The Phone Flipping Project
My first $ made online.
What?
I built a SaaS(Analytics as a service) for iPhone resellers in the US. Helping them appraise and estimate iPhone prices with weekly pricing reports sent directly to their email.
Why?
Phone resellers were appraising/estimating iPhone prices manually by going on eBay(.)com. I automated that process and gave them access to weekly pricing reports with data freshly scraped from eBay. Helping them stay up-to-date with current iPhone resale prices.
How?
I built multiple bots using Scrapy in Python. Prices were scraped every single day from eBay, and a weekly analysis of all the data pulled during the week was done every Friday morning before sending the Weekly report. The report was generated from a single Jupyter Notebook which I converted into a PDF. All data processes were automated on a local Debian Linux server.
Note:
This project was really scrappy, I released the MVP as fast as possible to confirm the product market fit of my idea and solution. It was a success because I ended up monetizing it in the first month with a Pro plan. In total, I had around 140 free and paid users.
I unfortunately had to put an end to it in 2020.
Full story here: https://blog.startupstash.com/how-i-launched-my-first-saas-business-with-0-bc68ab5cb9e2
