Like most here, I am very good at web scraping and automated form fills. I keep trying to figure out a profitable side project or business idea to make out of it and keep coming up with nothing that works.
Any good ideas?
Any good ideas?
- build a on-demand data api for a specific type of data and charge a premium for it. Good example is https://serpapi.com/ who do Google data, charge ~10X markup on proxy costs
- proxy solutions make good money. To scrape at scale you need proxies, and lots of users pay $1-5k per month. Lots of proxy solutions doing +$100k per month.
- build a tool that uses web scraped data, analyses/filters it and displays it to users. Lots of the biggest web scrapers are doing this, ex. doing product monitoring products for e-commerce companies, etc. Lots of competition there, but you can do it in new markets, like NFTs, etc.
- hedge funds will pay huge money for web data, if you have 5 years of continuous data so they can backtest it.
Do you have any examples of such sites?
> hedge funds will pay huge money for web data, if you have 5 years of continuous data so they can backtest it.
what kind of web data would they be interested in?
With all that data you can do stuff like make heatmaps from pricing data, figure out the most attractive areas for certain profiles (singles, families, ...). You could then mash up that data to produce things like a "Walkscore" or let people indicate what's important for them (green areas, bars & restaurants, time & distance to other destinations, even crime levels) and then show real estate that meets their criteria.
Some sites in the US already show this but in other countries that's not the case, while the data's all there just to grab.
Most likely it wouldn't be legal and certainly not if you made money from it. But it's incredibly fun and hugely useful. Maybe that could get you started on some ideas!
They pay $500/mo for access to a bot that will allow them to make these purchases.
Most of the community lives on discord.
No, that causes the problem. That encourages people to use bots to be the first one to purchase the moment the inventory is released.
I don't understand how a random raffle would ever not be fair (with the assumption that one person gets only one entry)
But what other than artificial scarcity drives people to spend hundreds of dollars on bots to snipe sneakers?!
There's a whole sneaker collecting subculture. Some buy and wear while others just collect. The big names in sneakers do release limited production models or limited runs of certain color combinations.
Similar to any other collecting subculture.
For me, this kind of product is part of the "bullshit economy" - similar to "bullshit jobs", this kind of product has no reason to exist other than vanity, as almost all of these "collectibles" won't ever be used. We are using up valuable, finite resources to create and distribute this kind of useless "bullshit product", we are using up valuable human time and IT resources on developing websites capable to resist (D)DoS attacks and on developing snipers to bypass the anti-bot technologies employed by the shops, and we are creating a lot of demand for all kinds of sneaker-related crime - and there's a lot of that: theft and robberies from stores, theft and robberies in the supply chain, ebay/classifieds scams, credit card fraud, robberies on broad daylight [1].
Seriously, fuck all that shit. No one needs hundreds of dollars worth of sneakers that only incentivize crime and bullshit.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=man+robbed+because+of+sneake...