I'm a developer who loves building things. That's just who I am. But the path from hobby project to a focused product rarely goes in a straight line - and TrueExtract is proof of that.
It started with AllCommerce
About a year ago, I started a hobby project called AllCommerce - a platform where users could search for products across all major marketplace platforms and get results in one place. I automated the scraping of e-commerce sites and marketplaces, and it actually worked. But it wasn't scalable, it was slow, and what seemed like a brilliant idea for a college project turned out to be incredibly hard to execute as a real product.
So I moved on and built something new.
Then came ChatGPTtoPDF
The idea was simple - paste your ChatGPT conversation link and convert it into a professional-looking PDF in one click. Students loved it. Especially those who wanted a clean printout of AI-generated answers before an exam. The PDF would format your prompt as a question and the response as an answer. Clean, simple, useful.
But it was a nightmare to maintain. Every time ChatGPT changed its website structure, the app broke. I'd have to inspect the HTML, figure out what changed, and patch the code. On top of that, when traffic picked up, we'd get blocked for hitting the site too frequently from the same IP address.
That's when web scraping stopped being just a tool I used - and became the problem I wanted to solve.
The idea behind TrueExtract
Both AllCommerce and ChatGPTtoPDF relied heavily on web scraping. And I quickly learned that web scraping is anything but simple - websites change their structure, bot detection blocks you, headless browsers get flagged, and IP bans are constant.
So I decided to build something better. A scraping tool that was powerful enough to handle e-commerce sites, affordable enough that people didn't need to pay for expensive enterprise software, and simple enough that anyone could use it.
After about five months of building, I launched TrueExtract - available as both a desktop app and a browser extension. It could extract product details from any e-commerce site in just four clicks.
What made it different? It's a visual scraper. You can see exactly what's being extracted, in real time. You have full control over the process. Unlike traditional tools that act like a black box, TrueExtract shows you everything - which is exactly how it got its name. No black box. No guessing.
TrueExtract launched on March 4th, 2026.
The app is still live if you want to try it. Here's a quick demo:
The hard truth about launching
As a first-time founder, I made a classic mistake: I thought a good product would sell itself.
Nobody showed up.
Across all my social media combined - X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube - I didn't even have 100 followers. I was devastated. I had poured months into this, had high hopes, and launched to silence. That was a painful moment.
So I shifted focus. I started posting consistently, creating demo videos, reaching out to people, and having real conversations about the product. Slowly, I started understanding the market better.
Understanding the market - what I missed
Through research and conversations, I realized the web scraping and data extraction space has two distinct layers:
Infrastructure - companies that provide the underlying technology: bypassing bot detection, rendering JavaScript, rotating IPs, handling CAPTCHAs. They sell to developers and tech companies. Think ScrapingBee, Oxylabs, ScraperAPI.
Finished products - companies that use infrastructure services to build end-user products: price comparison software, lead generation tools, visual scrapers. Think Octoparse, BrowseAI, Price2Spy.
Here's where I went wrong: when building TrueExtract, I wasn't sure who I was building for. I built a tool that extracts data. But data alone isn't enough. What people actually need is the story behind the data - the patterns, the insights, the business context that helps them make decisions. TrueExtract was doing its job perfectly fine technically, but it was delivering raw output without finished value.
The pivot: from data extraction to price intelligence
That realization changed everything.
Brands lose sales every day because a competitor quietly ran a flash sale, dropped their prices, or launched a new product - and the brand finds out too late. Usually when a customer mentions it, or when the numbers stop making sense and anxiety kicks in.
After talking to brand owners, I kept hearing the same story: they're manually maintaining Excel sheets of competitor prices, taking screenshots, bookmarking competitor pages, and checking them every single day. Those who invest in price monitoring tools often find them falling short - especially when it comes to product-to-product comparison, category-level analysis, and actual business context.
That's the gap TrueExtract is now built to fill.
What we're doing next - and how you can be part of it
I'm not making the same mistake twice. Before building, I want to deeply understand the market and the people I'm building for.
That's why we're offering a free Price Intelligence service for brands right now. Here's how it works:
- Email us 15-40 SKUs and 3-10 competitors you're keeping an eye on
- We send back a clear, structured report including product-to-product matching, category-level analysis, and a clear view of where your prices sit - above or below the market
- Reports delivered daily, weekly, or monthly - whatever works for you
No signup. No install. No credit card. Just email us.
This is the TrueExtract story so far - full of ups, downs, hard lessons, and a clearer direction than ever before. If you're an e-commerce team spending hours manually tracking competitor prices, I'd love to talk.
Want to see your own competitor gaps?
Free report. No signup. Just email us your SKUs and competitors.