Marcus Richards
We allow business quickly extract data from the web and turn into Spreadsheets or API’s using ready made tools. Our Mission is to empower businesses by giving them access to information on the web without barriers so they can use data to grow their businesses.
Tell us about yourself?
My professional background is as an IT Consultant delivering complex IT projects for the enterprise working at companies like Boston Consulting Group, Accenture & Deustche bank
I have been building or managing software development project for the entirety of my ~15 year career after graduating from University
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
SAAS is about recurring revenue, focus on customer who need your service on a recurring basis not people who need it for a short term project
What problem does your business solve?
The web is the most powerful data source, but all that valuable data is trapped behind web pages. Getting that data out in a structured form is exceedingly difficult, especially if you are not an expert computer programmer.
Most people that could benefit from the data are either not able or not willing to write code. Webautomation.io helps businesses extract data from any website without writing code, using easy-to-use self-service tools.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
How we came up with the idea was when I was running a price comparison website that relied heavily on web data extraction. I was struggling with maintaining and building the web data extractors due to my limited knowledge of writing the code.
A trusted friend referred an expert developer, Ozcan Yukaribas (now my co-founder), to help. It was not too long before we both got frustrated: me with having to rely on someone else every time I needed to update the code; Ozcan with spending hours repeatedly building custom web scrapers.
Ozcan built a considerably basic user interface to create and maintain web data extractors without writing code. This was when we had the “aha” moment and realized that so many other people like us would benefit from a tool like this.
What is your magic sauce?
Our competitors offer users powerful tools which they have to spend time learning how to use. This sometimes could take days.
We offer pre-built solutions meaning you do not have to spend anytime building, you just push a button and you start getting data
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Our mission is to empower businesses by giving them access to information on the web without barriers so they can use data to grow their businesses. We plan to achieve this with our master blueprint:
- Create the biggest library of ready-to-use web data extraction tools
- Open our platform to developers to build, host and share their ready-to-use tools, making money from the usage
- Continue to invest in R&D around WebAutomation, in turn providing our customers with the best in class technology solutions
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Making “an easy to use” product. web scraping is an extremely complex process which typically involves multiple expert computer engineers in the background.
Developing a product that abstracts this only showing a simple user interface has been incredibly challenging.
We originally launched with a point and click builder but this wasnt “easy” enough for our target users
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
Any business looking to improve their business using web data
