Title: I&#x27;m a data engineer at heart, and I never did or enjoyed front-end work. Having said that I always was happy to code and evolve crawlers and web scrapers. Now I&#x27;ve taken some time off from work and gigs and I&#x27;m working on a  side-project  I&#x27;ve been hacking for some time.<p>Without getting into the details yet: it aims to make web data collection a little bit easier for non-devs. I&#x27;ll soon have an MVP and will start pitching to investors: aiming for an open-source business model (after a few months of stealth development) and eventually a typical SaaS offering for extra functionality.<p>At this point I&#x27;m trying to consolidate and counter the steel-man counter-arguments I should expect from investors.  The most obvious one: as one can imagine, the product it&#x27;s not magic and, after a certain point it does require some manual work from the customer, hence this is an aspect I should prepare for.<p>I have done some preliminary analysis of the space of potential competitors (think import.io, Apify, Zyte&#x2F;ScarpingHub, etc.) and described opportunities for differentiation. What I&#x27;m afraid of is getting sidetracked in a discussion of &quot;um, this is web scraping and it&#x27;s hard to make a business on top of it&quot;.<p>I understand that there&#x27;s not much context now and one could easily say &quot;well yeah, anything could be possible with a good team, product...&quot;, but I&#x27;m reaching out to the HN community to gather some considerations, mental models and pointers, I may not think of myself at this point.
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