One of the things that pushed me toward building B2BProspects.io started with a scraping problem that honestly drove me crazy. About two years ago, I started working on scraping eXp Realty. At the time, its website structure was completely different from what I was used to. The data wasn't sitting there in some easy HTML table waiting to be scraped. So I started digging. I inspected the requests. I studied the site's structure. I looked at the scripts. I traced how the data was being loaded. I tried different scraping approaches. I kept going back to it, changing approaches, testing things, breaking things, and trying again. Basically, I used everything I had in my power to figure out where the actual data was coming from. And eventually... I cracked it. I finally figured out the underlying structure and how the data was being requested. After spending almost two years trying to get there, you would think that was the moment I'd be celebrating. Except there was a problem. The data coming back wasn't actually useful. eXp Realty was returning garbled/obfuscated data instead of the clean information I was trying to extract. So after spending all that time figuring out how to access the data, I was basically sitting there thinking: “Okay... I finally cracked the code. Now what?” 😂 It was frustrating. But looking back, that experience taught me something much more valuable than simply figuring out one website. I realized that modern websites aren't always difficult to scrape because the data doesn't exist. Sometimes the data is there. Sometimes you can even find exactly where it's coming from. The real problem is getting usable, structured data out of complicated modern web applications. That experience stayed with me. I kept working with different websites, different APIs, GraphQL, hidden application data, JavaScript-generated content, and different ways of extracting and normalizing information. Eventually I started thinking: What if the person using the tool didn't have to go through all of this? What if a tool could inspect a website and figure out where the useful structured data was coming from? That idea eventually became B2BProspects.io. I recently spent 37 days turning that idea into a real product. And now, after building the extension, website, data marketplace, payment system and everything around it, I finally have something publicly available. The Chrome extension was even rejected on its first submission. I fixed the issues, submitted it again, waited for the review... And then I got the email: “Your item has been successfully published to the Chrome Web Store.” That was a pretty surreal moment. Because I started with a scraping problem that I couldn't solve. Then I spent years learning how these systems actually work. And now I've built something that came directly from those problems. I'm still at the beginning. I don't know yet how many people will use B2BProspects or where it will ultimately go. But I do know one thing: Sometimes the projects that frustrate you the most end up teaching you exactly what you need to build next. I'd love to hear from other builders here: Have you ever spent months—or even years—trying to solve a technical problem, only to realize later that the problem itself was pointing you toward a product?

B2BProspects.io

Extract verified realtor data for smarter prospecting

Extract verified realtor data for smarter prospecting