Hey HN, I'm Vikesh, founder of TexAu. Happy to answer anything.
A few things the post doesn't cover that might be useful context:
What we got wrong with V1 and V2. We built a browser automation tool that depended entirely on platforms we didn't control. That's an obvious mistake in hindsight, but at the time, every company in our space was doing the same thing. The C&Ds were inevitable. We just didn't want to see it.
Why we chose a spreadsheet interface for V3. We tested three approaches: a workflow builder (what V2 was), a dashboard UI, and a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet won because our users already think in rows and columns. Every agency we talked to was exporting CSVs from 4 different tools and joining them manually in Google Sheets. We realized the spreadsheet IS the workflow, not a step in one.
*Where we are financially*. 25 people, bootstrapped, no VC. We've been close to zero runway multiple times. V3 is live with paying customers but we're early. I won't pretend otherwise.
*What I'd love HN's input on*. We're building waterfall enrichment across multiple data providers with stop-on-success logic and AI columns that run LLM calls per row. If anyone here has dealt with similar orchestration problems at scale (provider failover, cost optimization across APIs, batching LLM calls), I'd genuinely love to hear how you approached it.
Ask me anything about the legal battles, the tech, building B2B from India without venture money, or where we screwed up.
This looks very interesting and I’d love to try it.
We have data extraction and enrichment platform. We process over 12 million automations for our users, half of this is done on lambda and rest we try to process in a container.
We also utilize 10 GB+ in proxies.
I tried to do all the math on how much it would cost on your platform if we do a pilot project but I’m so confused with the pricing.
Can you please explain for 10,000 hours and 10 GB proxy usages what would the cost?
A few things the post doesn't cover that might be useful context:
What we got wrong with V1 and V2. We built a browser automation tool that depended entirely on platforms we didn't control. That's an obvious mistake in hindsight, but at the time, every company in our space was doing the same thing. The C&Ds were inevitable. We just didn't want to see it.
Why we chose a spreadsheet interface for V3. We tested three approaches: a workflow builder (what V2 was), a dashboard UI, and a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet won because our users already think in rows and columns. Every agency we talked to was exporting CSVs from 4 different tools and joining them manually in Google Sheets. We realized the spreadsheet IS the workflow, not a step in one.
*Where we are financially*. 25 people, bootstrapped, no VC. We've been close to zero runway multiple times. V3 is live with paying customers but we're early. I won't pretend otherwise.
*What I'd love HN's input on*. We're building waterfall enrichment across multiple data providers with stop-on-success logic and AI columns that run LLM calls per row. If anyone here has dealt with similar orchestration problems at scale (provider failover, cost optimization across APIs, batching LLM calls), I'd genuinely love to hear how you approached it.
Ask me anything about the legal battles, the tech, building B2B from India without venture money, or where we screwed up.