Industry: Social Media Intelligence / Web3
Developed for early-stage crypto marketing teams requiring cost-effective lead generation prior to the enforcement of restrictive social media API paywalls.
Problem
In the pre-LLM era of social targeting, finding qualified leads involved manual labor or prohibitively expensive enterprise APIs.
- Manual Bottlenecks: Marketing teams spent 20+ hours weekly manually vetting Twitter bios to distinguish real investors from bots.
- Limited API Access: Official social platforms had begun restricting free API access, creating a need for "grey-hat" data retrieval methods to bypass cost barriers.
- Static Data Needs: Clients required simple, portable lists (CSV/Sheets) rather than complex CRM integrations, but lacked the technical tooling to aggregate this data automatically.
Solution
A classic browser automation script designed to scrape, filter, and archive user data using residential proxies and keyword heuristics.
- Browser Automation: Deployed Selenium WebDriver to simulate human browsing behavior, effectively parsing follower lists without triggering early-stage bot detection algorithms.
- Keyword-Based Filtering: Implemented a rule-based logic engine (RegEx) to score accounts based on bio keywords (e.g., "DeFi," "Founder," "VC")—a standard approach before semantic AI analysis became viable.
- Cloud Document Sync: Utilized the Google Sheets API to serve as a lightweight database, pushing scraped results instantly to client-accessible spreadsheets for immediate outreach.
Tech Stack
- Core: Python 3.9 / Node.js
- Automation: Selenium WebDriver / Puppeteer
- Data Processing: JavaScript (Cheerio) / Python (BeautifulSoup4)
- Storage: Google Sheets API (gspread)
Results
- Volume: Successfully parsed and indexed over 50,000 user profiles during active campaigns.
- Cost Savings: Eliminated the need for enterprise data subscriptions, saving clients ~$2,000/month in API fees.
- Adoption: Served as the primary lead generation utility for 3 separate startup launches before the platform's major anti-scraping updates.