Bootstrapped Data Products — Here's What I Learned

Heshan Sanjuka — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 06:16:31 +0000

I'm Heshan. I build data products. No VC, no team — just me, a lot of Playwright scripts, and PostgreSQL.

Two years ago I couldn't build anything that worked. Today I run three production data platforms. Here's what they are and what each one taught me.

Social Intel — socialintel.io
A social media dataset marketplace. 130+ pre-enriched datasets across 100+ platforms, plus custom dataset builds.

Every post goes through a deterministic enrichment pipeline (no LLMs) — sentiment, topics, financial signals, bot detection, 250+ fields, 25 quality checks. Export in CSV, JSON, JSONL, or Parquet.

Built with: FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Next.js 15, Playwright, VADER Lexicon, AWS S3 What I learned: A deterministic pipeline beats LLMs for reproducibility. No token costs, no schema drift.

Pulse Aggregator — pulseaggregator.com
Production news platform indexing 100,000+ articles per week from 10,000+ sources. Updated hourly.

4-tier fallback: RSS → Playwright scraper (paywalls) → full-text search → REST API. Runs on APScheduler, has been at 99.9% uptime since launch.

Built with: FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Playwright, Next.js, APScheduler What I learned: Fallback chains save you. When one source breaks, the next tier catches it. No single point of failure.

GoodQuote Scraper
Production Goodreads scraper that outputs structured CSV/JSON. Pagination, data validation, multi-page crawling.

Built with: BeautifulSoup, Python What I learned: Sometimes BeautifulSoup is all you need. Not every project needs Playwright.

FinPull — finpull.dev (Upcoming)
Financial data pipeline — OHLCV, earnings, P/E ratios, analyst ratings. Playwright + yfinance → FastAPI → PostgreSQL → dashboard.

Target: Traders, analysts, portfolio dashboards.

Built with: Playwright, yfinance, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Next.js What I'm learning now: Financial data has worse APIs than social media. That's saying something.

The Stack That Stuck
After building all of these, here's what I actually reach for:

Production Tech Stack

Layer	Tools
Scraping	Playwright · BeautifulSoup · Asyncio · Proxy rotation
Data	Pandas · NumPy · Parquet/JSONL exports
Backend	FastAPI · PostgreSQL · APScheduler · JWT
Frontend	Next.js 15 · Tailwind · TypeScript
Infra	Vultr · Vercel · Supabase · Docker

freeCodeCamp Certified: Responsive Web Design (Mar 2024) · Scientific Computing with Python (Nov 2025) Everything I know about production scraping I learned by breaking things in production.

Right now I split time between Social Intel (growing, revenue-generating) and building FinPull. If you work with data at scale or have opinions about Playwright vs. pure HTTP — I'd love to hear your take.

All projects are linked on my GitHub.

DEV Community: Heshan Sanjuka

Bootstrapped Data Products — Here's What I Learned

Production Tech Stack