It was more of a technical solution to create automations in the browser

[nishat@264]

That's right. My wife was starting a publishing company and she wanted to reach out to different schools and as part of that exercise we were trying to find leads or contacts at schools to approach. At first we used cheap labour from countries where labour is cheap to do this manually from different websites. Then, because I'm a software developer, I thought I could probably write a script to do this, so I did. I started building a system that would pull in sites like Yahoo, back when Yahoo was still around, and the Yellow Pages, back when the Yellow Pages was our only audience.

The will:

When we started using it and showing it to tongliao cell phone number list people, it turned out that LinkedIn was of interest to a much wider audience than we expected. That's when we started looking at what was out there and we saw that at that point, the products that were out there clearly showed people's interest in working on LinkedIn, but the products were too expensive for too few features. So I thought this was the right place to see if we could establish ourselves as a leading LinkedIn automation tool.

Jeroen:

I didn't know this part of the story where you built a whole bunch of scrapers and ended up specializing on LinkedIn. That's interesting. Is Dux-Soup your first startup or have you had startups in the past?

The will:

I worked for a while as a developer for a startup in England. Then I went freelance with a product called Swivel Script. Before that, even before my professional career, I was basically coding things, solutions that I hope were useful. But it was when I started with Swivel Script that I wanted to do more. Swivelscript was already a product in a similar space to Dux-Soup. And it was quite a hard sell, meaning people couldn't understand what it was really doing. We looked into it and I thought I could build something like that. To at least make myself self-sufficient. I started looking for ways to improve what I knew and what I needed to do, something that would allow people to install and use the tool without thinking too much.