Here's how I made $20k in three days with a web scraping course

Adrian Horning, 34, didn’t learn to code till he was in his late twenties. Then he discovered scraping and never looked back.

After building his ‘Web Scraping Guy’ brand on social media, he launched a course that made $20k in its first three days.

Now it’s netting him around $7k/mo in passive income: life-changing cash that’s given him the breathing room to launch a SaaS — and take weekends off.

Here’s how he did it, in his own words👇.

Yoga pants and internet money

I never saw myself as a computer guy and I didn’t want to go into coding or anything ill I was maybe 27 or 28.

After studying psychology at college, I initially wanted to become a sports journalist. I changed my mind on that pretty quickly and got into human resources instead.

I applied for an HR position at this coding boot camp called App Academy. But eventually, I realized I should take the boot camp instead.

At the camp, they talked about people with similar stories to mine. That really inspired me and made me realize, okay, I can do this too.

I worked as an engineer for three years after that just trying to figure out how to code. I freelanced for a long time and still do.

I started doing a little indie hacking on the side with a friend from work. We made a bot for his wife that tracked when Lululemon products were back in stock.

We posted it to the Lululemon subreddit and found a bunch of users but we got banned pretty quickly. But we'd managed to get a lot of traffic to our website through SEO, so we were able to sell that eventually for like $20k.

That was my first internet money and it was crazy. I decided to do more scraping after that, and I found some jobs on Upwork and Twitter.

Personal branding is key

I wanted to build a strong personal brand to get more work. In one episode of the My First Million podcast, they talked about how they kept seeing all these "Guy" accounts on Twitter. Car Dealership Guy, Strip Mall Guy, that kind of thing.

Around the same time, I wanted to look up this tweet I’d seen by this woman who goes by the ‘Dating Boss'. I couldn’t remember her name, but it didn’t matter. I found her right away online when I tried to look her up.

I knew random people probably weren’t going to remember my name, so I thought I’d do the same thing. Now I’m the Web Scraping Guy everywhere on social media.

As my brand got bigger, I started to get more work. Early on, Moses Kagan reached out and I did some work for him. That was really cool.

Grow your social media audience

I have a buddy called Carson Szeder who goes by carsoncantcode on Instagram who got around 50,000 followers in a couple of months.

He told me I could grow an audience quickly if I just made some reels that all follow the same kind of format he used.

So, I decided to build stupid little projects and make videos about them. Prototypes that didn’t even have to work properly. But that would get attention.

I’d initially been nervous posting about scraping online. But a friend named Jordan Hansen was sharing videos about it on Youtube at the time. They gave me the confidence to post my own.

One of my videos ended up doing really well. I made $17,000 dollars from data I scraped from home services company Angi. Absurd.

The course that changed everything

A few months ago, I was really starting to run out of money.

I’d been building my social media brand for maybe two or three years by then, so I decided to take the leap and made The Ultimate Web Scraping Course.

I’d already put out some feelers and people seemed warm to the idea of a course. In fact, I'd nearly sold it to a SaaS company for $20k, but they work in Python and I’m a Javascript dev, so it didn’t work out.

I spent a couple of weeks putting together all the course content, then I put it on Gumroad.

When I launched it, it made about $20k in three days anyway. Crazy.

That died down pretty quickly, so now I have to promote it when sales start to lag.

One of the best ways I’ve found to get new customers is by hosting giveaways on social media. I’ll scrape some list and share it for free on Twitter. Then I’ll make a video about it, promote the course at the end, and a bunch of people will usually sign up.

I don’t plan on releasing another course for the time being. Instead, I’ll just continually update it.

Shifting to products

Right now, I’m mostly working on my product, Scrape Creators, which is an API for social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Youtube and Twitter.

A social media follower gave me the idea. They sent me a listing on Microacquire for a company doing the same kind of thing.

They were making like $20,000 to $30,000 a month but they got all their customers through SEO. I was like, oh my god!

I noticed a week or so later the company had just disappeared. Their website was offline. I don’t know if they got sold or shut down or what.

I’m not too worried about getting shut down myself, because I don’t scrape behind social media logins. Recently, a company called Bright Data had lawsuits from Twitter and Meta dropped, which is also really reassuring.

Plenty to learn

I need to focus on marketing. I’m good at marketing myself and talking about scraping. That really helped with the course. But when it comes to a product, I’ve really got to figure that out.

I’m still trying to nail down my ideal customer profile. I guess it’s developers at marketing agencies who use and build influencer tools. I would love to market it to them, but I’m terrible at it so far.

That’s what I’m going to work on over the next few weeks.

I’d also love to grow my YouTube. I think the content is there, the potential is there. But I don't edit at all and I'd love to outsource that. If the product does well and I get some extra money, then I would hire an editor.

I would love to just create content about scraping. Be scraping a bunch of stuff and selling leads.

Life-changing passive income

There are a lot of negative connotations with selling a course. But if you have an area of expertise, it’s totally legit.

And it can be life-changing money. I know I’ll be able to pay my rent now after worrying about it every couple of months for the last two years.

For the last six to nine months, I was working weekends and barely hanging out with people at all. Now I can hang out. I can do things I enjoy. I played volleyball today, which I wouldn’t have done if I didn’t have this course.

Work-wise, I can focus on things I want to and I don’t need to worry so much about getting another freelance gig. As long as I promote the course, I’m good to go.

Parting advice

Build a brand first the way that Carson and I did. Make a fun project out of it and promote yourself on social media.

Things can really explode online. Your content does not need to be serious to lead to legit work. Honestly, do the dumbest thing you can do.

The video that blew me up on Instagram was an AI I trained to see if a girl was hot or not and then automatically swipe on dating apps.

It was terrible. But it got attention.

And don’t be afraid to give things away for free. For scraping, I pick a database or a directory I can scrape and use for video content. Once I’ve made a video, I give away the scraped data on Twitter.

By doing something like this, you can promote yourself as a freelancer. Or you can give part of what you’ve made away and say, ‘If you want the rest, pay me a little bit of money.’

My biggest advice though is just to do it. If you have something you can teach people, freaking go ahead and create a course!