Speaker A
Hey, has anyone checked in on Craigslist lately? Lucky for you, I just did, and it's doing fine.
Chris Koerner walks through ways to profit from scraping Craigslist, from iPhone unlock leads and arbitrage to cars and parts, using scraping tools and AI.
Key Takeaways
- Scraping marketplace listings can reveal profitable arbitrage and lead-generation opportunities.
- Automating a scraped-lead service with outsourced fulfillment can generate passive income.
- AI tools like ChatGPT can help identify scrapable data and surface business ideas.
- Craigslist is still heavily used despite competition from Facebook Marketplace.
What the video covers
- Craigslist remains highly active and is a valuable data source for scraping listings.
- Koerner recounts an early college side hustle: scraping locked iPhone listings and emailing sellers offering unlocking services for $10-$20.
- Unlocked iPhones sell for $50-$100 more than locked ones, creating an arbitrage opportunity that drove the business.
- He describes automating the unlock service with a website, IMEI intake, and a contracted eBay seller doing the work at $5 per unlock.
- Scraping supply-side marketplace data, such as sellers of items, is presented as the foundation for building profitable automations.
- He later scraped 20,000 iPhone repair shops to build an iPhone parts wholesale business, which he says grew to over $10 million before being sold in 2019.
- Other ideas include sourcing motorcycles, pinball machines, and cars, and reselling or finding arbitrage against eBay prices.
- He demonstrates using ChatGPT to identify scrapable fields on a Craigslist page and to analyze exported data for the best deals.
- Previously, his car-auction business scraped auction data to buy vehicles for clients.
- He recommends AI-assisted scraping tools, promoting Oxylabs with free access and affordable credits.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
All the time I'm talking about scrape this, scrape that. All right, let's go check on scrape leads. There we go. I'm going to scrape some real estate agents phone numbers. Data scraper and I'm going to say garage door. You just go to
Speaker A
In fact, Craigslist is doing great, but we want to make money with it. So, that's what this video is.
Speaker A
do that? So today I am going to talk about this many ways you can make money by scraping Craigslist and doing really creative profitable things with that data.
Speaker A
All the time I'm talking about scrape this, scrape that. All right, let's go check on scrape leads. There we go.
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on Craigslist and I noticed, huh, a locked iPhone is worth $300, but an unlocked iPhone is worth $350 to $400.
Speaker A
I'm going to scrape some real estate agents' phone numbers. Data scraper, and I'm going to say garage door. You just go to Data Scraper.
Speaker A
That's interesting. So, I went and bought two domain names. And you can still go to the wayback machine or the web archive and see the original versions of these sites from like 17 years ago. It was $10 ununlocks.com and
Speaker A
I'm just going to look at RV parks right now. All right, let's see if our scrape is done. Boom.
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email address and send them an email or a text that said, "Hey, I see you're selling an iPhone on Craigslist. I see that it's locked. Did you know it's worth $50 to $100 more if it was unlocked?" Just so happens I can do that
Speaker A
But how can we scrape and make money with Craigslist, and what tools can we use to do that?
Speaker A
I just wanted to know how many more people are willing to pay $20 verse 10.
Speaker A
So today I am going to talk about the many ways you can make money by scraping Craigslist and doing really creative, profitable things with that data.
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automation where someone would go to my website, check out, they would put in the IMEI, which is like the serial number, the IMEI number of their phone.
Speaker A
But first, let me tell you a quick story.
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of the week." He said, "Sure." I would send them all to that guy and then he would unlock the phone within an hour and I didn't have to do anything. I didn't have any customer support, no follow-up. I just started making 10 and
Speaker A
I was in college. I was on Craigslist all the time. And if you remember back in the day, you had to unlock phones if you wanted to use them on different carriers. Well, one day I'm on Craigslist and I noticed, huh, a locked iPhone is worth $300, but an unlocked iPhone is worth $350 to $400.
Speaker A
valuable, and that's scraping is profitable. Couple years later, I started an iPhone parts wholesaling business. Where did I get all my customers? I scraped 20,000 iPhone repair shops. Every single iPhone repair shop in the United States in 2012. And
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And then I went to eBay and I saw people selling iPhone unlocks as a service for $5. So I thought, huh, $5 to increase the value of your phone by $50 to $100. That's interesting.
Speaker A
Scraping. Scraping. So, a lot of what I do starts with a scrape. And there's a lot of really slick tools out there that enable you to scrape just about anything without any coding experience. But Craigslist was always a tough nut to
Speaker A
So I went and bought two domain names. And you can still go to the Wayback Machine or the Web Archive and see the original versions of these sites from like 17 years ago. It was $10 ununlocks.com and $20 ununlocks.com.
Speaker A
to scrape Craigslist with a super easy tool that I wish I had 15 years ago when I built this myself. And then let's talk about exactly what to scrape, how to make money, how to get creative, how to
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And what did I do? I spent hours and days building this elaborate scraping tool to go to Craigslist, scrape every single iPhone listed worldwide that was locked to a carrier, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T. And then I would scrape their email address and send them an email or a text that said, "Hey, I see you're selling an iPhone on Craigslist. I see that it's locked. Did you know it's worth $50 to $100 more if it was unlocked? Just so happens I can do that for you at $10 ununlocks.com."
Speaker A
complex if you're more technically minded, but I'm going to go to oxyabs.io/tkopod because only there can I just type a simple prompt and have it scrape stuff for me. There may be other tools that do what I'm about to show you, but I've
Speaker A
The second version of that message was the exact same, except at $20 ununlocks.com.
Speaker A
Now, over here in this other tab, I'm going to pull up Craigslist, specifically the Dallas Craigslist because that's where I live. And before I talk about my ideas, I just want to start ideating, right? I just want to
Speaker A
I just wanted to know how many more people are willing to pay $20 versus $10.
Speaker A
minutes ago, 21 minutes ago, 21 minutes ago, 38 minutes ago. You can see that this is very active. This is one of hundreds of different sections of Craigslist in just one of hundreds, if not thousands of Craigslist markets, and
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It was an A/B test. It took me way too long to get this kind of gimmick up and running, but once it was, I was making money in my sleep. Literally making money in my sleep, because I created an automation where someone would go to my website, check out, and put in the IMEI, which is like the serial number, the IMEI number of their phone.
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an agent that can cross reference stuff on Craigslist with eBay because maybe there's some arbitrage to be found. And if you're not familiar with arbitrage, it basically means finding something at a specific price over here and selling it for a higher price over there. Okay.
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It would send that to a guy on eBay that I had messaged and said, "Hey, can you just bill me like once a week? I'm going to send you a bunch of IMEIs, and then I'll pay you five bucks per at the end of the week." He said, "Sure."
Speaker A
Those are the desperate motivated sellers. Parakeetses bed frame. Cool. A lot of this stuff is probably free or they'll pay you to take it like in the case of a piano. Now, I'm going to search wanted. Now, remember, if someone is
Speaker A
I would send them all to that guy, and then he would unlock the phone within an hour, and I didn't have to do anything. I didn't have any customer support, no follow-up. I just started making $10 and $20 at a time, and I was making hundreds of dollars a day in pure profit.
Speaker A
You need to go find a seller. Why not do that at scale with an automation? You can't build an automation until you scrape the supply side of the marketplace, which in this case is Craigslist. Another thing you can do, oh
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Now, as all good growth hacks go, this eventually died and went the way of all of my other creative growth hacks. But that taught me something very valuable, and that's that scraping is profitable.
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motorcycles. Why? He probably flips them. Cool. Will he pay you to source them for him? most likely, especially if he can still make a profit on his flip.
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A couple years later, I started an iPhone parts wholesaling business. Where did I get all my customers? I scraped 20,000 iPhone repair shops, every single iPhone repair shop in the United States in 2012. And then I had virtual assistants start cold calling them. And I turned that into a business worth over $10 million that I eventually sold in 2019.
Speaker A
you could certainly be in the, "Hey, every time I send you a lead, it's going to be five bucks" business, right? I'll swipe your card every time I send you a lead. That guy's wanting to buy old dimes and quarters. This guy's buying
Speaker A
Scraping. Scraping. Scraping.
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with a active category where people are actively transacting, right? I don't want to go on the misconnections or the ride share or the discussion forums.
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So a lot of what I do starts with a scrape. And there are a lot of really slick tools out there that enable you to scrape just about anything without any coding experience. But Craigslist was always a tough nut to crack.
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going to choose a location for the scraper server basically United States because that's where I am. Render JavaScript. I do know that I want to check always. Okay. And then output format. I want to do CSV. That's a
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And don't listen to people who say Craigslist is dead. Facebook Marketplace didn't kill Craigslist, because everyone can look. It's still getting millions of views every month. Just because you're not using it doesn't mean no one's using it.
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of the person listing it. There's a zillion things we could scrape. So, this is where the technical knowledge would come in handy if Oxyab's AI scraper wasn't as good as it is, but we don't need to worry about that. So, we're just
Speaker A
So let's talk about how to scrape Craigslist with a super easy tool that I wish I had 15 years ago when I built this myself. And then let's talk about exactly what to scrape, how to make money, how to get creative, and how to do cold outreach to all these people.
Speaker A
Okay, there's the parsing schema, whatever that means. Now, let's see if this thing freaking works. Scrape and parse. Click. I'm going to time it. It's 3:30 exactly.
Speaker A
So the tool in question is Oxylabs. It's basically scraping plus AI equals very easy scraping for the non-technical person like me. Now, they do have some parts of their website that can be more complex if you're more technically minded, but I'm going to go to oxylabs.io/tkopod, because only there can I just type a simple prompt and have it scrape stuff for me.
Speaker A
So, you can see it cleanly right here in my browser. Boom. There it is. That's exactly what it scraped. It took a minute. And we've got 168 different items. It has the location as requested, the URL. Done it and it
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There may be other tools that do what I'm about to show you, but I've never used them. I have no idea if they exist or if they're any good, whereas this is one I use regularly. Once I'm here, I'm going to click on AI Scraper.
Speaker A
original for sale URL. Rightclick it. View page source. I'm going to highlight all of it. Command C for copy. Then I'm going to go to chat GPT. Okay. So I want to ask JBT what is scrapable in Craigslist specifically in the for sale
Speaker A
Now, over here in this other tab, I'm going to pull up Craigslist, specifically the Dallas Craigslist, because that's where I live. And before I talk about my ideas, I just want to start ideating, right? I just want to start browsing Craigslist as a user and see what comes to mind. I'll walk you through how my weird brain looks at this.
Speaker A
what it told me is scrapeable. So, I'm just going to say I'm going to screenshot those.
Speaker A
I'm going to start by going to For Sale, Household. Okay, you've got someone selling a blender listed 10 minutes ago, 21 minutes ago, 21 minutes ago, 38 minutes ago. You can see that this is very active. This is one of hundreds of different sections of Craigslist, in just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of Craigslist markets, and people are posting every 5 to 15 minutes.
Speaker A
We're going to paste all those. So, this is basically going to scrape every single thing that's scrapable. Generate schema, scrape, and parse. And it is 339. Let's see how long this bad boy takes. Okay, 340.
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Now, this is mostly just crap. People are selling stuff. You do see some people offering services, countertops, flooring, etc. Richard Petty, wedding box.
Speaker A
because there's no there's no map. True. If there's a picture, all of these have pictures. location, which Craigslist refers to as hood. Cool. You even have the timestamp of when it was posted right there, the price, tags, if any,
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So that makes me think, huh, I should build some sort of agent that can cross-reference stuff on Craigslist with eBay, because maybe there's some arbitrage to be found. And if you're not familiar with arbitrage, it basically means finding something at a specific price over here and selling it for a higher price over there.
Speaker A
are underpriced? Where can I make money?" Listen, I have a little soap box for a second. All of us are using really powerful interesting tools on a daily basis. And then at the same time, we have these awesome business ideas or any
Speaker A
Okay. So now what I'm going to do is type in one of the most legendary keywords ever for any marketplace, and that is "need gone."
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start that business, right? Like, huh, I really want to start a business where I buy an excavator and rent it out, but how am I going to find customers? I got to learn Facebook ads. Huh? I just don't
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Those are the desperate, motivated sellers. Parakeet's bed frame. Cool. A lot of this stuff is probably free, or they'll pay you to take it, like in the case of a piano.
Speaker A
Why not use that tool to find customers for your new excavator rental business, right? Like, we need to connect the dots. And so, I'm over here thinking like, how can I make money with scraped Craigslist data while using ChatGpt to
Speaker A
Now, I'm going to search "wanted." Remember, if someone is posting to a marketplace with the word "wanted," they're saying, "Take my money. I want to spend money on something." So then what you need to do is go find the seller for that thing. You've got a buyer, which is usually the hard part. You need to go find a seller. Why not do that at scale with an automation?
Speaker A
into JGBT, and say, "Where's the alpha? What's interesting about this to you?" And even if I don't like its specific answers, it's going to tell me things that help me generate more ideas on my own.
Speaker A
You can't build an automation until you scrape the supply side of the marketplace, which in this case is Craigslist. Another thing you can do, oh man, this is giving me all kinds of ideas, is find both the buyers and the sellers on Craigslist.
Speaker A
I could just flip stuff." And that's another framework. If Craigslist is dying, it is dying. Like I will admit Craigslist is dying. Millions of people still use it, but it has been shrinking year after year. If that is true, then
Speaker A
This guy right here: "Small and large motorcycles wanted in any condition." So this guy's wanting to pay money for small and large motorcycles. Why? He probably flips them. Cool. Will he pay you to source them for him? Most likely, especially if he can still make a profit on his flip.
Speaker A
Like I don't want to say they're not on Facebook because everyone's on Facebook, but they just don't think to use Facebook marketplace. Just like I don't think to connect certain tools to certain ideas. We're human, right? We're flawed. And so if a large percentage of
Speaker A
So what's stopping you from scraping and doing cold outreach to every marketplace you can find to find motorcycles and send the leads his way? You don't want to be in the motorcycle buying business, but you could certainly be in the "Hey, every time I send you a lead, it's going to be five bucks" business, right? I'll swipe your card every time I send you a lead.
Speaker A
could be an entire business just buying stuff from Craigslist and then selling that same stuff without adding value to it or improving it on Facebook Marketplace. That's like the lowest hanging fruit without any sexy apps or automations or having to do cold
Speaker A
That guy's wanting to buy old dimes and quarters. This guy's buying pinball machines. Freaking awesome. There are just so many little side hustles going on in here, but I'm getting distracted. So let's lock in. Let me show you how to scrape this stuff.
Speaker A
scraped from Craigslist and listing it as if we already own it to Facebook Marketplace? Not in an unethical way, not because we're trying to scam people or mislead people, but to gauge demand.
Speaker A
Okay, so to scrape Craigslist, I want
Speaker A
Let's say we get it for 900. We meet in the middle. Go to Facebook Marketplace.
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You list it for 1,400. You settle on 1,200. You just made 300 bucks profit simply by buying from one platform and selling on another. This is a,000% realistic and doable. And people do it all day every day. It's called retail
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arbitrage. People will go to Walmart. They'll see something on the clearance rack, 40% off. They'll scan it with an app. Then they'll look on Amazon and see, oh wow, this thing is $113 at Walmart, but these sell for $225 on
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Amazon. I'm just going to list it real quick from my phone and then I'll buy it. Or I'm going to come back and buy it only once it sells. So I'm out of pocket $0. I'm not inventing retail arbitrage.
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I'm just showing you a new way to do it. Free couch. LG washerdryer. Let's take this a step further. Let's go up the food chain, a little higher ticket, right? Because we don't necessarily want to flip $30 Pokemon cards. Why not buy
Speaker A
lunker cars for $2,000 and sell it for $3,000 without having to fix it up? And hey, that actually reminds me of another business I used to have. I built a scraper that would go scrape Zillow, which by the way, Oxyabs can scrape
Speaker A
Zillow as well. would scrape Zillow every single day for the FSBO listings for sale by owner and I would auto text them an offer on their house that was 40% less than the Zestimate and 97 98% of people either didn't respond or said
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go kick rocks leave me alone and 1 to 3% of people would say let's talk yeah I'll take that it's a numbers game guys and the higher the ticket of the item the fewer numbers have to work in your favor
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for you to make good money so let's do this with cars. Back to the Dallas Craigslist for sale cars, trucks. Now, let's do some filtering because I do not want to mess with dealerships. I'm going to assume that those are unfairly priced
Speaker A
to their benefit and I won't find any good deals there. I'm going to go to posted today only because if it was a good price posted 4 days ago, it's probably gone.
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Sold by owner. And look at how many of them. like 10 to 20 every single hour just in Dallas. And then I want to parse this other data like how many miles it has. So we're going to take this URL and
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go back to chat GPT and say, "All right, here's my prompt. Okay, I want to parse cars for sale data from this page." And I entered the URL. Give me a commaepparated list of all the things I can scrape such as mileage.
Speaker A
All right, Chris, let's run with a All right, sure thing. Okay, we're going to copy that. Going to go back to the AI scraper. We're going to click generate schema. Paste in the new list. We're going to take the same
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URL that we just gave chat GPT. Paste it there. JavaScript CSV generate schema. Cool.
Speaker A
Generate schema. Okay, there's the schema. Scrape and parse. And I just want to harp on that point even more, guys. More eyeballs equal more money. Think of the dumbest business idea in the world. Okay? Like pet rock dumb, but even dumber. I'm
Speaker A
looking out the window. Let's say I see my fence in my front yard. Let's say I want to sell fencing panels that have Pokemon characters on them, right? Giant Pokemon characters on fencing panels.
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Pretty objectively a dumb idea, right? What if Elon Musk tweeted about that idea with a link to the website? Do you think people would buy it? Would anyone buy it? Of course, not because it's a good idea, but because of the law of
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large numbers, which means that if enough people look at it, someone's going to buy it, right? Someone. Because the marketing is there, the eyeballs are there. Now, similar principle, different example. Let's say I have a single family home that I rent out and the
Speaker A
market rental price for that home is a thousand bucks. It's three-bedroom, two bath. My neighbors are a thousand bucks a month. People across town are a,000 bucks a month. That's just what they go for. So, how are you going to get more
Speaker A
money for it? You're going to get more eyeballs on it, right? If you have a hundred people walk through that house, do you think you could get 1,300 bucks a month for it? Yeah, you probably could because a few of those people are going
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to really, really love something about it. The layout, the location, something. and they're going to value that feature more than they value an extra $300 a month, right? That's why arbitrage opportunities exist because you buy from a place with fewer eyeballs and you sell
Speaker A
it on a place with more eyeballs. Therefore, the price goes up. Okay, beautiful. My data is scraped. We are good to go. We're going to go back to our trusty old Google sheet. We're going to clear it. We're going to paste it.
Speaker A
What do we got? Okay, look at this. Body type. Most people don't list out all these features, right? You can see sedan pickup four-door okay?
Speaker A
Cylinders condition drivetrain engine displacement exterior color fuel yada yada yada. Make, Volvo, Toyota, etc. Mileage, almost every single car has mileage, and model, okay, price, title, etc., and year, and link. Okay, cool. Now, this is kind of a lot of data
Speaker A
to work with. So, I'm going to redownload this as a spreadsheet. We're going to go back to Trust Deal Chad GPT.
Speaker A
We're going to upload it here. My prompt, where are the best card deals in this sheet and why? Be specific and look at the titles to see if it's running or not. because if they see a 2010 Toyota Camry listed for $2,000 and
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the title says it's not running, it might not be a good deal, right? Okay.
Speaker A
All right. Best deals running, flippable, mispriced. 2016 Jeep Wrangler, 3500 bucks. Title does not say parts only, not running or mechanic special. 2001 Corvette, 11,000. 2008 4Runner 6,400. Now, if you want to go a step further, you could open agent mode
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on chat GPT and say, "Cool. This is awesome, but I'm still not sure. There could be something in the description that changes the outlook of this for me." So, go to cars.com, go to autotrader.com, and cross reference all
Speaker A
this data to be sure that this is actually a good deal. And then you can start eliminating. And then, if you're watching this thinking like, "Well, I don't want to get in the car flipping business." No, no, no, no. Stop. That's
Speaker A
not what we're talking about. You could take these leads, you could sell them to car flippers. You could take these leads, you could sell them to dealerships. You could take this car, take the same pictures, the description, post it on Facebook Marketplace. Oh,
Speaker A
this Wrangler's listed for 10,000 over here. I think it's worth 12. I'm going to list it for 11 on Facebook Marketplace and say, "Firm, non-negotiable on price." Then you make a,000 bucks. Also, that reminds me, I've had another business in the car business
Speaker A
where I scraped car data. It was called Presto Cars. We would go to auctions, Mannheim and Adessa auctions, and we would buy cars for people, me and my business partner Nick. And before the auctions, the night before, we would
Speaker A
scrape all the auction data and find alpha, which of these cars are probably mispriced based on previous auction sale results. So, I hope this stuff gets you as excited as it gets me. And you know, a lot of times in business, you see data
Speaker A
like this, you get super excited, and then you go start launching something, and you find out, oh, this isn't as good as I thought. That's okay. push through that. That's called the trough of despair. That's normal. You got to push
Speaker A
through that. Don't quit there. Just keep going. Now, what other things can you do with scraped Craigslist data? How about you make a niche job board?
Speaker A
There's a lot of people out there making a lot of passive income. And you know, I don't say that very often with job boards. You scrape jobs from Craigslist.
Speaker A
You populate your job board and then you drive traffic to your job board. How do you make money? You charge businesses to list their jobs. I hope by now you've realized that Oxyabs is awesome. It's an awesome tool. They're a friend of the
Speaker A
channel. They have 175 million proxies. And if you don't know what a proxy is, it basically helps you scrape better because it masks your location so these websites don't think you're scraping everything from just one location. If you want to use Oxyabs, please use my
Speaker A
link below at oxyabs.io/tkopod. Also, I neglected to mention their AI studio tool is completely free for you to use. If you want more advanced scraping, you can go buy scraping credits that are super affordable. I asked my team to go ahead and implement
Speaker A
coupon code for you guys. If you want to use Oxyabs, just do TKO pod for 20% off.
Speaker A
This works with both their AI studio and all of their other products. Thanks for checking out the Kerner office and we will see you next
Topics:Craigslistweb scrapingarbitrageside hustleiPhone unlocklead generationChatGPTeBaypassive incomedata scraping
