The original title is "Bootstrapped Data Products — Here's What I Learned"

Short summary

Solo developer Heshan shares lessons from building three bootstrapped data products without VC funding or a team, using Playwright, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and Next.js. Key takeaways include preferring deterministic pipelines over LLMs for reproducibility and cost, implementing multi-tier fallback chains for scraping reliability, and choosing the simplest tool that gets the job done. He is now building FinPull, a financial data product targeting traders and analysts.

• •Deterministic pipelines beat LLMs for reproducibility — no token costs, no schema drift
• •Multi-tier fallback chains (RSS → scraper → search → API) eliminate single points of failure
• •Simple tools like BeautifulSoup often suffice; not every project needs Playwright

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.