customer profiles (ICPs) who actually needed scalable data automation—typically other SaaS businesses and enterprise marketers. The SEO traffic, which had originally been the acquisition hook, started converting better after product improvements.
Then, out of nowhere, an enterprise client submitted a ticket asking about a potential seven-figure contract. It wasn’t just validation—it was acceleration.
As revenue increased, so did the complexity. MrScraper was still a small team, and Cahyo had to get sharper about who they were building for—and who they were hiring.
He identified two major missteps:
- Not clearly defining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
- Not clearly defining the Ideal Employee Profile.
Cahyo realized that chasing every user was a mistake. Instead, the team focused on a smaller group of high-intent users—companies doing frequent, structured scraping tasks who valued automation.
On the hiring side, he gave up trying to compete with Silicon Valley for top-tier engineers. Instead, he built a distributed team in Asia, where he found capable developers who aligned with the company’s early-stage constraints and speed.
He also focused on operationalizing AI across the company—not with abstract training sessions, but through practical, tailored onboarding. “We sit down with marketers, salespeople, analysts etc., and walk them through how a single, high-impact task AI can improve right away,” Cahyo explains. “The key is giving people a real outcome to own and not a new tool to memorize.”
Lessons From the Journey
Cahyo’s journey with MrScraper offers a different kind of founder story—one that didn’t begin with an idea, but with a calculated acquisition and a bet on execution.
Some key takeaways:
- Founder-market fit matters. As a technical founder with agency experience, Cahyo knew how to execute and how to deliver value. He didn’t have to invent the market—he just had to fix the delivery.
- SaaS is slow until it’s not. The team endured months of near-zero revenue, but once the right pieces clicked, things moved fast.
- Focus on leverage, not noise. Viral tweets are nice, but targeted outreach and search traffic made the real difference.
- Know who you’re building for—and who you’re building with. The ICP and the team matter just as much as the product.
- Operationalize, don’t theorize. Cahyo’s hands-on approach to introducing AI tools across teams is a reminder that clear outcomes beat abstract ideas.
MrScraper is now a lean, profitable SaaS that helps businesses automate scraping and data workflows with simplicity and speed. From five figures to $1.7M/year, it’s a case study in buying potential—and building focus.
As a founder of an early company, my advice is that you should not try to get everything right but get something right. It’s important to get the initial traction to validate right away if you’re doing the right thing or not – whether it’s hiring, marketing, sales, etc.
Cahyo Subroto
