Hey all I built this MVP and here's the video below of me using it to scrape LinkedIn and generate emails for people I want to cold email and network with. Looking to get feedback to see if anyone wants me to deploy the tool to an actual server and provide the service for those sick and tired of manually building networking lists in excel and just want a tool that does it for you.
Why did I build this? Because I couldn't find anything on the market for my problem that I could pay $20 a month for. This doesn't violate LinkedIn's ToS and what used to take me 3 hours to get numerous names and emails, now takes me less than 2 mins.
Looking forward to getting feedback and if there is any market demand or pull for this. I'm updating it as I go to add email automation such as automatically updating which emails are legit or bounce upon sending an email and fields for updating contact information such as phone numbers and relationship status such as "Cold" to "Hot" + last spoken to and last time they responded to me.
Demo video here:
Based on the most helpful WSO content, your MVP idea for automating LinkedIn scraping and email generation for networking purposes seems to address a common pain point for professionals who spend hours manually building networking lists. Here are some insights and feedback:
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Your MVP seems promising, and with the right positioning and features, it could fill a gap in the market for affordable, efficient networking tools.
Sources: Networking - Linkedin Message vs Email, , I got an offer, heres how you can too! (MM NYC), LinkedIn vs Email, MUST HAVE TOOL FOR RECRUITING
How does this not break ToS? Also, how have you not gotten shut down. I've been suspended because it thought I was a bot because I visited too many profiles per minute.
Great question and glad you asked. LinkedIn cannot stop users from manually accessing the DOM, copying and pasting it outside of LinkedIn or on their own machine, and then doing whatever they want with the data. There is no bot on their site, it's an actual human being manually copying the data. ToS is only violated if a bot uses your account to automatically scrape. But copying the DOM and extracting names and info is just the same as a person manually highlighting, copying and pasting from linkedin to excel and then typing in emails.
Why have you been suspended by visiting so many profiles? Why were you visiting so many profiles? What were you trying to achieve? I want to hear your story and pain.
The site is not live anywhere right now. I posted it here to get a feel for market demand/pull. If I have people that want the site, then I'll go through the extra work of deploying it and creating sign up/login + security flows.
Yeah I picked that up after watching the video. You're not scraping, but parsing HTML that you manually extract. Scraping utilizes something like selenium to simulate a person, visit the page, and pull the info. Was going to edit my comment to say this but got sidetracked.
That said, this isn't really something you could SaaS. That's why it's not available to purchase. It's static code someone could ask chat to generate.
So as to why I was visiting linkedin so much, basically I had a list of companies. Needed to see if any of the people on my team were connected with their executives. I was able to script the google search and had a spreadsheet of the linkedin links for their CEOs/CFOs but since ToS bans bots I manually clicked each link to check mutuals
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Edit: Accidentally replied to myself.
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